At five o’clock in the morning, Tony Snodgrass is in the parking lot of the Willapa Thriftway in Raymond, Washington, smoking a cigarette and waiting. The lot is empty aside from his idling crummy, and the asphalt glistens wet beneath the street lamps. It’s December, so it’s chilly and gusty. But inside the cab of his truck, it’s warm and dry. And clean — cleaner than the other guys’ crummies, Snodgrass points out with a smirk.

Within minutes, two sedans peel into the lot. Michael Neumeyer climbs out of one, and Julian out of the other. The three exchange good-mornings, with Julian’s being nonverbal — a nod and a smile — as he speaks little to no English. They toss their bags in the bed of Snodgrass’s pickup and climb into the cab. Neumeyer rides shotgun while Julian sits behind him, covers his face with his hoodie and goes promptly to sleep.

He stays asleep for the duration of the hour-long drive to Doty while Neumeyer and Snodgrass banter about football and the radio, tuned to a pop station, drones softly on in the background. It’s still nearly pitch dark outside, but oncoming headlights occasionally light up the cab just as one man turns toward the other or glances up at the rearview mirror, revealing a cheekbone, or the corner of a mouth, or an eye. These features give little away though, except, perhaps, for a certain, quiet alertness.

Part of it is the early hour. As the day goes on, bodies and tongues will warm up and become more expressive. But only to a certain point. The woods are no place for performances. Swagger will not help you down in the hole.

Julian’s features, hidden beneath a hoodie, reveal nothing at all. They remain hidden until the very last minute, when Snodgrass is backing the truck down the muddy two-track where everybody parks their crummies before hiking a short distance up to the landing. Snodgrass and Neumeyer spill out of the front seats and into the surrounding darkness as soon as the truck comes to a stop. Julian yawns, rubs his eyes and stretches. His mannerisms confirm that he is the newest member of the crew working this logging side — a salvage job in burned-over, second-growth timber on state land — and that his day is only just beginning.

Outside, Neumeyer begins pulling things out of the bed of the pickup: a rucksack, a power saw, a gallon jug of water, jerrycans filled with gas and bar oil, and some plastic shopping bags full of bratwursts that he will later cook over the warming fire and share with the rest of the crew. He dons a pair of caulked rubber boots, a raincoat, a pair of rain pants and a dirty, hi-vis vest. Up on the landing, Snodgrass has already fired up the yarder, which is now coughing and groaning like a giant beast of burden. It’s half past six, and the rain, illuminated by the machinery’s floodlights, is a spitting one.

The firewood Neumeyer sets about chopping is already drenched. But after dousing it with a few glugs of gasoline and layering on enough of the previous shift’s empty grease gun canisters, he gets it to go — just as Julian and the rest of the rigging crew make it to the landing. Jacinto, rigging-slinger, and Jose and Alexis, choker-setters, have arrived separately, with Jesus Diaz, the crew’s do-it-all hook tender. They are all originally from the same part of Mexico: Michoacán. And aside from Diaz, who has been here the longest, only Jacinto speaks English.

“Good morning, Michael! Good morning, Tony!” he yells over the din. And just then, the yarder’s whistle blows a few times in quick succession, signaling that Snodgrass is preparing to raise the skyline cable, along with the carriage and the attached choker cables that will ride it down into the hole and bring back up the logs. It’s a petulant, high-pitched sound — a bike horn multiplied by a million — and piercingly loud.

Once committed to memory, though, whistle codes also constitute the quickest, clearest channel of communication in this steep, gnarled terrain. They are how Snodgrass and Jacinto will signal the majority of whatever they are seeing and doing — the former by pressing a button in the yarder cab and the latter by squeezing the trigger on the Talkie Tooter transmitter dangling from his waist. They will take no breaks, and by quitting time they will have choked, yarded and processed upwards of 30 turns, or batches of logs.

But that is still eight hours away. Now, the carriage is hurtling downhill for the first turn of the day, with the rigging crew on its heels.

“Let’s go!” Jacinto yells. For a second, Julian sticks his hands into the warming fire, rubbing them vigorously together as the flames lick his fingertips. And then he pulls on his gloves and dives off the edge of the hill with the others. They’re a nice pair of heavy-duty work gloves — insulated on the inside and coated with rubber on the outside, all while remaining pliable. Later, the warmed-up tongues around him will call them “b***h gloves” and rib him good-naturedly about shelling out for them. But can you blame Julian? He was just curled up in the back of the crummy with a hoodie over his face. Ten minutes later, he is crashing through the brush and the dark and the driving rain, mere flesh and bone in a world made of wood and steel.

In a way, he might as well still be asleep. Like building skyscrapers or sending people into space, there is something so fundamentally preposterous about what he is about to do — about pulling whole trees out of the forest. Something about doing this work that demands one suspend all sense of what is safe or reasonable or even possible. Something about logging these rain-soaked hills that compels one to move and operate as if by the logic of a dream.

