CANDLELIT CHRONICLES: HISTORIC HAUNTS

March 12_RIP Merlin Olsen. Free Read_2083 word count

Merlin Olsen, former star of the Los Angeles Rams, actor and FTD spokesperson, has died at age 69, of mesothelioma, the cancer which is I think best known through advertising by personal injury law firms as a cancer caused by exposure to asbestos.





RIP Merlin!





The maternal grandmother of my grandson's kindergarten teacher had a stroke a couple days ago, and is not expected to live on. I asked my daughter the lady's age; she didn't know, but said the teacher is my daughter's age. I said, "Well the grandmother must be older than I then," and my daughter gave me a wise response:


"Mamma, even two year olds can have strokes."


Yes indeed, we live in a world bounded on each end of life by mortality. RIP.





Today's free read:

THE PHANTOM LOGGING OPERATION          





a Novel





by Archie Standwood





Book One: The Testament Corporation Chronicles





(because it's not just logging, after all)

Prologue:





The Phantom Northern Woods Tales are set in an alternate historical probability, in which The Northwest Territories were divided differently than in our own “consensus reality.” In this reality, The Northwest Territories became Wisconsin and Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio. Each existing state is called by its full name: “State of-” as in State of Wisconsin, State of Michigan, State of Illinois.


In The Phantom Northern Woods, there are three states where today only Michigan and Wisconsin stand: one state between them, like an inverted triangle, heavily forested, bordering Canada to the North-the State of Algonquin. It is this state which harbors the infamous “Big Forest.” In The Phantom Northern Woods, each existing state is called by its full name: “State of-” as in State of Westerley, State of Minnetonka, State of Illustrian. There are three states where today only Michigan and Wisconsin stand: one state between them, like an inverted triangle, heavily forested, bordering Canada to the North-the State of Algonquin. It is this state which harbors the infamous “Big Forest.”

         

Chapter 1

                   The faded-red 1928-style cab yanked behind it a long unwieldy flatbed of precariously loaded pines. Within the darkened cab, shadows shifted and drifted, fluttering aside at the last moment of view to reveal what I'd already suspected: the log truck possessed no driver. Both the driver's seat and the passenger side were empty, yet the headlights glowed like twin eyes of some bird-of-prey, and the truck barreled down my road, headed east toward Collins Junction. Well, I assumed the destination would be Collins Junction, the county seat, the only town of any size anywhere in our county. It was the only community still with a sawmill- even if it ran only three days a week.





                   I stood by the corner of my newly built log home, keeping I hoped well out of sight, peeking at the cab and praying that whatever was not inside would not see me. To the southwest, in the direction from which the log truck had appeared, was only the little town of Knox, really more of a village. A mile or two further back began a vast empty pine forest, extending way West and North, a combination of original timber and second growth from the logging boom of the 1920's, when timber was an extraordinary industry in our state. Back then the mill in Collins Junction had run six days a week, three shifts a day, so my Daddy had told me. But when the logging industry collapsed in 1932, the loggers took to riding the freights as hobos, or disappeared out to the Southwest, toward Arizona and California, hoping for work, or at least for heat, which is an event that occurs here only in July.





                    I hadn't realized any new logging operations had begun near The Big Forest; nearly as long as I'd been alive (I'd been born in 19-Ought-30), the old operations had been closed and by now, in 1957, all remaining traces were eradicated from sight by new forest growth and old roots. I didn't remember the old access road into the forest being locatable, either, so it was a mystery to me as to where this bizarre log carrier could have manifested from-or why. I decided to take a little ride out toward Knox, and see if I could find any new operations between there and my land.





                   I lived 12 miles east of Knox and from my house,  east and southward, Collins Junction was another 25 miles. Back nearly directly south was Rennald, but the turnoff for it was 5 miles east of me. Perhaps that strange truck was headed there.





                   Yet my amazement was not yet to end. As I turned from the southwest corner of my house, where I had just finished planting a row of perennials- the corner toward the Knox Road-I heard yet another loud, raggedy, engine approaching. Expecting that perhaps the phantom log truck had circled around on some unexplored back road and returned, I looked toward the east, but suddenly my attention was impelled in the opposite direction, from which the driverless log truck  had first appeared. Approaching was a square wood-sided truck, also red, paint faded almost to the point of exhaustion, engine laboring as if on a steep climb-although our road had no grade at all; and once again, this truck possessed no driver. Ah, but this one did include a passenger, a dark-complected male bundled in a dark green jacket, golf cap pulled down over his brow, apparently staring out the passenger window so that I could not see his face; nor really, did I wish to.





