ON THE THIRD OF JULY 1997, my friend of thirty-eight years, Steve Short, and his eighteen-year-old nephew were finishing a logging job on the Klamath River in Northern California. A peculiar thing happened on a particularly bad stretch of road — they destroyed three of their tires on the way back from a timber falling job. That morning they had started work at dawn and had to return to finish up about two hours’ work of a falling job and were on their way out. Because the side of the river they were on was remote, the three flat tires meant they faced a twenty-mile walk back to a phone.
Steve knew the river well from drift-boat fishing for salmon and found a place nearby where he thought they could wade across safely, to get to a phone at a lodge on the other side. Steve had on heavy caulk boots as they started across. Caulk boots, called “Cork boots,” by most of the men who wear them, have rows of tiny metal spikes to keep your footing while walking on downed logs, and work very good on slippery rocks as well. The younger man had on conventional Vibram sole boots, which are sometimes like walking on banana peels, when used in a west coast river. The eighteen-year-old also had a heavy backpack with a Stanley thermos, and some logging gear.
The young man was Steve’s wife’s, sister’s son, and had been in trouble and Steve had taken him under his wing. He had been giving him good paying work and teaching him to work as much as teaching him a trade. Steve saw the boy twenty yards away and down river from him lose his footing and then was swept into the current and down towards deeper water.
Steve had been an All-American full back in 1967 at Del Norte High School, in Crescent City, California. He lost a scholarship to UCLA because of getting into some trouble, after high school and was now near 50 years old. He went after the young man in the same manner he followed his blockers at those Friday night games all over Northern California.
Steve Short was my best friend in the small Eagle Point School in a small logging town in southern Oregon from the 5th to the 8th grade. His family moved to Crescent City, California in 1963. Bill, his dad, bought a fishing boat and traded logging for Steve Wilson logging Company in Eagle Point for the open sea.
Every summer after that, I would go to Crescent City to visit; and Steve would return the favor and come to Eagle Point and stay with us on our little farm. We wrote letters and signed each other’s names as “Esquire” for our own adolescent self-appointed nobility and never with a thought of becoming lawyers because we thought we were appointed by virtue of adolescence to make up our own rules. We would get in mild trouble every time we got together. At sixteen, I remember going to a matinee in Crescent City California with Steve and seeing the Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, film a “Fist Full of Dollars,” and afterward buying hard and stale Paroudi cigars and choking them down and trying to look tough while driving through town in a 1955 Volkswagen.
Steve liked fighting on Friday and Saturday nights, he’d always win, and he tried to pick guys that either looked or thought they were tougher than him. When we were seniors, I had witnessed a bully beating up a boy half his size and then brutally putting the boot to him as he writhed on the ground in front of Jack’s Drive-up. Steve came to Medford from Crescent City with two friends in a ’63 Impala a couple months after this. They all liked Elvis Presley and had slick-backed hair and the three of them wore leather motorcycle jackets. Somehow, Steve found the Medford bully on his own this Saturday night; he may have played football against him that fall and carried somewhat of a grudge from one of the games. Steve beat him up at Jack’s in a manner similar to what I’d seen the bully do a couple months previous and then chased him in their fast Impala with black California plates to his parents’ home on the east side of Medford and screamed at him to come out and take another beating. I got the whole story shortly after it happened and having figured out who the victim had been I corroborated how richly he deserved it, and then we all drank beer in a motel room until the early morning. Just before dawn Steve and I went for a walk and began to follow a milk truck delivering milk to homes in the early morning hours to homes in west Medford. When the milk truck turned a corner, Steve nudged me, and we went up to the porch and Steve took two-quart bottles of milk—and passed one to me. The dawn began to light up the Medford streets while we sipped our milk, still a little inebriated and made a large circle back to the Motel and our lives jumped past adolescence and had started to become dangerous.
I’d been in the Army about three years of a four-year enlistment after High School. I had to go to the Presidio in San Francisco, and I went there with another guy who then wanted to visit a friend of his in Letterman General Hospital, which is at the Presidio, which is directly at the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge.
On our way up to visit my buddy’s friend who I did not know, one of the giant hospital elevator doors opened and there stood Steve in a hospital get-up. He saw me and broke into one of those big wide grins he used to have. He’d gotten hepatitis in Vietnam and got out of the country one month early. Steve had got drafted in 1969 and was then married to his high school sweetheart Susan. He then enlisted to perhaps ease Susan’s fear of a Vietnam destination, and had a recruiter talk him into being an Army aircraft mechanic servicing helicopters. In 1969, that eventually translated into the reality of being a door-gunner on a helicopter in Vietnam.
I got him out of the hospital and brought him, with his flight helmet, to our little apartment in Santa Rosa, where I lived with my new wife from Massachusetts.
We were about twenty miles from the base where I was stationed, an Army Security Agency base that went under the cover of a communications facility. In reality we monitored the Russian Navy’s communication in the Pacific. I’d spent most of two years in east Africa where we were on a high mountain plateau where the radio teletype signals of all of the mid-east could be monitored.
Steve told me of some awful things he’d seen in Vietnam. Susan, his wife, and Steve’s mother Rosie, a lifelong Sunday school teacher, came down and picked him up at my place in a joyous homecoming. I saw him very irregularly over the years after that, I’d find myself driving through Crescent City and I usually looked him up if the timing was right.
After the army, Steve became a timber faller in pretty much the last effort to harvest ancient redwoods. The notion of cutting down a tree that was alive and growing in a forest back when Jesus walked the earth sets off an alarm bell in not just a few. What men do for a living regionally drives an economy and economy and resources are always changing and often take all the resources too fast and then everything changes. Like the great whales that were struck in the 1800s, the large redwoods came down at the behest of commerce and supply and demand. Teddy Roosevelt came out to the Pacific Coast and to the Redwoods and gave a stump speech, perhaps literally on a stump and proclaimed the majesty of the great forest.
