Cutting with the Big Boys: Fiset & Sons of Elk Lake
HighGrader Gal Goes Logging

text by Brit Griffin
photo essay with Louie Palu
(photos are not available online)
HighGrader Magazine January/February 2001

"Are you a Canadian?" she asked. She was leaning against the pool table, long blonde hair pulled back and a bit disheveled.
It seemed like an odd question. "Yes, I am."
"Great," she said, heading towards her boombox, "Then you won't mind some Nazareth. Americans that come through here, most of them never even heard of them."
I was just signing in at a small motel in Elk Lake, Ontario. Lisa, the proprietor, was busy fixing up the place. She had been painting the reception area a deep hunter green when I arrived.
On went the blasting sounds of 1970's metal-rockers Nazareth and out came the home-made hooch.
"Want some wine?" It was tempting. It was even in an old Tia Maria bottle. But I had to be up very early the next morning so I said good night. She said maybe tomorrow we could go out and watch the bears at the dump. She was a pretty cool motel operator. I made my way to my tidy little kitchenette.
I already had my steel toe boots and rain slicker all laid out, and if I could've pressed the damn things I probably would have, I was so excited. In the morning, come five am, I was scheduled to head out with a logging crew for a couple days. What more could a girl want? I fell asleep to the wailing of Nazareth.

I've always had a soft spot for big machines. I grew up thinking John Deere tractors were the ultimate. And I could never resist oogling the dozers along the edge of the highway. But I had no idea anything existed like the Timberjack 2628.
But there it was, working away in a cutover down the Beauty Lake Road. It's a fellerbuncher - a machine designed to cut and grab trees then stack them for the skidder that comes along to drag them to the roadside. Its huge sawhead sizzled through the trees, followed by that peculiar cracking sound as the trees sailed forward.
"The head on that saw," Jerome Fiset explained, "goes as fast as a bullet from a 30-ott-6."
Jerome Fiset is the oldest of the three brothers who keeps Fiset & Sons, a third generation logging outfit alive and kicking. The company was started by their grandfather, then bought out by Jerome's father and his two uncles. Now Jerome and his two brothers, Terry and Dennis, run the show.
Terry and Dennis are both licensed mechanics, handling the shop and expanding into some millwrighting. Jerome oversees the bush operations.
Jerome Fiset fits the bill of a big fella. Doesn't look like the kinda guy you'd want to tick off - there's no shortage of stories in Temiskaming about the Fiset brothers, like the one I heard about how when they were young, Jerome and his brother Terry rolled a pick-up truck on their way to high school. They simply got out, pushed the thing back upright and kept going - but in person Jerome comes off as very measured. Still, when he talks - you pay attention.
"Safety has to come first," he said, giving me the lecture he probably gives to every neophyte. "Always stand back from the saw head. If one of those teeth comes lose...." he paused for effect, shaking his head "though of course it won't travel as far as a bullet, because it's heavier."
Some consolation. The teeth on the thing were gargantuan.
"Ready to give it a try?" Jerome asked.
He had to be kidding. It looked like some alien transporter from War of the Worlds. Suddenly, that John Deere Tractor I drove around as a kid looked like a tinker toy. I was having my doubts. But Donald Racicot, the operator, waved me on.
"Come on up, you can cut a few trees."
Oh, well, okay, with an invitation like that, how could I refuse?
Inside, it was like a cross between a game boy and a lawn tractor on steroids. But it did seem a little safer from the inside looking out. Hmm. Maybe I could cut down a few trees after all.
The cab was remarkably quiet as the machine kicked into action.
"Cut as close to the ground as you can, but don't drown your blade in the stump, that's what you do when you want to stop cutting," Donald said. He showed me how the joysticks and pedals worked. But I was getting mixed up. And flustered. I always suspected these eye-hand Nintendo skills were more developed in in boys. Now I was sure. And the metallic whine of the saw head was jangling my adrenaline.
"This is hard."
"Tell my wife," Donald replied, "she doesn't think I do too much out here."
I made contact too far up the tree, tried to catch it in the the metal pinchers and missed, sending it up and over, to deliver a good wallop to the top of the buncher.
"Not bad," said Donald calmly. Was he being ironic? "Try again."
I was ready to bail on this tree-eating preying mantis.
"No, come on, try again. No one gets it at first, give it another try."
Steady she goes. I aimed the head down towards the tree and managed to saw it off a fair bit lower. This time I even managed to catch the tree. And then I did another. Yee haw.
Still, as Jerome explained before heading out, there's a lot more involved in running a buncher than just being able to cut a tree.
"The buncher operator has to be trained to recognize trees that may look green but actually have holes in them for woodpeckers or animals. They have to leave some trees for animals. In addition, they have to be careful so that it doesn't tear up the ground. All this work - from identifying a bird's nest to noticing claim post markings on a tree - has to be noted and left. It means a lot more care on the operator's part."
After letting me cut a few more trees, Donald complained that the terrain was too good here and he wouldn't have much of a chance to show off what this 65,000 pound techno-beast could pull off. But he was itchin' to get to it so we traded places, Donald taking back the controls and me jamming myself behind the seat.
He took a run at a hill just up ahead of us, cut and grabbed onto a few trees.
"Look back there," he told me. I glanced out the back of the cab. There was nothing but precipice.
It seemed like we were suspended in some mid-air carnival ride. It's this serious leveling feature of the Timberjack 2628 which means you can cut up steep hills but keep the cab level at the same time. The tilt was so steep it felt as if the whole thing was going to topple over backwards. Must have some kick-ass traction.
I kept my panic in check, but it was seriously disorienting. So I kept looking ahead until I adjusted to new lay of the land.
I asked Donald if he liked his job. Sitting out here in the bush, defying gravity, cutting down trees?
"Yeah, it's pretty good. It can get boring sometimes. But you're kinda your own boss, no hassles. You just do your job."
Is that it, the independence?
"Yeah, that's what I like about it."
How did Donald feel about the bad flack loggers receive.
"I don't understand it myself, everybody uses wood, come on. I'm just making a living out here."

