Pushbutton Logging

Amid national excitement over gushing oil wells, ore-rich mines, expanding factories and mammoth power projects, many Canadians tend to forget that their biggest industry is still based on the nation's trees. The output of Canada's pulp and paper industry last year hit a walloping $1 1/4 billion. In domains now pushed clear up into Arctic watersheds, the industry pays more workers more wages, and operates on more invested capital than any other business in Canada. But in the new Canada the venerable giant, in pace with headlong progress, has gone streamlined.

Gone are the legendary draveurs who. jeering at death as they twirled long pike poles like batons, rode great logs down white water to the mills. In Quebec's 325-mile-long St. Maurice River valley, scene of the world's biggest log drive each year, the treacherous rapids have disappeared. Tamed by six major power dams, the turbulent St. Maurice has subsided. The romantic log drive of old has given way to a largely mechanized operation.

This week the "sweep" or cleanup stage of the drive was ready to begin on the lower St. Maurice. At some dams, main gates were wide open. Snorting diesel tugboats spasmodically shoved log masses through the sluiceways. Helped along by current and wind, the coeur de bois (i.e., "heart" of this year's 770,000 cords of pulpwood) slowly moved toward the St. Lawrence.

Boss of the lower river for the three companies that combine St. Maurice operations is tough, Norway-born Steinar Jenssen, 62. The wood drifts into his bailiwick at the town of La Tuque. Aided by ingenious, mechanical sorting gaps, Jenssen's men will drop it off at the proper owners' mills--yellow-daubed four-foot logs for Brown Corp., swastika-stamped four-footers for Consolidated Paper, twelve-footers for Canadian International Paper.

Once, the sweep meant breaking up log jams with axes or dynamite. Today, logging's storybook excitement and din is again lost to unspectacular efficiency. If wood piles up behind rocks, or wanders high and dry up on the river bank. Jenssen will casually ignore it most of the summer. At length he will signal the gate-tenders of the great Gouin Reservoir at the St. Maurice's headwaters. Switches will be flicked. A flood of extra water will dissolve the jams and rush the beached wood along on its interrupted journey. Pushbutton logging is here to stay, but the dead yesterday of whiter water, bigger jams, geysers of dynamited wood, is still recalled fondly by a few oldtime draveurs. Murmured one, with fine contempt: "Today, it's like picking flowers."

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