Working in Lumber Camps V - Summers 1946/47

Chapter V - The men who came to work in the Lumber Camps

Who were the men that worked in the lumber camps? There were of course a small core of skilled workers who operated the saws, graded the lumber, acted as foreman over the workers in the mill and out in the lumber yard, an office clerk, the blacksmith and the all important camp cook. Many of these men had a wife and children living in a nearby cabin or in a town somewhere. The balance of workers were quite a mixed bag including I recall a trapper escaping from the woods during the summer months, other men with a history dating back to the Great Depression of hitching onto freight cars in search of menial jobs wherever they could find them, displaced people – the DP’s we called them – that had begun the migration from Europe that followed the end of WWII, Canadian men of Japanese origin and a few students, like myself and my friend Dick Fleming, who came up from the cities to work for the summer.

Let me tell you something about these men.

The trappers: These men lived in the forests year round. I have a picture of one of them that I took with my box camera when I worked in the camp. His name was Henri Levesque. In the summer when the black flies, mosquitoes and other biting insects arrived Henri would escape from the forest and find work in the Lumber Camps. In early October he would return to trapping. This meant returning to his camp on the banks of a river deep in the woods.. It was a simple log cabin with the clay mud from the riverbank placed in the cracks between the logs to keep out the cold. He was a skilled carpenter and using only his axe had cut the logs and planed them to make rough boards for the door, table, and shelves. From the camp he would set up trap lines in the woods to trap beavers and otters for their pelts. Before leaving for his camp he would drop into the local Indian reserve to pick up a strong Indian woman who had accompanied him for many years. She was his partner and helped him to set up and then look after the camp, kept a fire going because the temperatures would commonly drop to -20 C degrees or more, fish and gutted the animals he brought back to roast, cooked his meals, and skinned and hung out the animal pelts to dry. At night they would lie close together under blankets and furs to keep warm.

Henri was semi-literate, spoke French, English and a local Indian dialect and kept track of his money. I recall he had about one or two years of formal schooling. His worldly interest seemed to be limited to the forest and the wild life around him. I think he was a happy man in control of his life. He loved to talk with us about his experiences and adventures in the woods and these conversations were invariably filled with his good humour. He possessed the many skills required to survive and make a good living alone in the woods. He was a true entrepreneur. He could do anything with his axe and I recall while in the camp he made for us in a few minutes oars for the long boat and then hollowed out a dug out canoe. When it was hot at night in the lumber camp he would take his blankets and sleep outside, despite the swarming insects, rather than put up with the snoring and musty air in the bunkhouse. He wasn’t a drinker like most of the men I worked with, and managed to build up savings in the bank from selling his pelts and the money he earned in the camp. His dream for retirement was to go off with one of his Indian women and own a cabin not far from a town

He was clearly very intelligent and I wonder what kind of life he would have had if he had grown up in a middle class home and gone to school.

The Japanese: When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 and joined with Germany to fight against the Allies the Canadian Government interned Japanese Canadians living in British Columbia because they were worried that they would become an internal threat to National Security. They were interned in work camps and their livelihood destroyed. These Canadians of Japanese descent were an industrious people and owned fishing boats, small farms and grocery stores and all of this was taken away from them and sold off at a fraction of its value. Many non Japanese Canadians benefited from this theft. The fact is they were exceptionally loyal Canadians and never at any time proved to be a threat to National Security. This is a disgraceful and criminal event in Canadian history that you must read about some day.

In 1946 and 1947 I met up with some of these Japanese who were working in the lumber camp after being released from internment. The men I met had been fishermen and owned boats on the West Coast. They were a quiet and relatively well-educated group who kept to themselves and were intent on working hard at bonus paying jobs to earn enough money to take up life again with their families somewhere in Canada.

One had been a judo instructor on the West Coast. He was a small wiry man, a few inches above five feet. One day a tall and tough looking man arrived in the camp and claimed he was Boston Blackie, a well known boxer. Actually radio had a detective series about Boston Blackie between 1944 and 1950 and this is where he probably picked up the name. Judging from the scars on his face and flattened nose he probably had been a boxer of sorts. In any case he was hired and joined a group of several men whose job was to peel the bark off logs that were to become railway ties, It was the highest paying bonus jobs in the camp.

