In Missouri: Outdoor Work, Very Heavy Lifting

By Sue Hubbell

One evening soon someone is going to go out in his backyard and grill a steak over charcoal made from the blackjack oak Ray Tune cut this morning in the Ozarks.

Ray is a woodcutter who lives near West Plains, Mo. He is 58 years old. He is 6 ft. 1 in. tall, a handsome man with a weathered face and a small mustache. He is in physical trim that a weight lifter would envy. Ray cuts wood every day, stacking six tons on his truck and unloading it inside one of the kilns at Craig's Industries in Mountain View, Mo., before the sun gets too high. He figures he lifts 24,000 lbs. a day.

When Ray began work, there was a half-moon in the dark sky, circled with a ring of moisture giving promise of the humidity to come. The whippoorwills were still calling, although a yellow-billed cuckoo was sleepily experimenting with his daytime songs.

Ray was in the woods with his one-ton Ford flatbed truck by 7. He had with him his chain saw, an 18-in., yellow Swedish-made Pioneer, a thermos of water and another one of coffee. He was cutting wood on a ranch where loggers had taken the big timber. He had bought what they had left, tops from big trees and an occasional standing tree. He commenced work in a clearing the loggers had left surrounded by woods that cut off the breeze.

He cut several trees quickly and efficiently, not bothering with the notches a lesser woodcutter would have to use to direct their fall. He dropped each tree precisely where he wanted it, blocked up on underbrush, the butt end hinged by a sliver of the tree's outer edge. He cut the heavier ends to 16-in. lengths to make them easier to load. Branches and tops were cut longer. He spent no more than ten minutes on a tree and walked surely through the brush with his chain saw running.

He stopped for a cigarette and coffee. Has he ever had any bad accidents? "Well, some near ones." He cut off the end of an ear twice. And once a branch snapped back and threw the chain saw out of his hands, one of which was laid open; at the same time, he twisted to avoid the running chain and hurt his back badly. He wrapped up his hand in a handkerchief and loaded the truck, but he couldn't unload it because his back hurt too much. "Saw a doctor after I'd put up with it for a week, and he popped my back into place so's I was able to unload it." Has he ever had back trouble since? "No, never."

Ray started to load what he had cut. He had put stakes in the truck bed to hold the wood in place, and he built up the load in one corner to 4 ft. high. He tossed in 100-pounders or more not quite as effortlessly as matchsticks (he grinned after he chunked in a particularly big one, saying "Whew" in mock theatrics), but he was not breathing heavily.

The price he receives is low these days, $8 a ton, and he and his second wife are having a hard time getting by, but he has cut wood since he was 14 years old and can't see himself working at anything else. He and his first wife, who died a few years ago, had eight children, and they raised them on his woodcutter's wages. Back in the days when he began, he says, "There weren't nobody lower than a woodcutter," but today his skills are more respected, and he tells proudly that the bank was willing to lend him money to buy his last truck. "I got a boy, though, he's 23, and he won't cut wood. Says it's too hard." Ray paused, watched the cigarette smoke rise in the still air. "Course he ain't no bigger than a bar of soap neither."

The price of hardwood that Ray cuts is lower, in part because the kilns buy more of the cheaper log slabs -- the cutoff outsides of logs when they are squared by a sawmill into lumber. These, along with the hardwood, are charred in kilns, put through a hammermill and mixed with charred sawdust, coal, limestone, sodium nitrate, borax, wheat paste and steam, which turns the mixture into a slurry that is pressed into briquettes and then put through a drying process.

By 10:30 Ray had his truck nearly loaded. The temperature was over 90 degrees F. He worked effortlessly, cutting and loading. Sweat had soaked his short-sleeved plaid shirt, his jeans, and made a dark band around his peaked red cap.

He cleared a road for his truck through brush that he stacked neatly in a pile -- a future home for rabbits. He once found two baby squirrels while cutting, tiny blind creatures, and took them home to bottle feed. "Gentled 'em so that when they grew up they'd come when I called."

By 11:20 he was making the long drive to the kiln. He drove slowly to keep his tires from overheating under the heavy load. Ray is a careful man. He cuts carefully, loads carefully and carefully tots expenses. "It takes two-days work to pay for one blowed tire." And he blows them often, because he has to overload the truck to make the 60-mile round trip from home to woods to kiln pay. His chain saw cost $500, and he can only run it a few years before it needs replacing. He has just had to overhaul his truck's engine; that cost $1,400. "And anymore it takes $2 just to fill the chain saw with gas and oil, and I have to do that twice for each load."

At the kiln yard his load was weighed. It came to 12,400 lbs.

The kilns are mounded, cavelike structures of concrete, lighted by air holes in the curved roofs. There is a door at either end, and Ray backed his truck in one. Inside the kiln, soot coated the walls. It was damp and smelled of wet chimney. Ray worked fast, standing on the truck bed, stacking his load on a base left by another woodcutter, filling the kiln up to the ceiling 5 ft. above his head. His safety depends on how well the previous woodcutter stacked his load. Once, warned by a slight noise, he had just enough time to jump away from a wall of wood as it collapsed on his truck. "Could have been killed," he said softly.

By 1:30 his truck was empty. His work had earned him a little more than $48. He must take $6 to pay for the wood he had cut, $6 for gas for the truck and another $4 for the gas-oil mix for his chain saw. The balance had to be spread thriftily to cover all the ordinary living expenses a family man has. His wife's part-time job at a shoe factory pays so poorly she can't keep up expenses on her pickup. "When she was aneeding a tire for it a while back, I had to pay for it," he said.

Ray would drive home, clean up and go back outdoors to work around his ten- acre place. "Seems like there's something that always needs doing." He goes to bed early, usually by 8.

Some of the kilns at Craig's were already filled and had been lighted by packing kindling and gasoline-soaked bags under the air spaces at the bottom of the stacked wood. The top holes have been covered and the steel doors shut. Inside, the wood was burning slowly, turning into char. Thick smoke curled out of the pipes that extend from the floor vents.

"How hot does it get in there?"

"Hot enough to boil your spit."

It takes a week for the wood inside to char down to half its original bulk, and another week to cool. When the doors at last are opened, a work crew empties the kiln into a hopper with a conveyor belt, which dumps the charred wood into a waiting semitrailer that will bear the load to a factory, where it will be blended into briquettes, bagged and shipped to grocery stores all across the land.

For now, black clouds of dust billow out of the trailer, a dark contrast to . the lighter smoke from the smoldering kilns. The workers' figures are outlined in the gloom of smoke and dust. A few big trees, choked by soot, are dying at the near edges of the kilns. In the woods beyond them a red-eyed vireo sings.