| ST, his week: The crunch of” ~ breaking timber ilton Jovial had noi enjoyed his first experi- ence at one of his log- ging sites. The journey began pleasantly enough. It was to be a day of learning... To see how the harvesting of his forest was actual- ly being done. It was to be a day to nurture his pride... To experi- ence first hand the well-oiled machine he had created with his northwestem B.C. logging and milling operation. But what he learned was all wrong and did nothing for his pride. Bouncing up a defective logging road, his driver and contract super- visor Joe Nicholl at the wheel. Nicholl apparently loved potholes... He didn’t miss one of the bone- crunching craters. Jovial learned © later that his road construction and maintenance man, Rocky Rhodes, had neglected to ballast the road properly in the interests of cutting his costs. Now Jovial was con- sidering cutting Rhodes. | When they arrived at the site, a momentary sense of pride was soon shattered. Archie Skidmore had literally destroyed the soil at the site and Jovial was the one that was going to have to pay an esti- mated $2,000 per hectare to reha- bilitate the area. The total cost could be as much as $16,000. Skidmore, Jovial’s forester Herby Squish explained, had started too early in the season and was cutting his costs by. not following the Pre-Harvest Silviculture Prescrip- tion, the plan that lays out the rules for harvesting and replanting a specific site. Part of the PHSP is a map detailing the location of landings and skid trails and Skid- more hadn’t even looked at it. No more than seven. percent of the area was to be used for skid trails. Skidmore had used about 15 per- cent. Archie Junior said his father had told him to take the shortest route and drop the blade if anything got in the way. "Time is money," he had mimicked his father, "and it takes far too much time and fuel to follow a foresters map..." Even worse, Nicholl, Jovial’s own employee, seemed to agree. "Nobody uses those maps," he had said. And it was Nicholl who had made up the contract signed by Skidmore, a feat that had prompted Terrace forester Herby Squish to hang the nickname "Plug" in front of his surname. "That’s what your. contract is worth to your boss," Squish had said firmly. "A plug There was nothing Squish could nickel," But the moming’s horror was behind him now. With Herby Squish as his driver (Nicholl was insane, Jovial had decided, and he refused to get back in his truck) the tide down the mountain had been almost pleasant, and now they were back on pavement driv-~ . ing west. Jovial chuckled to himself. "What’s on your mind, Milton?" Squish asked his boss. "Plug," was the reply. "Plug Nicholl... I like that." Both men chuckled. Then Joviai sighed, "Sixteen thousand dollars..." Squish tried to console him. "Could have been much worse." Jovial swallowed hard. "You don’t think any of those other guys out in the bush are as stupid and ig- norant as Plug and Skidmore... Do you?" The Way I See It... by Stephanie Wiebe We're having a census — it’s kind of like a huge cross-country roll call. This is the time when the government sends out ques- tionnaires asking all sorts of personal questions; How many people live with you? How much money do you make? What col- our is your underwear and how often do you floss? Evidently they’ve got some good reasons for wanting to know these things, but I’ve got some questions of my own which I plan to submit with my com- pleted form. For starters, since we’ve had censuses before, and - supposedly they keep track of people coming and going through immigration, birth and death records, don’t they already know how many of us there are and what we're doing? Surely they could make a good guess — isn’t that somebody’s job? I also won- der whether or not Brian Mul- roney has to fill out a census form, or does the head honcho of censuses simply fill in the answers for him? And if Elvis Presley is alive and haunting international laundromats, as often reported by The National _ Enquirer, would that make a difference in the total population count? More important, where DO all those lost socks go once they’ve disappeared from the washing machine? I think these are valid questions deserving honest answers. If Tom Selleck and Don John- son are visiting this area during the census, | wonder if they’ll be counted along with us. As a matter of fact, I want to count them on my form, so this thing better have plenty of space for that. I hate it when forms leave a piddly three centimetres for a name, which might be fine if your name was John Doe, but not for the millions of people with. names like Hildegarden . ‘Schnickelfyer (hyphen) Tortellini. I also hate seeing those arrogant little blank squares marked "Do not write in this space". When I see those, I want to scribble "’ll write anywhere I damn well please" in that space. Sometimes, these forms have an area labelled "For Office Use Only", with number codes and little boxes to check off. These get on my nerves, too, so [ sit quietly in my» office and tick off a few boxes at random. But I digress. Getting back to the census, it’s evidently against the law to refuse to fill out a census