Boston Blackie soon informed his fellow workers that they should pay him a share of their earnings or he would deal with them with his fists. This went on for several days because the men were afraid of him. Finally the Japanese man asked the men to let him look after it. He quietly went up to BB and told him bluntly that the men weren’t going to pay him anything. Boston took a mighty swing at the little Japanese who avoided the blow and then went to work on the big man with judo chops. In seconds Boston Blackie was unconscious and placed onto a passing box car resting for a few minutes on a railway siding. And that is how he left the camp never to be heard from again. I guess he never picked up his pay check and I wonder what became of him..

The Drifters: The largest group of men in the camp was between 40 and 55 and had a history of at best temporary work. Many had lived through the Depression years before World War II when millions of men in Canada were unemployed. They told me stories about hitching rides on freight trains and traveling across Canada looking for work wherever they could find it; sometimes during the harvests, or on road gangs from British Columbia to Nova Scotia and here in the lumber camps. Many would arrive with not much more than paper bags or a dilapidated suit case that carried their few worldly possessions. Some told me about a girl friend or wife and kids from long ago but with the life they were leading and without any money these were left behind and only dimly remembered. Many couldn’t read and count money. When they bought something they just handed someone money and took whatever change that was given back. I was even asked the question about where Europe is and asked if it was south of the camp somewhere.

They lived from paycheck to paycheck saving just enough to go into the nearest town to drink and look for a woman to spend time with. Many of them in a drunken state got into fights in town, usually about money or women, and the police would put them into the jail to sober up. It was a cycle I’m sure they repeated hundreds of times; it was a life of disappointment without hope and expectations. Listening to them talk on the front porch after work I learned that many of the men they fought with or stole from were their friends and they laughed about their jail time. They had few job skills other than what they had learned in these temporary jobs.

They were generally quiet and well behaved in the camp. The behaviour code of the camps was that you didn’t talk at the table, didn’t fight and get into arguments, or steal from each other while in the camp. If anyone stepped out of line they took justice into their own hands and it was rare that anyone did. I had a little experience with this. I was carrying in my wallet the picture of a girl I had been dating in Montreal. Another young man about my age looked into my wallet and paraded the picture around the camp as his girlfriend. When I confronted this young man some men nearby overheard our heated discussion and their response was, “Kid, I guess you are going to have to fight him to get it back”. He wasn’t any bigger than me so we fought and he returned the picture. Later we went fishing after work together.

Could they be violent? I guess the camp manager thought so because one day he entered the dining room when the men were eating. He said he had a simple message. “My teenage daughter will be staying with me for the summer. If any man crosses over the railway track to the side my house is on, for any reason, I will shoot him dead on site and I am a good shot.” He then went out and someone said, with heads nodding “Wow! I think he really means it.”

Dick Fleming and I saw one incident that led us to believe they shared an underlying potential for violence. One day we were working on the railway siding dragging railway ties into a box car. A rabbit appeared and one of the men threw his cant hook (a stick with a hook at the end that we used for dragging logs) at the rabbit and broke its leg. The men thought this was hilarious and in seconds we observed a group of man roaring with laughter as they beat the poor rabbit to death. You hear about how soldiers running amok have committed terrible crimes in Iraq and Vietnam and I often think back about that helpless rabbit.

The Students – We were treated like the others and if anything were tolerated as rookies who had a lot to learn. In that sense the trapper and some of the older men were quite fatherly and helpful to us. Our education didn’t count for much. Two students I recall were studying medicine and planned to commit their early career to working on the icebreaking ships that went into the Artic harbours. (I have a picture of one of these men carrying a log with me with us pointing in opposite directions). The Frontier college volunteer and ex Spitfire pilot I mentioned in Chapter V when he took charge when that poor worker was cut in two. I think he was a med student from Western. He worked full shifts like everyone else but in the evenings he sat around helping people to read and handle money. After a while I would help him One thing you had to be careful about was opening your big mouth and using your book knowledge, uninvited, to show off some things you knew about the world or even worse to correct someone who was passing on inaccurate information. Invariably you would be accused of being a liar. You will find in any work group someone they go to for answers even though they know nothing.

The DP’s (displaced people). The war in Europe and the Far East was over and millions wanted to leave their war torn regions to start a new life in a Canada. They were warmly welcomed and several million arrived in the years that followed. At that time the rule was that they had to serve some time for about two years away from the cities so they began to arrive in the mines and lumber camps. Many, if not most, had acquired skills like tradesmen, accountants and even having completed courses that would lead to professional degrees so they were just serving their time until they could return to the cities. Most were young and very hard workers. We saw just the early trickle of a few arrivals in the camps with the big migration happening later when I was working the following years in the mines.