Also making a living on that cut were the father and son team of Pete and Martin Verrier. They've run the skidders for Fiset & Sons for the past 6 years. The skidders grab piles of timber in a large clamp and then haul the wood to the roadside. The state-of-the-art Timberjack 560 skidder is slow moving and powerful so that it can haul timber over longer distances. That means fewer roads to disrupt the cut area and it saves on costs.
I was given a few lessons in handling the skidder and then was allowed to haul a few loads. Its a lumbering kind of machine, but it clambered over the mounds of timber as casual as a browsing Stegasaurous.
In fact, there was something strangely prehistoric about these machines roving over the undomesticated landscape - metallic timberbeasts out for a feed. The repetition of their movement, like the way the de-limber changes a tree into a T-Rex size toothpick, grabbing it in its long snout and snagging off the limbs and tops. And there's sort of a primal rhythm to the work itself.
But still, it's the high-tech mechanization of logging that irks many people. One of the big criticisms of modern logging operations is that big machines means more timber being cut in less time, which means fewer jobs in the community.
Jerome Fiset has watched the move towards increasing mechanization. He says the big machines/less jobs argument doesn't look at the whole picture.
"What's the alternative? Guys getting hurt?"
Jerome says that its tough to find young guys willing to do the heavy and dangerous work of unmechanized forestry. After all, they didn't call dead-woods widow-makers for no reason. His company made the move to mechanization in the late 80s because they just couldn't find the men willing to take the risks.
"It's a trade-off, I guess," he said. "Sure, you have less jobs but there's greater safety. And we're pretty efficient with the timber."
The crew might be smaller than in the old logging days but they remain remarkably self-sufficient out there in the bush. The machines are fueled right on site and guys from the company shop come out to the field to give oil changes. Other than major repairs, which are done back at the shop, everything seems to be right there in the field; loads of fire-fighting equipment; a nifty little supply building, with all those small cardboard boxes stacked with spare parts.
Some things I recognized, lengths of hoses, chunky bolts, but lots of stuff looked pretty exotic. They even had something called a mega-crimper. Until then I thought crimping was something you did to your hair. It'd be some hair-do that came out of that contraption.
During the time I was out on the Beauty Lake Road cut, I managed to go through the entire timbering cycle, from riding in the early morning with Luke in his pick-up, listening to the scratchy traffic updates (and lots of fishing talk), to the marking of line, through to cutting and hauling. The only machine I wasn't allowed to go in was the de-limber, a machine that would've been on the wish-list of every Spanish inquisitor. Jerome said it just wasn't safe, there wasn't room for two people in the cab.
But as a consolation I got to ride in one of the big trucks as they hauled the wood to the local mill. Pounding down those skinny logging roads, with the blonde bombshell on the air freshner in Gaston "Mona" Boudreault's cab swaying coyly from the rearview, was better than any tractor ride I ever had.
It's easy to see the attraction of the work. Sure, the hours are long, and you have to put up with the weather, but that's probably part of what makes it good work. You're out in the bush, watching the seasons come and go, the sogginess of spring and the brittle winter mornings, surrounded by the sweet smells of sap and diesel. Just the pick-ups, the machines, the bush and the sky.
This chapter is a shorter version of a chapter in a work-in-progress on wilderness by Brit Griffin.

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