If I hadn’t met Dick Carlson in person, he would have had to come to me from the pages of a novel.
He was close to 70 when I knew him, with a shock of unruly silver hair, eyes like sapphires and a rocking gait from a lifetime working on uneven terrain. Leather boots, a flannel shirt, jeans and suspenders filled out his signature look, topped by a Greek fisherman’s cap when he was feeling jaunty, which was often.
Dick was an orphan, a logger, a carpenter, a labor agitator, a Pearl Harbor survivor, a Democrat, a Sierra Club member, a regular at political demonstrations, and a rounder. While logging, he walked away from two helicopters that crashed with him on board. “I can’t explain it. For some reason, God always had his hand right here,” he said, clutching his own shoulder.
In the winter of 1983-4, Dick was patching together fleabag hotels in downtown Seattle for wages and talking about working just one more season in the woods.
He woke at daybreak each morning, drank one cup of coffee, finished the crossword in the Seattle P-I, and tended a garden outback of the boarding house he and I shared with five other strangers in Madrona.
Owing to the sack of doughnuts I left on the kitchen counter each night (a bonus from my job on the closing shift at a Seattle Center House bakery) I was a popular tenant. Besides for the doughnuts, Dick may have favored me because I was, like him, not tied down.
The Northwest timber industry was suffering a depression and his last woods boss was washing dishes at Rhonda’s Country Café, but Dick was still hopeful. He loaded up his GMC pickup truck with saws, caulk boots and hard hats and we ventured out into southern Washington looking for anyone needing help bringing down trees.
I hadn’t so much as started a chainsaw in my life, but Dick wasn’t daunted. “I’ll tell them I’m the faller and you’re my bucker. You’ll pick it up quick enough.”
I brought along a pile of resumes we dropped off at small newspapers along the way. I was casually looking for work as a reporter but my lack of experience doomed my job search as much as my soft hands and Dick’s grandfatherly countenance hobbled ours.
We rattled through the logging towns between Seattle and Mount St. Helens that April, sleeping in the truck bed and haunting greasy spoons for word of work. Dick would stop at pay phones to ring up old friends, but got no offers.
Pitching us to a logging operator we met in a parking lot who was skeptical of our chops, Dick said, “I’m as strong as I ever was and I can still run 100 yards in 15 seconds.” When we got back to the truck, he was regretful. “I shouldn’t have told him I can still run that fast. That was a lie.”
We were both striking out but you wouldn’t know it by Dick. He was out on a jaunt in the springtime, seeing familiar country.
At Longview we stopped at a pile of timbers stacked on the banks of the Columbia, each log about three feet in diameter. I photographed him beside the pile, his arm up to show scale, and asked him what it was like to fall giant trees. “You know,” he replied, “As I was cutting on them, I always wondered if they could feel it.”
We went on to Mount St. Helens to drive along the Tootle River and see those same giants blown flat like matchsticks by the mighty eruption four years previous.
At an intersection somewhere around Chehalis, a pretty blonde in a sedan turned left in our direction, running a red light. Dick caught her eye long enough that she was blushing as her car passed alongside our pickup. “Well, aren’t you something,” he muttered.
One morning at a restaurant up in the hills, I gave up on a pile of pancakes that arrived about twice as tall as I expected. “I can only do so much for you,” he said. “If you can’t get through a stack of pancakes, you’ll never make it in logging camp.”
When the scenery got thin on that trip, Dick’s story came out. He was from Idaho and was raised by his grandparents. His own parents he never knew. He’d married once but his wife fell ill and died young. Starting years before the chainsaw, he spent every summer in the woods, where he also made trouble for logging companies by agitating for better health care and wages for loggers.
His strategy was to first find out how much in wages and benefits were going to the people sitting in the timber company office, cozy and safe. His most recent row was against a community college whose workers he was trying to unionize. The college president broke some laws to defeat the vote on forming a union and when Dick called him on it, the president leaned in and whispered, “Carlson, we don’t always fight fair, but we don’t lose all the time, either.”
Dick found great humor in the expression, citing it for every new revelation of official corruption on the news.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed, Dick was at nearby Schofield Barracks as it was strafed by Japanese fighter planes. When I asked him what that was like, he said, “It was great. The Japs machine guns opened up a Quonset hut full of Coca-Cola. We got to drink Cokes all day.”
He spent his Army hitch on Christmas Island after the fighting there ended. It was quiet but also painfully desolate of women. Danger is a small price to pay for excitement, he told me.
At the end of our trip, Dick drove me around Seattle, showing me his favorite public art pieces, “Waiting for the Interurban” and the troll under the Fremont Bridge.
A few weeks later during the Democratic presidential caucus, Dick, me and the rest of the boarding house voted to send one delegate in support of George McGovern. It was perhaps my proudest moment as a voter. The rest of the neighborhood, mostly Blacks and Yuppies, split between Jesse Jackson and Gary Hart.
Dick went back to carpentry and I shoved off for a job on a cannery slime line in Alaska. I visited him a few times on trips south, just to hear to him muse about the state of the world and chuckle about it.