How did we spend our time when we weren’t working?

The basic work week was 6 days a week and 10 hours a day. There was overtime too. I recall two occasions where I was ordered (not asked) to work both the day and night shifts – 36 hours without sleep working near whirling saws - because the night worker was drunk in town and didn’t show up. When night fell most workers behaved like birds and went to sleep. Nine o’clock in the evening and the snoring started in the bunkhouse.

I recall that many just sat on the porch after work, didn’t talk to anyone and just stared out over the lake. I guess they occasionally saw something swimming in the lake like a moose escaping from the insects, a fish jumping or a couple of busy loons fishing. Sometimes when dusk settled in the Northern Lights would take over and light up the sky with a brilliant emerald and shimmering glow that flashed across the sky in waves. I remember commenting once to some nearby workers sitting there “ Wow! Just look at that” They looked up and said, “I don’t see anything”. I guess you can get accustomed to anything.

I read a lot. My mother would load up my bags with many books that she liked (I wasn’t consulted) that included heavy reading like works from Henry James, James Joyce, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Joyce Carey, Victor Hugo, Pushkin and something light like a Hemingway or an Agatha Christie. I had no choice; there was no television, I don’t recall any radio or even newspapers, so I read books. I read what she gave me but looking back I am forever grateful.

I remember as well Dick Fleming and I going out to the railway track to watch the transcontinental train racing by because it kept us in touch with the city world we had left. We would see the people sitting in the dining cars and sometimes people standing on the platform between cars looking clean and well dressed. On occasion some young ones would shout out insultingly,’ Beaver!!’ which was a reference to our shabby work clothes and unshaven faces.

Fishing was a great pastime in my first year at the camps because we bordered a 50km long lake teeming with fish: pickerel, pike, bass and even the occasional muskie (muskellunge). We went out in the longboat that could take about six men. We brought a big pan in the boat to collect the live fish rather than letting them die. We built a stone wall around an inlet in the lake (we called it the crib) near the camp and dumped the live fish in there. Twice or three times a week the cook had us to go down to the crib to collect enough fish for the 40 or so men in the camp. The cook was always worried that the bears would get to the fish before we did and sometime this happened, but not while I was there. I guess the raw garbage at the end of the camp kept their bellies full.

Another big event for the men was the happy berry picking on Sundays. Happy women arrived by train and were greeted by happy men and with their baskets, picnic food and blankets they soon marched off to the woods and logging roads nearby. My impression at the time this was serious berry picking event to collect whatever the seasons provided: mainly blueberries and raspberries. Sure enough a few hours later they happily came out of the woods with their baskets full. It was agreed that the camp cook could take about half of it. When the milk train finally arrived late in the day, the women climbed aboard with their baskets after much fussing and goodbyes with the men. Later I was advised by some of the men that there was much more to this event than berry picking but I was young and innocent at the time and looking back it was just as well.

Working in Lumber Camps IV - Summers 1946/47

Chapter IV: Starting Work in the Mill and the Terrible Accident of a Man Cut in Two by the Circular Saw!!!


I had finally escaped from the cookhouse and now I could sleep in until 6AM. Unfortunately the pit beneath the 10 hole outhouse had filled up and a new hole had to be dug. It had to be deep; about 7 feet, and the digging was through clay, roots and rocks and the rain didn’t help. The new men in the camp took turns with this miserable assignment so I had to do this for two miserable days. The yard foreman would appear at the top of the hole every once in a while with a big grin and each time he would ask the same dumb question, “Hey city kid, what’s taking you so long?” I just smiled back because I knew I would get out of this in two days and I didn’t want to give him any satisfaction. Actually he wasn’t a bad guy; big and tough but some sort of minister on his days off. A few days later the hole was completed, men and horses dragged the big outhouse on top of the hole, earth from the new hole covered over the old location and it was ready for service.