To shield or to embrace

It turns out somebody had beaten Snodgrass and Neumeyer to the landing. His voice crackled over the citizens band radio while Snodgrass was still backing down the two-track and Julian was still sleeping.

“Morning, George,” Snodgrass replied. It was the boss himself — George Bridgewater, the 71-year-old owner of Bridgewater Logging, who is typically up by half past midnight on a workday, out on the landing not long after two, and loading the first log truck of the morning some time between three and four. As almost every one of his employees will point out independently, Bridgewater is usually the first person to arrive at the side, and the last person to leave.

His movements and mannerisms are also the most measured of them all — seemingly, at times, to the point of slowness, though what appears to be slow is actually just deliberate. It certainly has nothing to do with age or ability. Rather, it has to do with experience, feel and dedication to a principle governing all forms of manual labor: slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

There is another thing that makes Bridgewater stand out, as much as he loathes drawing attention to himself. In a sea of ball caps, hoods and orange hard hats, the boss wears a simple leather cap, caked in a layer of grease and dirt that any seasoned woodsman will immediately convert into a sense of vintage. Nobody seems to know more than this, though word on the landing is that Bridgewater has never not worn it — not even when he used to fall timber by hand.

Squint real hard, and Julian’s gloves and Bridgewater’s cap might just look like competing, if not mutually exclusive, responses to logging’s most fundamental and inconvenient reality: many millions of tons of wood do not simply walk themselves off one of Earth’s most productive but unforgiving landscapes. People have to go out there and get it. The scales are mismatched, though. The exposure is extreme. Harvesting timber, like other human attempts at wrangling nature, ends up being a physics problem of deadly proportions — one that has to be survived as much as solved.

So the question is, do you shield yourself from nature, or do you embrace it? Do you try to limit your exposure to the elements, or do you let them weather you? Do you opt for the protective, rubber work gloves, or the worn, leather cap?

It isn’t binary, of course. Methods of coping with objective danger and discomfort exist on a spectrum, and any number of variables affect where you might land on it. Age is one of them. And here, Bridgewater and Julian are perhaps representative of their respective generations.

“When I was younger, there wasn’t too much emphasis on safety,” Bridgewater recalled. “I mean, you didn’t want to do stupid things, but you didn’t sit down and talk about it. You know — ‘We can’t do this, we can’t do that.’ Never did that.”

This was in the 1960s, when Bridgewater was a boy, pulling levers in the cab of a D5 Cat at the bidding of his late father and founder of Bridgewater Logging, Jack Bridgewater. The logging town where the younger Bridgewater grew up, Raymond, was already in decline, though still full of places to down a beer and a steak, or else satiate any other appetite that could be worked up in the woods. Company camps and towns still dotted the Willapa Hills, and there were still a number of gyppo outfits that hadn’t yet been swallowed up by the giants, Weyerhaeuser and Crown Zellerbach. Said simply: most everyone in Southwest Washington still made a living, directly or indirectly, off of the trees towering above them.

But the mindset and risk-reward calculus that Bridgewater spoke of defines a much longer period of time, spilling over decades on either side of his own boyhood. Here in Southwest Washington, it began with Scandinavian immigrants and the Deep River Logging Company, which, according to logger, historian and Naselle resident Bryan Penttila, “harvested over a billion board-feet of logs from the Naselle River watershed” in the first three decades of the 20th century.

The physics problem that is logging was even deadlier then. And men routinely failed to solve or survive it — were felled or maimed on the job at many times the rate of injury seen in just about any other line of work. To this day, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration deems logging the most dangerous job in America.

And yet, for the better part of a century, the promise of money to be made, and the seeming inexhaustibility of the resource that made it, managed to turn the physics problem into a numbers game, played with as much relentless persistence as ingenuity. Communities could send an endless stream of men into the woods because they had the men to send. And those men took the risk of living cheek by jowl with nature for granted — navigated it with a do-or-die combination of pluck, nerve, endurance and skill.

Ultimately, what the individual logger earned for bringing these qualities to bear was more than just a living. The pride he felt in doing the grittiest, toughest work out there — in measuring himself daily against the elements — was as big as the timber he felled.

A century later, there has been a subtle, but profound change in the industry. It isn’t the rapid mechanization of logging operations across the board. It isn’t the constriction of timber markets in an increasingly globalized economy, and the concurrent shuttering of so many independent outfits and mills up and down the Emerald Edge. It isn’t the newfound emphasis on safety, efficiency and regulation. It isn’t the way social and political attitudes towards logging have shifted since the timber wars of the 1990s.

It’s the draining of that once-fierce pride out of the logging community itself. The sense that there are fewer and fewer who are in it for the love of it — who have the sap running through their veins.

To those who have seen enough to pinpoint it, this change does feel like a relatively recent one. When asked what he wishes more people understood about logging, Bridgewater’s nephew and right-hand man, Matt Cron, said: “Ten years ago, I would have said the pride in it, just the value of the job, because it comes from the heart. But it’s changing so much now … guys don’t do this stuff now because it’s what they really want to do.”