                   This was becoming way too spooky for me. My heart urged me to race back inside the cabin and lock all the doors and windows, but my mind insisted there must be a logical explanation, if only I could find it. I yanked the keys out of my left-hand jeans pocket and juggled them in the air for a moment, trying to decide which of my organs to heed. Finally, mind won out, so I jogged along the side of the cabin, across the back lot, and up to my '49 Mercury coupe, parked at the far end of the driveway from the road, just ahead of the property's wood lot. I jumped in, gunned the engine, and backed up sufficiently to turn around, then headed down the drive. Just as I came within sight of the road, I heard another motor approach, and hoving into sight was a similar square wood-sided truck, this one loaded with pulp wood leavings-the crown branches from cut logs.      A really upsetting sight in the cab met my eyes: this time there was a driver (the first had contained no one; the second no driver, just a passenger), a burnt husk himself-yet he drove, and he turned his eyeless gaze upon me, then suddenly floored his gas pedal and roared west in the direction of Knox and the Big Woods, belching gray exhaust fumes from the sawed-off tailpipe.





                   The afternoon had progressed from strange, to bizarre, to unbelievable. I didn't know whether to pull out on the road, turn west toward Knox and the Northern Woods beyond, turn east toward Rennald, or beyond, Collins Junction, or back up  the long drive, run inside the cabin, and lock the doors, pulling down all the window shades. I was beginning to wonder why I had insisted on moving here after my divorce in February.





          When my wife of 8 months had run off on me, claiming a blackjack dealer down in Vegas as her new toy, I signed the divorce papers the sheriff's deputy bought me, packed the little I owned into the Merc, and headed for the property my Daddy had left to me when he passed over in May of '41, that came fully into my possession two years ago when my Mamma died of a painful, lingering bone cancer. I hadn't ever used it, had not even seen the land, for when Daddy enlisted in September of 1939 in the Canadian Air Force, Mamma had carried me to Champaign, State of Illinois, where she still had people, and I had grown up there.





         I'd married late, at age 26, but I guess I still wasn't wise enough to choose well. I liked my mechanic job at Joe D's Garage, going to church on Sunday mornings, and a beer or two on the back porch on a Saturday evening. Leill liked the high life, or so she said, and eight months into the marriage she was off to Vegas like a shot. More power to her; I packed and went home to the land that Daddy had given me. According to what my Mamma told me before she died, I actually had grown up in this region: I wasn't quite sure where was my birthplace here, for Mamma had never actually specified. But she had told me often that when I turned two, Daddy had moved us from this section of the County down to Rennald. That was the year the Logging Operations here in The Big Forest had shut down. Daddy had logged in the eastern stretches of The Big Forest, for the Testament Logging Corporation out of Madison Mills, about 50 miles distant,  and it were a good-paying job for the times, least until the Great Depression rolled in with its suicides and bank collapses, and everything in our world just turned upside down.





                   As far as I knew, I also still held title to that little tract of land; Daddy had built a 3-room cabin on it just before the wedding, and Mamma had birthed me there. They had managed to hold on once the Depression started; Daddy was real skilled with his hands, so when the timber boom collapsed in 1930, he was able to stay on with Testament Corporation by working for them as a travelling maintenance man, going from site to site and keeping all their equipment in good repair. For some reason unknown to me, Testament did not suffer in the Depression as many of the logging and mining firms did. While other firms collapsed, or filed bankruptcy, or just disappeared, while owners threw themselves out of high office windows, or ate their pistols, or just disappeared, Testament Corporation persevered, even thrived, as if the Great Depression was instead for Testament an economic boom time. The timber operation near Knox in The Big Forest was closed, but the main plant in Madison Mills kept right on running, and Daddy sometimes had to go as far as Kenosha, over West in State of Wisconsin, to do a job of repair work. Most of the time, Mamma said, Daddy would travel down to Trent, or over to the sawmill at Collins Junction; about once a month or so he'd be called in to work at the Main Plant in Madison Mills, and sometimes he might be up there for a week or two. He and Mamma had given up the rural homestead in 1932, when I turned two and the Logging Boom collapsed, and moved to Rennald, to a house right at the edge of town that Daddy built himself (for he was handy that way, both with house carpentry and with furniture-making, and just with all kinds of woodwork. I often dreamed that if he had lived on and not died in the Second Hun War, he and I could have owned a furniture-making, cabinetry, wood-working business together, up here in the Northern Woods.





                   In 1936, Daddy was asked to move up to a full-time position in maintenance at the Madison Mills main plant. I was only 11 when Daddy died in the Europe War; he enlisted in September 1939, with the Canadian Air Force, right as soon as Hitler invaded Poland. I was 9 and a half then, and it was then that Mamma moved us to Champaign, since her folks had already both passed away also-though I did not know when, nor did I remember them, so I supposed it was before my birth.





                   Testament Logging Corporation sure was on my mind these last few moments, ever since I had seen that first bizarre log truck with its missing driver. None of the three odd trucks had any kind of markings or insignia; I had heard no sounds of saws or digging or axes; there was no reason to think anything was happening down to The Big Forest. No reason to think-yet I knew.  I knew.