Logger rhythm> Writer has finger on pulse of hardy river drivers from bygone era

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SPIKED BOOTS: SKETCHES OF THE NORTH COUNTRY, by Robert E. Pike, The Countryman Press, Woodstock, Vt., 1999, 287 pages, paperback, $14.95.

I have never met, nor will I ever meet Vern Davison, the main character and first-person narrator for much of “Spiked Boots,” a compilation of anecdotes, reminiscences and tales straight from the lumber camps and backwoods of northern New Hampshire, Vermont and central Maine.

That no such meeting will ever take place is probably just as well — for both of us. I doubt that we would have hit it off.

In his book, originally self-published in 1959 and reissued by The Countryman Press in 1999, author Robert E. Pike takes his readers on a journey through what he terms “The North Country” to the front porches, stoops and doorways of the men and women living there.

While growing up in Upper Waterford, Vt., Pike, who passed away in 1997 at age 92, spent much of his childhood along the rivers of the region watching the rivermen conduct log drives. He later devoted much of his life to studying and chronicling the history and lore of the logging industry.

His mentor and guide for much of his travels was Davison, whom Pike refers to as “Old Vern” and describes as “a crusty, cantankerous and independent-minded inhabitant.”

Davison and his fellow loggers and rivermen were for Pike a wealth of firsthand knowledge of the history and lore of a time when one log drive could stretch for miles down a river and one carelessly placed foot could cost a man his life.

Then as now, logging was a dangerous profession. A lack of safety equipment or training at the time meant a logger took his life in his hands at the start of each drive. Many were buried along the way after a misstep on a floating log, a carelessly placed dynamite charge, a runaway horse or a falling tree abruptly took a life — his passage and burial spot marked by a pair of spiked boots jammed into a tree.

For Pike, the true heroes of the north around the turn of the century were the loggers and rivermen themselves.

To hear Davison and his contemporaries tell it, even the most unsavory of characters became heroes, and the reader is left with a somewhat romantic view of life amid the log drives.

There’s George Van Dyke, lumber king and “greatest man the North Country ever produced — bar none,” according to Davison. This apparently despite the fact that Van Dyke once deducted the price of a winter’s worth of tobacco from an employee’s wages, even though the worker never smoked or used tobacco. “Yes, but it was there if you wanted it,” Van Dyke told the hapless worker.

By cheating landowners and pushing his workers, Van Dyke managed to die a millionaire — after being born poor and earning and losing three fortunes.

Ruthless to the core, the lumber baron at one point, as told by Davison, refused to save a worker who had fallen into the river during a log drive, but ordered his men to save his cant dog, or peavey.

“And a damned good reason for it, too,” said Davison. “A lot of [riverment] weren’t worth as much per board foot as good sound hickory.”

At the same time, Pike finds evidence from other retired lumbermen of Van Dyke’s “generosity and public spirit.”

Any random question or comment from Pike puts Davison on the track of another tale. The old lumberman is never too busy to drop whatever task he is working on and take to the roads or bush to flush out an old friend with a story — and he usually manages to find a good fishing hole along the way.

One day Davison takes Pike deep into the woods to the shanty home of Ginseng Willard, a man whom Davison dubs “the most unusual specimen of God’s carelessness in the North Country,” and with whom he had worked on the log drive of 1892.

In the corner of his home, Willard kept his homemade coffin — built out of two old grand pianos, and in which he slept for two years, “just to get used to it.”

Pike describes Willard’s yard which includes a ramshackle wagon full of hand-carved wooden miniatures of all the items he will need when he buys a team of horses to head out to California in the manner of the ’49ers.

Pike writes that Willard described his wagon and items “with an air of half sincerity and half of mockery so that to save my life I could not tell if he was serious or joking.”

Much can be said of the tales recounted by Pike. Many seem just too outlandish or far-fetched to be true, with the storytellers themselves often making light of the brutal conditions and hardships faced daily by the rivermen.

Adding to the sense of unreality is Pike’s habit of falling back on his academic and scholarly background.

Pike is a graduate of Dartmouth College, the University of Minnesota and Harvard University, and a former professor of foreign languages. His lumbermen never spit, they “expectorate”; old-timers don’t predict, they “prognosticate”; and men don’t swear, they “hurl epithets.”

The stories and anecdotes in “Spiked Boots” are of a distinctly masculine bent, with neither Pike nor Davison seeming to have much time or sympathy for the condition of women who make up 50 percent of the North Country’s population.

Davison, at one point, dismisses women as “always a damn nuisance in the woods anyhow.” This observed after meeting up with a guide who, before abandoning his party of a man and his two daughters, gave one of the girls, “a damn good spanking” for scaring the fish.

At one point in the book, Pike recalls Davison’s description of the North Country practice of swapping or selling wives. “Lots of men up here sell their wives, just like they would a horse.”

When Pike asks if the woman is a willing partner in what he refers to as “this pleasant North Country custom,” Davison replies: “Sure. Why wouldn’t they? They haven’t anything to lose and they kinda like the change, I suppose.”

To hear Pike and Davison tell it, the women populating the North Country in the era of the log drives were for the most part prostitutes, unfaithful wives or “poor white trash.”

Davison and cronies could never be accused of being politically correct. In fact, that hardy breed would probably take that label as the ultimate insult.

Pike initially wrote “Spiked Boots” for those individual characters — his first marketing plan was to ride the roads of the North Country, his car trunk full of books, and pitch sales to the residents by saying, “You’ll want to buy this book because your name is in it.”

With those people long gone, Pike may well find an audience in the flatlanders and city slickers who still take to the woods in search of a little peace and wilderness experience.

Its yarns and tall tales come from a time when oral traditions kept storytelling alive. By writing them down and preserving them, Pike has allowed a new generation of outdoor enthusiasts to get a glimpse — romanticized as it may be — of a time when lumber was king without having to go through the danger, mess and discomfort of the actual work.

Helen Pike will reminisce about her father and his book beginning at noon on Aug. 9 at the Bangor Public Library. For more information, visit the Web at www.pikebooks.com.