I’VE BEEN WORKIN’ ON THE TEE VEE

As a well-known couch potato overfed on a TV menu of drawing-room comedies and domestic dramas I’ve often felt a need to get a little roughage into my entertainment diet by picking up on some of the he-man stuff that becomes available at times on the screen. The Kalahari and the Serengiti and their indigenous wildlife are always good for this kind of thing along with the Himalayas, the Gobi Desert and other such places. The animals provide the entertainment and the humans are simply there to do the reporting.

Lately a format has been established in which the humans take center stage and the reporters are there to cover their activities, not those of other species. The best known program of this sort is The Deadliest Catch, the crab-fishing epic of the Bering Sea. If ever there was a formula for bringing in the stay-at-homes to participate in the thrills of living dangerously, this is it. They can experience the whole range of high risk and hard-rock existence in a half-hour in front of the tube. Where else can you go through seasickness, inhuman fatigue, frigid weather, high winds, cramped quarters, slippery decks, icy surfaces and baths of freezing spray, all chipping away at your will to live? You finish watching this in the same condition as the crew -- you need a drink.

Clearly, anything so unpleasant has to be popular. A spectator has to feel better after watching it. He hasn’t been through the wringer like the boys clinging to the decks. They’ve done it for him. For that we thank them and we hope they get those big catches they’re looking for and the paychecks emanating therefrom. They’ve got them coming.

“Catch” is a grabber all right, but there are other ways of sharing pain vicariously. My new favorite for this is the lumbering industry. Two TV programs about it have caught my attention. The History Channel is offering us Ax Men covering the Pacific Northwest while the Discovery Channel has American Lumbering covering the state of Maine at the other side of the continent.

The main differences between the sort of operations to be seen are (a) the size of the mountains in the West; and (b) the variations in the West where lumbering is carried out by helicopter and by boat as well as in the traditional ways of just attacking the trees with deadly weapons and waiting for them to fall. East or West, though, it’s the same job with the same hazards, “leaners,” cut trees that have snagged on standing ones and have the potential to fall on someone below; and “widow makers,” trees with loose limbs likely to do the same. Weather, of course, is always a hazard from possible wind, rain, snow or just low temperatures. Unlike the fishermen, though, the lumberjacks don’t have to work at night. That is, they don’t unless they’re driving down a mountain road with a fifty-ton load of cut timber aboard their eighteen-wheeler.

It’s all very spectacular, particularly when the helicopter is hovering high above the tree tops attempting to land a cable in a cleared spot below where some cut trees are lying waiting to be lifted up to a landing place. The ground crew connects the cable to the “choker” or collar they’ve attached to each tree and the lift is made. Three or four fifty-foot tree trunks hanging below a mile-high helicopter is a sight that sticks with a viewer.

Before helicopters the only way to get tree trunks out of hollows in the hills would have been to hitch them to a team of horses -- a big team -- or later, a big tractor, and haul away. It wasn’t done in most cases, just because of the difficulty of getting the mover into place, not to mention the problem of lifting tons of weight up a sixty or seventy-degree incline.

The rest of the operation is more conventional if anything can be conventional where huge machines stand on little hillocks and swing booms around in a full arc reaching out to clutch a pile of logs here for de-limbing and another pile there for loading on a truck ready to take them to the mill. It’s a sight to see, putting me in mind of one of my favorite sayings “I love work. I could watch it all day.”

Another spectacular operation is aqua-logging, carried on by a man named Smith and his son, who battle like Ivan the Terrible and his son except that neither one has killed the other, yet. When at peace they cooperate in raising sunken logs from a river, where they have been soaking for years since floating them to the mill from the forest was prohibited. Now the impermeable ones have been well marinated and are estimated by Mr. Smith to be worth $10,000 apiece. The accessible ones stick up out of the water and can be “choked” like the helicopter logs and then dragged ashore by winching -- a lot. The latest on this is that the state of Washington says it’s unlawful because the logs are healthy for the river, but if that’s so, why were the log floats outlawed? Strange legal events take place out west, I’m afraid.

In northern Maine where the Discovery Channel records the work of the seven Pelletier brothers, the hills aren’t as steep as in Washington, but the trees are just as thick and the roads just as slick. There are monuments along them to commemorate the drivers whose trucks overturned on the way down, but the trucks keep coming just the same. The key to the Pelletier operation appears to be the huge ten-acre utility building they’ve erected where repairs can be carried out on machines disabled while contending with the trees and the resistance they offer to their amputation and dismemberment. Trees don’t go quietly, as the brothers remark while looking over another $20,000 clearer-cutter being brought in for major surgery.

In spite of my admiration for work as noted above I can’t say that my enthusiasm has reached the point of obsession. I respect Mike Rowe, the man who stars in the “Dirty Jobs” series on the Discovery Channel, but I’m not intending to follow in his footsteps. For that you’d need boots anyway. No telling what that guy is likely to walk through.