A sawmill's basic operation today is much like those of hundreds of years ago; a log enters on one end and lumber exits on the other end.
In the mills I worked in 1946/47 logs were taken out of the forest on horse drawn wagons and dumped into rivers and a lake where they were placed inside a boom of logs* and dragged by a diesel barge to the sawmill.
The first step when the log arrived in the mill was to slide the log onto a cradle to feed the big circular saw that sliced it into slabs for further processing. The cradle was on rails and slid back and forth with each pass of the big saw. A man stood beside the log and for each pass fastened it into position. He was called a Dogger. He was a quiet and friendly young man who was in the camp with his brother to save enough to buy some farmland in Quebec.
A few times during the season a log that had been part of the log boom and still had a spike in it went through the saw and it sounded like a war was on as the saws big teeth went flying through the air making holes in the roof and the walls of the mill. We all hit the floor when that happened and fortunately no one was injured.
A set of rollers carried the cut slabs over to the edger that was a flat table with rollers and a gang of saws that trimmed the slabs into lumber and bark. My job that first summer was to stand behind the Edger to receive the slabs from the circular saw that were typically 16 to 18 foot long. I waited until about half the length had cleared the edging table and holding the end firmly in one movement bounced the plank and flipped it over to a side table where a man was waiting with a trim saw to cut off the ends. Doing this for ten hours a day for two months added a lot of muscle onto my skinny frame.
My work station was facing the big circular saw that was only about twenty five feet away

At noon on my first day a seaplane was landing in the lake outside the mill. This happened often as mineral prospectors and foresters, who had heard about the great cook we had, decided to drop in for lunch. The Dogger by the circular saw was looking out the window at the plane when the cradle moved forward to the big whirling saw. He slipped and fell across the log; he probably shouted to the Sawyer but the screaming of the saws drowned out his voice and he wasn’t heard in time to stop the whirling saw. His last move was to desperately use his arms to push away but it was his last move as the saw cut him in two. (Here is a picture of him when we were out fishing a few days before the accident)
It was the worst thing I ever saw and 63 years later the horror of this image is still with me. I was in a state of shock and with the other men who saw it, panicked and ran out of the mill. Once outside I felt sick and just slumped down; others were retching. There was one man who was calm through it all. He was a student from Western University who had come up to the camp as part of a Frontier College volunteer program to teach many of these men to read and count. He had been a Spitfire pilot during the war so he had seen a lot. He went back into the mill and gave the man his last rites and then phoned the provincial authorities and organized some men to keep busy making a pine box for the body.
Another day off as police and other authorities kept the managers busy and then it was back at work again. The manager advised us that we had to work extra hard to catch up for the lost time. He was always announcing new production records being met so presumably it had something to do with his bonus objectives.


* A log boom is made up a string of logs fastened at each end with spikes and a chain between them. The boom encircles a large number of floating logs.

Working in Lumber Camps III - Summers 1946/47

Chapter III Working in the Cook House


Here I was sitting on the floor peeling potatoes beside another guy who was old enough to be my grandfather. A large pile of potatoes lay before us and 40 hungry men would be expecting them before noon. I was pretty glum. I had signed on at the camp to be a lumberjack and here I was relegated to the lowly role of Cookie. I had arrived in the lumber camp the day before and the camp manager took one look at my skinny frame and had decided this is where I belonged.

The cook who was my boss at first seemed dangerous. He was a large heavy set man with a ruddy complexion and threatened to skin me alive if I didn’t stop cutting off so much of the potatoes while peeling them. After several days I realized he really wasn’t going to skin me and besides I was getting better with the peeler.

It was a long day in the cookhouse, ten hours (and 6 days a week), the same as for the lumberjacks and mill workers except my day was broken up. The workers arrived for breakfast at 6 AM so I had to be up at 4:30AM to light the fire in the iron stove; This was followed by assisting the cook in preparing the porridge, mixing the pancake batter, preparing the tea and coffee and cutting up the bread and slices of fruit and setting the table before they arrived. And all of this while the chef kept threatening to have me boiled alive or cut up in the stew if I failed in any of my assignments.

Then just before they men arrived we prepared scrambled eggs, pancakes and fried bacon. The tradition in lumber camps was that there should never be any bare space on the table so that in addition to the things we prepared, the table spread also included pies and cakes from yesterday, jams, jellies and syrups, and cold meats. What they didn’t eat at the table was packaged up for a mid morning snack. A strict rule in all lumber camps was that there was to be no talking at the table; they ate in silence. I was told that the reason for this rule of silence was because discussions could result in fights breaking out. In any case, we in the kitchen liked the rule because they came in and ate and in twenty minutes they were out again and we could get on with clearing the table and washing the dishes. By 7:30 AM I was finished and had time off until 10:30AM when it was time to prepare lunch. All the meals were the same: huge, because the men faced 10 hours of hard work every day and burned up a lot of calories. The lunch period required 4 hours because peeling vegetables for lunch and dinner were part of it. Then another break until 4:30PM and finally ending my day by 7:30PM.