“It will take a thousand generations to cut them all down!” Teddy said. The chain saw had yet to be invented.
“Yep, I chop down the great big fat ones!” Steve would say with wistful grin, and his head cocked sideways. Steve had what was called a ‘pull show,’ where they’d use two giant winches to lower the great trees to a bed of smaller trees without damaging any of the valuable wood. Steve had each of his winches powered by powerful Ford V-8 engines. Steve would climb to the top of each great behemoth he was assigned, then attach cables from the winches and then he’d personally make an undercut often larger than an American, middle class living room. And with his giant McCulloch chain saw he would sever the largest tree the Lord ever designed and would gently lower each ancient giant down to the earth where we humans, like the eager Lilliputians we are, would go to work on them for the tiny pieces of wood that are now so valuable. In 1978, when they discontinued the model of chainsaw Steve used, the McCulloch Company manufactured the most powerful saw ever made at that time and had sold that model mostly for go-cart racing. Steve bought three of these engines before they became obsolete just for his special line of work.
Susan and Steve had three girls. The last time I saw them altogether they were three little blond dolls toddling around a living room of their suburban house a couple miles from the ocean in a rural area near the always misty Crescent City— all his girls are married with babies of their own now. Steve did well with his business and tried to get out of logging after he turned forty or so, but eventually went back into it, although the “pull shows” were over, after most of the “Great Big Fat Ones,” had been “chopped down,” with a lot of hand wringing when there were not so many of the big trees left. Steve went onto the traditional timber falling that took him inland all over three National Forests and farther away from home.
He worked hoot-owl logging jobs in the summer, starting work at 2:30 in the morning with a meet-up and all-night diner where they had breakfast with the lad he had hired, like he did that morning, to drive inland to remote sections of an ever-decreasing forested landscape to get started at dawn so enough work could be accomplished and the saws could be shut off when the humidity began to plummet—all to alleviate a fire danger because of the possibility that later in the day a when a tiny ember from a whirring piece of metal striking a rock like anger a spark and might smolder and then become a 500 to 5,000 acre wildfire of wrath.
The woods had been worked that way for half a century with less and less being left with each passing decade and the approaching millennium seeing this wide-scale livelihood that fed families and sustained local economies coming almost to a halt.
When I came to the southern Oregon grade school in the 5th grade, I was an orphan, being raised by a maternal uncle and his saintly wife, my aunt. I came into a rough and tumble little school where most everybody’s Dad, it seemed, was a timber faller or a cattle rancher. I think God sent me Steve for a friend. I had no friends, and Steve became the best one I ever had to that point in my life. As the skinny little “four-eyed,” kid I was, and because Steve was my friend, no one dreamed of picking on me. When he was in the sixth grade, he beat up an obnoxious high school kid in front of the little store on Butte Creek where we bought our candy.
We had no particularly high art or hobbies, but model cars, hunting and fishing and bike riding were the holiday arts that we practiced well. When we came of age things were less innocent. Neither of us at that time could be confused with saints.
Decades later, the death of my good friend occurred on a July day, the day the before our independence celebration in 1997, a woman standing on a rock above the lodge side of the Klamath River, observed the two loggers trying to make it across the river. She saw Steve and his nephew’s attempt to wade the river, she saw the boy splash and struggle and swept downstream to deep water with the current, then the boy went under in swift water and saw the man upriver go after him.
There was no sight of either of them for what she later described as several minutes, and then the younger man came out of the water with a mighty force he made it to shore without his backpack. It is assumed that Steve got to the lad and got his pack off of him on the river bottom and then took on water and the weight of his boots kept him from making it the extra feet to the surface for a burst of air.
This happened around nine-thirty in the morning. Steve’s wife Susan heard about it and shortly got someone in a jet boat to roar up the Klamath River to the accident scene. The Sheriff’s Department and Susan and Steve’s friends searched for his body until early evening, when divers finally found him on the bottom of the river in twenty feet of water. The Deputies tried to make Susan leave, but she would not, and stood by while they recovered Steve’s body. Susan then cradled Steve, her husband of thirty years, in her arms in the Sheriffs jet boat all the way back down the river, with the sun setting down to darkness and passing by the great trees they’d loved and lived in, until the boat stopped with its sad cargo and the tide water mixed with the fresh water from all north California and central Oregon.
Steve Short was the finest man, Christian or otherwise, I had ever known. Sadly, to knock my own religion the finest examples of humans in my own life have not always been Christians. I truly know, I do truly know someday I will see him again and he will break into one of those big wide grins he used to always have.
After my divorce, Steve and I exchanged a lot of phone calls. We’d talked about some future fishing trips that never happened, but mostly we talked of God a lot, and how He’d changed both of our lives and how He’d been there all along when we were just struggling through life thinking it was something we were carrying on by our own strength. I do not know why He took him home. But Steve used to talk about knowing that being in heaven was 100 million times greater than being here. However, here he lived finally as an example of what Jesus described as there being no greater love than giving your life for your friends.
“I command you to love each other in the same way that I love you,” he’d said in the Gospel of John. “And here is how to measure it—the greatest love is shown when people lay down their lives for their friends.”
James Ross Kelly lives in Northern California. Mr. Kelly is a U.S. Army Veteran (1967-1971), Mr. Kelly has been a journalist for Gannet, a travel book editor, an environmental documents editor for the Forest Service and had a score of labor jobs — the in-between, jobs you get from being an English major.