Three cheers for the chainsaw

By Rick Attig, The Oregonian  

 

 What's a Timber? Portland's few props to Oregon's logging history

My grandfather surely kicked more butts than soccer balls during his lifetime, but if I could have him back for just one night, I'd take him to see the Portland Timbers.

Lou Morgan was a logger, a cusser and a drinker. He'd fit right in to the Timbers Army, at least until someone urged him to sing or put on a scarf, and then he'd let out that roar, the one I remember from the Christmas when my young cousin accidentally dumped his piece of cream pie into grandpa's open silverware drawer.

Nick Hernandez / OregonLive.com 

 

Grandpa Lou had a big voice until emphysema clenched it into a wheeze, but I can hear it when Timber Joey trots through the stands in his suspenders, gunning his chainsaw, or when I see the tools of my grandpa's trade, the double-bladed axes and chainsaws, slung over the bare shoulders of the pretty young women and tattooed men on those billboards around town. I imagine him bellowing, "What the (blank) is a Timber?"

I'm not sure, grandpa. If the name is a reference to all the great forests of the Northwest -- the "timber" -- what is it then with all those axes and chainsaws? I think a "Timber" is someone willing to pose with an axe or a chainsaw, and a "Logger" is someone willing to actually use them. It's so much easier to give the former a standing ovation.

I confess to being overly sensitive about this, but I descend from four generations of Oregon woodsmen, loggers, millworkers and carpenters. Over the years I've seen their occupations, their contributions, the stuff of their lives, politically attacked and socially devalued. My grandpa and other ancestors were real people, not mascots. They were loggers, not Timbers.

This is not meant as an attack on Portland's soccer franchise. I love the atmosphere at Timbers games, the scarves, the waving flags, the singing, the passionate fans who refuse to sit down. Still, it's striking, in the middle of a decidedly anti-logging town, to see Oregon's timber history used as a theme, its tools deployed as totems.

It's at Jeld-Wen Field where you can clearly see and feel the deep ambivalence that many people, especially in this city, have about Oregon's timber history. It's in this place known as Stumptown that 18,000–plus people roar every time a soccer mascot revs his chainsaw, while the silence in this city around the slow death of the modern timber industry is deafening.

I know it's not fair to load all this onto a soccer team. Yet I can't help but wish more people in those crowded soccer stands and all throughout this city understood what those chainsaws and double-bladed axes really represent, not just to Oregon history and development, but to tens of thousands of rural families still trying to carve out a living in timber country today.

It'd be something to bring Grandpa Lou to the next Timbers match, and follow him to our seats, him in his cracked leather boots and steel-gray crewcut. I'd buy him a beer, or six. I'd like him to smell the blue exhaust when Timber Joey strides by our seat with his chainsaw. And most of all, I'd like to show all those people a logger -- a real one -- and ask them for one last cheer.
--Rick Attig