|

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.