Archie

I met Archie when I was 18, near the end of my fifth summer working for my grandfather on his ranch. My grandfather had hired Walter Simmons to build a fence across the Whitecreek canyon, and had offered my help to cheapen the cost. Archie was hired to cut the trees that stood in the marked fence line. I have no deep ties with the man, but I found myself fascinated by his character and uncanny way of living. And, other people in the community seemed fascinated, and growing up I heard lots of stories about the old man and his feats. Some could have been stretched, due to the lack of entertainment in small town Wyoming, but nobody could argue with the truth; Archie had run a one-man logging business for more than fifty years.
Archie ran a sawmill on my grandfather’s place, and in return gave the ranch lumber. The locals often joked at his old sawmill that consisted of a hand-built wooden shack over a rusted saw blade attached to the belt of a bedless semi. His lumberyard was riddled with homemade equipment. There was a tractor with a loader bucket rigged into the PTO, and a greasy backhoe arm rigged onto the back of a 1972 hoodless Dodge one-ton. They referred to his sideshow as Archie’s Thick and Thin lumber; ideal for leaky log cabin roof construction and hazardous uneven porch projects. But, Archie got by, and regardless, when locals needed cheap lumber, he was the man to talk to.
Archie was born on a frostbitten January day in 1939 to Harry and Ira Grisham. Ira had given birth to the boy in a log cabin at the base of the Big Horn mountains that Harry had built. Harry had logged all his life, and his father had homesteaded in Wyoming at some time in the 1890’s. Logging was a Grisham tradition.
Archie was the fifth and youngest child to Harry and Ira, and like his two older brothers, he would log. The Grishams were industrious, tough, and poor; ideal traits for a small time logger. Archie grew up riding on the back of the old logging trucks. The kids sat on the gigantic logs, swinging their feet off the back of the truck as Harry skillfully guided the Detroit diesel down the mountain at thirty five and forty miles an hour; much faster than many men will drive a modern truck down that widow-maker of a road.
When Archie was ten, he lost his brother Riley. Harry had sent Riley into a canyon to run a cable around a freshly cut log. The cable was worn, and had become hairy with rusty broken iron fibers. Riley had successfully attached the cable at the base of the log and was standing beneath the log when Harry started the wench. When the log was halfway up the canyon side, the cable snapped and sent the log careening down the hillside. Riley had tried to cover behind another standing tree, but the roots had rotted from its base and his attempt was unsuccessful.
Regardless, the Grishams were loggers, and in the midst of the worst time, men cling to what they know. A man can engulf himself in the work, and make his job of such an importance that it can overpower his feelings. Archie was still too young to understand his brother’s death. But, it isn’t the event of death that affects children at that age so much as the way the people they look up to react in it’s wake. Archie saw his father battle his sadness in work, and learned to do the same.
And so it goes; by age fifteen, Archie was the only remaining son in the Grisham family. Some men are luckier than others, not smarter, or more cautious- just lucky. A logger watches his life flash before his eyes more than a handful of times before his is an old man, if he is to become an old man. Archie had ducked under logs as big around as the wheel of a semi, he broke limbs when he should have lost them, and dodged death when she should have taken him. And he had honestly believed that God must have somehow saved him, and he wondered why.
Yet, when I met Archie, he lived with more zeal than any man I had seen before. His eyes lit up as he arched his back and took a mental measurement of the tree, and the crash it would make when he felled it. He wore an old flannel shirt and a pair oversized coveralls he had picked up at a second hand joint. He pushed his square rimmed glasses up between his eyes with one of his gnarled hands and then palmed his tobacco-stained beard in amusement. He was a funny looking old man, very hairy seeing as the Grishams were never to concerned with visual appeal. Hair protruded from his ears and nose meeting the beard that grew into his neck. He had the hunchback of a man that had lifted trees far more than his body should have allowed, and he stood on his good hip to rest the sorry one plagued with arthritis. It seemed impossible that a seventy-year-old man who had lived on poached game and Wonder-bread peanut butter sandwiches could still wield such a saw.
He took a great heave on the saw cord and set the engine afire. The old man’s entire frame shook with the weight of the saw as he notched the tree on the uphill face. Archie kept all his saws razor sharp, and the blade glided into the grain like a steak knife in soft butter. He notched the tree twice and then let the saw descend into the heart of the beast. The tree shuddered and slowly began to lean, but it’s fall was withheld by another tree below.
“Damn, I figured she’d go head an’ fall.” Archie’s English was far from perfected; his education had been stunted at the fifth grade and with very few teeth left his language was tough to distinguish. Undiscouraged, Archie sawed a limb from a nearby tree and attempted to pry the tree from its base. Scared to death, I scrambled further up the hill to stand behind another tree and pray the old man didn’t catch the base of the log with his chest.
“Jesus Christ,” Walter’s eyes were as big as chicken eggs as he paused from his work and gaped at the crazy old loon jumping up and down heaving on his homemade crowbar. The limb didn’t last long with Archie’s little frame wrenching on it like a frenzied badger in a rabbit snare. Without missing a beat, Archie picked his saw up and walked uphill, leaving Walter and I thoroughly confused as to what he had in mind.
He surveyed another large tree that was several yards uphill from his original foe.
“Good God, he’s gonna go for the bank shot,” Walter mumbled, breathing hard just from watching the man at work. The two of us leapt for cover further uphill to save ourselves from a certain violent death. And so, Archie tore into the defenseless, seemingly just excited with the whole endeavor. With the skill of an experienced demolitionist, Archie felled the tree directly into the target and sent both specimens to the floor of the canyon with a deafening crash.
Archie could barely contain himself as victory burst from his little body. Smiling he looked at the two of us.
“Well, I spect that’ll do ‘er. You boys go ahead and fence away, I’ll come back later and wench ‘em up.”
And so I met Archie Grisham in his element. I realized that men like Archie have met the edge of life, and didn’t see any other way but to live clinging to it. Most would call him lonely; his wife had left him for spending too much time with the edge of life, and his son-in-laws were too “concerned with brakes and all that safety business” to work with the wild old fool. But, Archie wasn’t lonely; he spent his time a mountain goat roaming the mountain in search of taller trees with heavier falls.
Almost a decade later, long after I had left my grandfather’s, two hunters found Archie’s truck crushed under a lodge-pole pine in the high country of the Bighorns. Archie and his beloved Husqvarna saw were nowhere in sight. Several search parties went out in search of the man, but found only a broken saw chain and a graveyard of fallen trees.