Nevertheless, The Observer Coming Up The Sound Sees Not Nor
Hears Anything Of This Fierce Storm Of Steel That Is Devouring The
Forests, Save Perhaps The Shriek Of Some Whistle Or The Columns Of
Smoke That Mark The Position Of The Mills.
All else seems as serene
and unscathed as the silent watching mountains.
XIX
People and Towns of Puget Sound
As one strolls in the woods about the logging camps, most of the
lumbermen are found to be interesting people to meet, kind and
obliging and sincere, full of knowledge concerning the bark and
sapwood and heartwood of the trees they cut, and how to fell them
without unnecessary breakage, on ground where they may be most
advantageously sawed into logs and loaded for removal. The work is
hard, and all of the older men have a tired, somewhat haggard
appearance. Their faces are doubtful in color, neither sickly nor
quite healthy-looking, and seamed with deep wrinkles like the bark of
the spruces, but with no trace of anxiety. Their clothing is full of
rosin and never wears out. A little of everything in the woods is
stuck fast to these loggers, and their trousers grow constantly
thicker with age. In all their movements and gestures they are heavy
and deliberate like the trees above them, and they walk with a
swaying, rocking gait altogether free from quick, jerky fussiness, for
chopping and log rolling have quenched all that. They are also slow
of speech, as if partly out of breath, and when one tries to draw them
out on some subject away from logs, all the fresh, leafy, outreaching
branches of the mind seem to have been withered and killed with
fatigue, leaving their lives little more than dry lumber.
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