Light on the Devils: Coming of Age on the Klamath

Piss-Firs

27 Piss-Firs liz and i rarely talked about our mother’s first husband, a man we could remember seeing only twice.Our mother hated him and had always been afraid that he would try to take us away from her. Many years later, we figured out that since this was the last thing in the world our father’s second wife wanted, it would never have happened. Both women, for different reasons, greeted our adoption by John Brannon with relief.And since divorce was a stigma in Hilt, Liz and I were more than willing to forget our former status, even though those first few years with our stepfather had been painful.We struggled to conform to strange new rules, and were punished with blows from stout sticks when we failed. Still, when I saw my revised birth certificate, I experienced a sense of disorientation. It proclaimed, as it always had, that I had been born in Boise, Idaho, and Mother remained my mother, but the man whose genes I carried had been wiped from the page.In his place was someone who had been nowhere near Idaho at the time. Not that it mattered in Happy Camp,where no one knew our history. As we slapped the falsified documents down on the counter in the principal’s office,we were—although we didn’t realize it—participating in the old western tradition of reinvention. Liz proceeded to make the most of it.Within a week,she had acquired a new nickname—Beaver— for the front teeth too big for her face.We hadn’t,in those days,heard of the word’s coarser meaning. In our new home, birth and marriage meant little. Ruth, a pale thin girl whose father Ralph worked in the Forest Service’s fire warehouse, told me quite casually that her father had been married “eight or nine times, I’m not sure.” Her own mother had simply left one day, and over the years her place had been taken by a succession of stepmothers. None stayed long. In Happy Camp, divorce was unremarkable, as were common-law marriages and illegitimacy. Liz and I could have claimed to be the love children of Johnny Horton, and except for the Light on the Devils 28 sad celebrity of the thing—the famous singer having smacked his car into an immovable object the year before—no one would have cared. The one social disadvantage we faced was not that Dad was not our real father, but that he worked, according to our schoolmates,“for the Piss-Firs.” “Piss-fir” is logger slang for the white fir, Abies concolor. Today, when anything that will make a board is valuable, white fir gets more respect, but in those days it often ended up in cull decks to be burned as trash. When freshly cut, its pale, brittle, sappy wood smells exactly like hot urine.The thin gray bark is easily scraped, leaving the wood open to infection by fungi,fit only for chips—and in 1962 there was no market for wood chips. No one seems to know when or where the name was first applied to Forest Service employees. The full moniker was “Piss-Fir Willie,” sometimes shortened to “Willie,” as in, “So, you’re working for the Willies now, huh?” Real men, we were given to understand, were loggers, or at least worked in a sawmill. But in Happy Camp, the lumber business was not, as it had been in Hilt,a secure job.Loggers made excellent wages when they worked,but winter snows or low lumber prices could keep them home for months at a time.Every January,bulletin boards around town sprouted desperate notices:“Ford ½-ton Pickup:Take Over Payments.”But the next spring, loggers and millworkers would buy new vehicles “on time” and take their chances. Our parents had paid cash for both car and pickup truck, and looked upon debt with horror. But Forest Service employees—at least the permanent ones, like Dad—had an extra measure of security: civil service retirement, health insurance, and disability payments if severe sickness or injury struck. The price of all this was less money per hour. Also, living conditions for many Forest Service families in boomtowns like Happy Camp were cramped.We had been lucky to find the blue rental: new hires were far down the waiting list for the few government houses available on the ranger station compound.We realized just how lucky the...