TRUCKSTOP - By Rich Tatarka

       A great deal of time and effort is spent on making sure the typical day of hauling logs goes somewhat smoothly. From the few extra parts you carry to the simple act of keeping an eye on the weather. Avoiding the “Grievous Moments” and “Mass Crisis” situations is critical, but no matter how well prepared you are for them, they happen anyway, often times earning you the coveted “Herbie Award”. (Thus, the reason why one keeps his grievous Moments to himself…) So, something like a blown hydraulic hose while loading a long way from town would be considered a “Grievous Moment”. Unless you don’t have that particular spare hose in your toolbox, then it becomes a “Mass Crisis”. Hard to run to town for parts when the truck is in loading mode when it breaks… And who hasn’t had the Grievous Moment of being the last truck out for the day in a raging snowstorm and you fall off the road. Then there was the day I was loading logs and for some reason my loader started acting sluggish. About then I noticed I nice river of hydraulic oil running out from underneath the truck and down around the switchback I was loading on. And of course, I’m in the driveway of a big fancy house on an urban interface job. Luckily, I had my trusty MLA Spill kit (although 9 more would have been nice…) and contained some of it. It was also winter and the logger I was hauling for was able to push snow and hydraulic oil into the brush pile. I had one rather major Mass Crisis in the motel parking lot at the big casino south of Coeur d’Alene. I was loaded with some real long poles and parking with loads like that was always a challenge. I had stayed there before and didn’t have any trouble at all. Well, this time I pulled into the wrong parking lot, and I couldn’t get back out because this particular lot was full of cars. I figured that they were employees of the Resort and they surely would be gone when I got up at 3 to leave. Nope. Lot was even fuller than it was when I parked. I looked the situation over and decided to try backing out. So, I would back up a ways and get out and look for where I needed to go. Walking back to my truck I literally bumped into a large security guard. Scared the crap out of me. He had been watching me for a while and actually came to help me back the rest of the way out. Half an hour and a half a mile of going backwards later I had successfully averted that Mass Crisis… Yay.

     Moving on, I was thinking the other day about the old Executive Committee meetings I was a part of. They were a two-part meeting with a dinner on Friday night and the meeting on Saturday morning. (It was on one of these Friday night functions that I learned the hard way not to try and drink more whiskey than Charlie Newton…) Sometimes at the Friday night barbeque at MLA headquarters there would be over 30 people what with the Executive Committee members and their significant others. After dinner we would sit around the big table and share stories. I think this was about the time that the Kenny Swanstrom “Slide Show” first appeared. Kenny is our ALC Representative and he would travel all over the states to their meetings. Those meetings were loaded with field trips to all sorts of different places and Kenny took lots of pictures, which he shared with us at those Friday night barbeques. Also noted was that a few of the boys would show up straight from work still wearing their work clothes. Rick Smith was one of them. I still remember the loggers’ tape and the log counter attached to him, and his corks parked out by the front door. Then on Saturday morning at 8 am sharpish, the meeting would commence, everyone gathered around the big table. Heck-a-Jake off to the side doing his crossword puzzle ready to render legal advice. Occasionally he was joined by John Boy doing his crossword puzzle too. Sometimes Uken would show up and do Uken-ey things…  And of course, Mr. Olson and Coleen at the head of the table guiding whichever president it was at the time through the meeting. The number crunching extraordinaire Vickie Heilman started things off with the accounting of every penny report…  What with this “Profession We Call Logging” being so contentious, topics for discussion at times was rather brutal. Our group health plan was a big one and it seemed like premiums were always going way up, and we had to find a way to take some of the strain off our membership. Coupled with dwindling log supply, dwindling places to take our logs, it was sometimes not a fun meeting to be at. Yet sitting there in that room with Kenny Swanstrom, Rick Smith, Paul Tisher, Brent Anderson, Charlie Newton, Dave Cheff, Kevin St.Onge, Senator Crismore and of course our fearless leader Keith Olson, you somehow knew that whatever happened, it was going to be alright.

     That said, I must close now. Before I do though I need to mention that I’m now going through a medical type of mass crisis, and the next few months aren’t going to be much fun at all… So, the goal for now is to still be around for the MLA 50^th Anniversary Annual Meeting in Butte… Time will tell, I guess…

Keep Hauling…

That is All.

Rich T.