Time off for me was usually spent swimming, running across the logs in the log boom in the lake, fishing and reading. My partner, the old cookie, usually just sat and smoked or went off for a snooze. A nice thing happened on my first morning. I picked up a fishing line that was lying on the dock and lowered the line in the water just to see how deep it was before diving in for a swim. There was a sudden violent yank on the line and a mill worker seeing my struggle came running over to help me battle with a nine and a half pound pike. The men were impressed. I caught a lot of fish after that but this was the biggest and best.

My boss, the cook, had been a chef in a Hotel in London Ontario. He was an alcoholic and had decided to spend the summer at the camp to sober up. The problem was that the Cookies were instructed to collect any fruit juice and wild fruit and store it in a barrel to ferment. About once a week he would drink from this raw and bubbling brew and get roaring eyed drunk. He would then lie on a cot outside the kitchen and watch through the screen and sing and shout out his crude and violent thoughts. We liked him because he was actually kindly and gentle although when drunk he would do crazy things. For example he would often throw the slops out the door and deliberately splash someone walking by. He would then rush out and profusely apologize as though it was an accident. The men knew it was a game and forgave him because he was famous in the north for his cooking and for many of the men the food was more important than the money they earned.

After about ten days in the kitchen the cook became weary of my complaining about working in the kitchen and arranged with the foreman to have me transferred to the mill. I was delighted to start my new career.

Just an observation: I can't recall ever seeing a fat man in a lumber camp. Despite eating three large meals a day the physical demands of  a lumberjack's  way of life burned off all the calories. Compare that with today's sedentary way of life with machine aided work and hours spent in front of television and computer screens while consuming copious quantities of junk foods.

Working in Lumber Camps II - Summers 1946/47

Chapter II - My Night in the Outhouse with the Bear

We slept in a log cabin with about 10 beds lined up in a row. If a newcomer arrived with bed bugs or fleas, we all got our share of them and ended up in the morning scratching. The only solution was to pile up all the clothing and blankets and douse them with DDT. This got rid of them but these bites would itch for several days.

The toilet was an outhouse out back. It had 10 holes in a line and with no partitions. It was a building with a screen door and set above a big hole. The idea was that when the hole filled up you dug another hole and several men would pick up the cabin and move it to the new location. I was assigned at one point the job of digging the new hole but I will tell you about that in another chapter.

The morning visit before going off to work was a very social event with a full line up of men sitting there with most of them smoking. It was sort of a solemn ritual as they sat there in silence with rarely a word exchanged. The smoking at least reduced the smell from this open pit. Mosquitoes seemed to like the pit below so this added to the discomfort from the flea and bed bug bites. I being a city boy hated joining this line up so attempted several alternative methods to enjoy some privacy. The mill whistle went off at 7 AM and the men got out of bed at 6AM for breakfast and then used the outhouse for their morning crap before going off to work. I waited until the last minute, about 6:50 AM when most had left for work, did my business quickly and ran to the sawmill with about a minute to spare.

Another solution was to take an oil lantern and head out back when most men went to bed. One night as I sat there alone I heard a scratch at the screen door. I looked up and saw a big black bear - at least the it looked very big to me at the time - staring in at me,. The bear seemed very interested in checking me out and made a small noise, sort of a snorting sound or maybe it was heavy breathing. At first I sat there quietly not daring to move and hoping it would stop scratching at the door and go away. It was a pretty flimsy door so I didn’t want to excite the bear because it could have easily ripped it open with one slap of a paw. I didn’t dare shout but I finally worked up the courage to say very quietly, “shush!” This caused the bear to sit down and tilt its head onto one side as though it was trying to figure out what to do next. The bear just stayed at the door and it looked like it was going to be a very long night in that smelly outhouse. I just sat and the bear just sat as we stared at each other. I thought that if I looked away and stopped staring at the bear eye ball to eye ball it would get bored, but when I looked back it was still there staring. It seemed like forever, but finally it turned around and left.