He paused before adding: “I think a lot of people look at guys who work in the woods … like, ‘Oh, you work in the woods? Well, you must not be able to do anything else.’”

It’s hard to say what, exactly, is responsible for this change. As Cron pointed out, it’s still possible, in spite of all the other aforementioned changes, to earn a decent living by logging — especially in this evergreen corner of the country.

But what’s also undeniable is that the various forms of belt-tightening the timber industry has experienced in recent decades have simply resulted in fewer loggers. And for the ones that remain, the philosophy of the industry now revolves around minimizing their exposure and maximizing safety and accountability.

For every one of his employees whose boots touch the ground, Bridgewater now carries insurance at a rate of $19 per hour through the Washington Department of Labor and Industries. Jobs that used to take the manual labor of an entire crew, working together out in the open, are now done with a man or two, holed up in the climate-controlled cabs of modern machines. As Trace Conklin, an operations manager at Weyerhaeuser’s Raymond sawmill put it: “If we could get to the point where no hands touch the lumber at all, we would.”

Or in other words, the rubber gloves, and not the leather cap, are now the default.

Which, to Bridgewater and Cron, isn’t a bad thing. After all, the physics problem itself hasn’t gotten any easier.

“This job is always gonna be hard work,” Cron said. “[It’s] getting physically easier on people … but now it’s more of a mental game.” And individual loggers, regardless of age or experience, still yearn to be tested by it. It’s why Julian got made fun of for his gloves that day on the landing. It’s what Snodgrass meant when he said, while pulling levers in the yarder cab, “Sometimes I miss being down in the rigging. Just the hard work of it.” The men that Cron and Bridgewater have working for them are still steeped in pride and camaraderie. And in an age that sometimes seems designed to rob them of both, it is equally by design that they have retained these qualities.

“Terrain changes, timber changes, markets change, everything changes, but to do a job in this day and age, it takes people,” Bridgewater said. “I don’t care what you’re doing, you need people. So by God, you better treat them right. You want the most out of them. And that’s what I try to do. I try to lead by example.”

Planning and vision

Back out on the side, Diaz is down in the hole.

As a hook tender, he doesn’t have to be here. Jacinto has things fully under control in the brush, whereas Diaz’s primary responsibility amounts more or less to masterminding the entire yarding operation. The placement of the skyline cable, the triangulation of various smaller ropes and cables that will pull the skyline into place, the designation and rigging of multiple, faraway stumps and trees as anchor points for blocks and pulleys, the way that an entire hillside of downed timber can be covered in the fewest and most efficient yarding corridors — all of these things are a direct result of Diaz’s planning and vision.

But he’s here anyway, helping to choke logs, piling onto Julian with the jokes, and occasionally relaying messages up to Snodgrass. Part of it is the presence of a reporter, whose safety can be better ensured with an extra pair of experienced eyes. But another part of it is what Bridgewater was talking about: leading by example. Plus, Diaz likes it down here. He started in the brush 20 years ago, with Bridgewater Logging, doing exactly what Julian and the other choker-setters are doing. And he still prefers to spend his days hiking all over the place, breathing the fresh air and keeping an eye on things.

Unlike Bridgewater, Diaz does wear a hard hat. But the two men still share identical philosophies, when it comes to facing the elements. Beneath his raincoat, Diaz is wearing nothing but a hoodie, a hickory work shirt and an undershirt. It was all he was wearing several winters ago, when he was logging in the snow and ended up with frostbitten fingers and toes. It’s all he’s worn since, opting primarily for the protection his mind offers him.

“You just hang in there, and say to yourself, ‘I’ll make it, I’ll make it, I’ll make it,’ and that’s how you learn how to control all that stuff,” he said. “It’s all in your head. If you think about it, it’s bad. But if you start doing something, you know, bullshitting with those guys, playing around, stuff like that, it goes away, and you’re fine.”

“I’m not a robot,” he continued. “I got problems, everybody’s got problems. Maybe you feel sad or something. But then you come sit over here, quiet, you hear a couple of birds, you hear the creek, and you’re just calm, and relaxed. That’s it.”

The whistle blows and the carriage starts back down from the landing with three empty chokers, and something else dangling from one of them. Jacinto stops the carriage, whistles back with the Talkie Tooter, and lowers the chokers down. It’s the plastic bag full of bratwursts that Neumeyer brought up to landing. Only now, they’re wrapped in tin foil and piping hot, and there’s a bag full of hotdog buns alongside them, and bottles of ketchup and mustard, too. Neumeyer has even thought to cook up a brat for the reporter.

They choke the logs, blow the whistle, and send them back up. They tear into the sausages, dribbling ketchup on their rain coats. They say, “Gracias, Michael,” out loud. Some of the tin foil gets balled up and scattered — strange, silver mushrooms sprouting in the brush. There is a hint of diesel and grill smoke in the air. The rain falls, and falls, and falls.

Editor’s Note

This article about modern-day forestry will appear in the 2025 edition of Our Coast magazine along with additional photos.