form. Whether you get the Short form with 10 questions, or the long one with 54 questions, you stust fill out the form. Per- sonally, I think they'd get a better response by awarding prizes for the best answers — but 54 ques- tions? f can’t think of 54 ques- "I also hate seeing those arrogant little blank squares marked ’Do not write in this space’." tions the government could poss- ibly ask. Actually, I can only come up with four: (1.) What’s your name? (2.) Where do you live? (3.) How much is your income? and (4.) How soon can you send it to us? This is what they really want to know. Meanwhile, there’s some poor soul rating up a huge computer to tally all the information and numbers we send in. Twenty-six million Canadians will be counted. Over a million of those people will fill out the 54-ques- tion form. The pages and pages of statistics spewed out will be phenomenal. They’l! tally the number of people who own homes, and the ones who speak two languages. They'll count the people who are self-employed, and the ones who ea! pork and beans for breakfast; the ones with ingrown toenails and excessive nasal hair. They’tl even add up all the people who can’t walk and chew gum at the same time — with one slip of a digit, we could become a nation of bozocs. A scary thought. I just hope I gct the short form. Tom Selleck won't mind, and I don’t eat pork and beans anyway. say that would calm Jovial’s new- found concern about the efficiency of his logging operation and he knew it. "How about those Penguins?" Squish wanted to get the conversa- tion onto anything but logging. "What?" Jovial frowned. "Pittsburgh?" "I really don’t care," said Jovial with a hint of a scowl. The pair fell silent. Ten minutes later, Squish tumed ieft onto a logging road. This one was a little better than the previous effort, Jovial would discover... Or perhaps it was just that Squish was a better driver than Nicholl. Jovial sat in silence as he. tried to imagine Joe Tower’s harvesting operation. No skid trails here. A steel tower and cables dragging logs out of a clear cut. What could possibly go wrong? A short distance and Squish turned right onto a second logging toad. Climbing an casy uphill grade, they began to rise above the valley floor. "Well here we are," he said. "Clutch valley. Beautiful, isn’t it?" Jovial, suddenly aware of his Surroundings, had to agree. The forested valley... He saw beautiful green dollar signs. The reflection of snow-capped Beetle Mountain on the surface of Gearbox Lake, ' though, was to Jovial true beauty. An offering of nature on which no one Could place a dollar value. "If you look off to the left and back a bit, you'll see the site Terrace Review — Wednesday, May 29, 1991 A7 Forestry by Tod Strachan, in consultation with Rod Armold and Doug Davies where Jack Block’s phase contract- ing operation will take place," Squish said. Jovial turned to look. Clutch Creek meandering aimless- ly... "Right. I can see the bridge across Clutch Creek." Jovial was Starting to relax....The day was beginning to offer some of the experience he had been told to expect. Nothing more was going to g0 wrong. Nothing was going to Spoil his day. Around a right hand switchback. Up a short slope... Squish hit the brakes hard, "Oh no..." Two short words that pierced Jovial’s gut like a cruelly misdirected icicle. Jovial looked at Squish. His jaw was hanging open. Jovial stared straight ahead. A large clearcut... Steel spar work- ing... Men turning trees into Jovial dollars... "What’s wrong?" Squish didn’t Say a word, Jovial stared ahead. He watched the steel spar working, cable bouncing in the sky. He watched in fascination as the cable dragged a tree off the edge of a 100-foot cliff. The tree dropped slowly as though nature had shifted time into slow motion. Slowly twisting and tuming in the air until it came to an abrupt and destructive stop on the ground. Cable reeling in the remains like a giant, broken fish. Something, Jovial suspected, was not quite right with this tech- nique... But then, what did he know? Letters to the Editor Chip goes to Mainstage To the Editor; The Terrace Little Theatre would like to extend heartfelt thanks to the patrons who came out to sup- port the benefit performances of A Chip in the Sugar this past week- end. Because of your generous dona- tions as well as financial support from the Skeena Zone and the TLT, A Chip in the Sugar has raised enough funds to travel to Mainstage in Nelson. Our perform- ance time is 8 p.m. Tuesday, June 4. We hope to wow the audience and do the Skeena Zone proud. Marianne Brorup-Weston, for the Terrace Little Theatre. A thank-you from Tank To the Editor; I would like to express my ap-. preciation of the excellent cover- age of the many volunteers and their activities over the weeks preceding Emergency Preparedness Week. It was my objective to increase public awarencss of the emergency planning and resource Organizations involved in our community, and thank to you and your staff, I feel the campaign was tremendously successful. Please pass on to all your staff my sincere appreciation of an excellent job well done! Thank you all. Ray Tank, Atea Co-ordinator, Tettace Emergency Services.