I wasn’t sure whether it was outside and still waiting somewhere, but I finally cautiously opened the screen door and looked around in the dark. Hearing no sound I worked up my courage and leapt off the porch with oil lamp in hand and in record time was back in the bunk house. I did not attempt again to go to the outhouse at night and finally became accustomed to sitting with my work mates.

Thinking back on it 62 years later maybe the bear was just trying to be friendly, but I will never know.

Working in Lumber Camps I - Summers 1946/47

Chapter I Going to Work


In May 1945 Germany surrendered and four months later after America dropped two atomic bombs on Japan the war “to end all wars” was over and the troops were coming home. I was still in a high school at the time and in order to save up enough money to help my mom and dad pay for my education I went to work for the summer months every year as soon as school was out.

In 1945 while the war in Japan was still on I spent the summer working as a bellhop in a summer hotel in a resort area south of Montreal. I’ll tell that story later. My dad grew up in northern Ontario and with his dad (my grandfather) managed a lumber camp so I listened to many stories over the dinner table of his exploits there. I wrote a letter of application to the Pineland Timber Company and mentioned my father as a reference and a few weeks later a letter arrived saying I was accepted.

In June 1946 as soon as school was out I packed clothes and books into a large duffel bag and boarded a train to Sudbury where from there I took a milk train that would take me to my destination. They called it a milk train because in those days it would travel very slowly and come to a halt every few miles to deliver milk, local passengers, and the mail. The billowing smoke from its stack and a choo choo sound from the steam engine announced it was coming around the bend. Finally a loud blast from its steam whistle would announce its imminent arrival and then a few minutes later its subsequent departure. Sometimes the train would stop at a little station and other times people simply appeared out of the woods at the side of the track. Now there are roads in the area so the milk trains are gone.

I remember the train from Montreal was filled with soldiers back from the war who boarded when I did. They had just arrived from a ship that had taken them from Europe and they were finally going home. They were a pretty happy lot and time on the train was party time with liquor flowing freely. It was an overnight trip to Sudbury and I remember it was hot and someone had opened the windows before dropping off to sleep. Trains in those days had steam engines and the train left a trailing cloud of smoke rising high above it from the burning coal. When their heads poked out in the morning from behind the curtains it looked like a minstrel show because their faces were coal black. The laughter didn’t stop despite the dirt being everywhere.

From Sudbury I boarded the milk train that after several hours of start/stopping arrived at a bleak opening in the forest where I was told I had arrived. At the same time they unloaded a few milk cans and boxes and told me to wait for someone who would soon arrive from the camp. I sat on my duffel bag for what seemed a very long time while being kept busy swatting away the clouds of black flies that came to greet me. I began wondering if anyone would ever come and considered walking to the camp although the porter on the train warned me not to try it because he knew of cases where the black flies had driven men crazy in the woods. Finally a man with a bushy beard and big belly arrived in a horse driven cart, asked me to help him load up the milk cans and packages and agreed to take me to the camp although no one had told him that they were expecting anyone. It was a short trip on a logging road through the woods and even though it was the middle of June I saw some snow amongst the trees. An opening in the woods appeared and I was at the camp. It was on the shore of a lake. The camp consisted of a collection of log cabins, a saw mill, a big barn and at the foot of the mill a huge boom of logs floating in the water. A boom is a ring of logs attached together end to end and encircling a huge number of freely floating logs from trees cut down and dragged into the water*. I was immediately taken to a small log cabin office and left with someone I assumed was the manager. I gave him a copy of the letter I had written to the company. He claimed he had never heard of me but they were short a few people and I was hired on the spot. I was told to expect a working day of 10 hours for 6 days a week with Sunday off. My pay was to be 45 cents an hour with 1 dollar and 30 cents per day deducted for room and board. Overtime would be paid at time and a half **. No additional benefits were offered. He bluntly observed that I was a skinny kid and said I would immediately be assigned to the cookhouse. My business career had begun.

*Later I would take part in a game to run across the logs to see how far you could go before falling in

**When I finally started working in the mill I discovered that a significant proportion of overtime happened when a lumberjack went into town and got drunk and didn’t show up for work. The sawmill ran day and night and the foreman would come into the bunk house and inform me that I had to work all night as well as the day shift I had just completed. I wasn’t asked, I was told.