Charlie Fisher

Charlie Fisher by Wendell Berry

Charlie Fisher is a veteran horse logger and timber businessman whose work joins forestry, local enterprise, family tradition, and a deep attachment to horses and woods. Raised on a truck farm, he worked in rodeos, dairying, and farm labor before learning logging and teamstering from an elderly dairyman. He later worked for years cutting and skidding logs, sometimes alone and later with his son David, who began handling a logging team at nine and remains his father’s partner in the woods. Near Andover, Charlie and Jeff Green establish Valley Veneer, a company combining horse logging with a sawmill. Charlie buys standing timber, marks trees for cutting, and oversees the crews; Jeff manages the mill and sells the lumber. The mill employs local workers, uses local banking, and provides a market for timber of many kinds and conditions. Its orderly yard separates logs by species, salvages usable boards from damaged or inferior trees, sells slabs as firewood, chips remaining waste for pulp, and sells sawdust to farmers for animal bedding. This full use of material enables the company to cut selectively rather than taking only the most valuable trees. Charlie’s three crews work mainly in small, privately owned woodlots. Each includes a cutter and teamsters using horses and logging arches to pull logs. Although Valley Veneer owns trucks and bulldozers for necessary hauling and yarding, nearly all logs are moved by horses. The logging arch lifts the front of a log, reducing friction and preventing it from digging into the ground. Charlie insists that a teamster must understand a team’s capacity, keeping horses steadily and properly loaded without either overworking or wasting them. Charlie prefers horses not because he rejects machinery, but because he has used mechanical skidders and judges horses better suited to his purposes. He and David own Belgian horses, compete in pulling contests, and take pride in their animals’ strength and training. Horses earn their keep in the woods, cause less damage than skidders, need narrower trails, do not bark standing trees, and leave shallower ruts. Horse logging also keeps more money circulating locally and costs less than machine logging, allowing a logger to cut fewer trees and choose more carefully. Before crews enter a tract, Charlie marks each tree to be cut. Except on land intended for clearing, he does not aim to take every marketable tree. He selects trees that are diseased, damaged, inferior, or otherwise appropriate to remove while preserving the forest’s ability to keep making wood. He opposes clear-cutting because it removes the larger trees that contribute most to growth and can leave a woodland without a worthwhile future harvest for decades. His aim is for a tract to provide income repeatedly, perhaps every ten to fifteen years, while retaining healthy trees for later cuts by David or another logger. A previously logged woodland demonstrates his method: its remaining maples are largely undamaged, skid trails have healed, erosion is absent, and the forest remains diverse, uneven-aged, and productive. Charlie’s practice balances the interests of landowners, crews, horses, the company, and the woods. He pays owners for precisely marked trees, plans for what will remain as well as what will be removed, and marks hazards for cutters with painted arrows. Landowners who want income without ruining the health or beauty of their woods seek him out, giving him more work than he can accept. At sixty-six, Charlie remains intensely occupied by his family, forestry, horses, pulling contests, coon hunting, and logging. Though he once planned for retirement, he says he is busier than ever because he loves the work.

By Wendell Berry · First published 2019 · Genre: Literary Nonfiction, Environmental Writing, Nature Writing · 3,471 words

First lines

I DON'T IMAGINE Charlie Fisher told me everything he has done, but in the day and a half I spent with him I did find out that he was raised on a truck farm, that for a while he rode bulls and exhibited a trick horse on the rodeo circuit, that as a young man he worked for a dairyman, and that later he had a dairy farm of his own. His interest in logging and in working horses began while he was a hired hand in the dairy. In the winter, between milkings, he and his elderly employer spent their time in the woods at opposite ends of a crosscut saw-which, Charlie says, made him tireder than it made the old dairyman. They cut some big timber and dragged out the logs with horses. The old dairyman saw that Charlie liked working horses and was good at it. And so it was that he became both a teamster and a logger.

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rural fiction · Kentucky · farming · small-town life · family · community · friendship · memory · aging · mortality · land stewardship · nature

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