Nothing cuts it like logging for Roy Bowen

Originally published Saturday, August 14, 1999

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Roy Bowen might be a little out of place in a china shop, but the 71-year-old Buckley logger makes one helluva Bull of the Woods harvesting or hot-decking timber.

That apt title, bestowed on Roy at this year's Buckley Loggers' Rodeo, fits him almost as well as the XXXL bright green "Bull of the Woods" jacket that came with the honor.

But fancy duds pretty much stay in the closet of Roy's home out on Entwhistle Road East, because he's a work-clothes kind of guy. "I've tried retiring -- twice -- and it plain don't work for me!" These days, he "does a little work" with grandson Bill Ratliff on a siding near Snoqualmie.

"I can't keep him off a job so I might just as well let him work when he shows up!" said Bill with a smile. He could do worse: His granddad helped him and dozens of other local loggers get started in logging over the years and there isn't much about logging that Roy Bowen doesn't know or can't do.

Which is one reason a loggers' rodeo committee awarded Roy the Bull of the Woods title . . . although it usually goes to a retired man. "I've worked more'n 40 years in the woods and I've told Bill that they'll hafta haul me out of the woods.

"You're more likely to get killed logging than in almost any other job you can do, especially if you're not careful. But there ain't nothing as good as being out there and breathing the good air and coming home knowing you done a good day's work."

At 5-foot-8 and almost that far around, with a crease in the side of his skull below the crew-cut snow line and a nose that lost a fight with a tree, Roy looks every bit the part of a Bull of the Woods.

What's hurt him more than any work accident was losing his wife of 41 years. She was "Grace" to some folks but "Shorty" and "the most wonderfulest woman that ever lived" to Roy, and "Grandma Shorty" to many friends and family. And there was so much family hereabouts that this section of Entwhistle Road East used to be called "Bowensville."

Roy's daddy moved his family from Colorado -- with four boys and four girls -- to Pierce County after seven straight years of drought in the Dust Bowl days. The family never strayed far from the Sumner-Bonney Lake-Buckley area, and Roy left school to get an early start in the local hops field where his father ran a crew.

His young life was a hopscotch pattern of farm work, logging and sawmill work all over the Northwest. He can't remember the names of all the logging contractors and lumber companies he's worked for in the past several decades, but he remembers the job that started it all.

"I hired on with a guy who was using a blind mare to skid logs. I showed up on a Monday and he wasn't there, but I fed the horse. After feeding her about a week, some guy shows up and asks about the job and I told him the man had called and said he was quitting the game. I inquired about taking over the cutting contract and he said it was all right with him, and they sent me paychecks regular during the job."

Roy Bowen started logging when the basic tools were two-man saws and axes. He used Belgian draft horses to skid the 20- to 40-foot sections of fir and hemlock to sidings. Family and friends, including his two sons, Jack and Bill, and Tommy Ratliff and Dan Arnst and Sonny Frick and many other local men broke into the logging game under Roy.

"At one time, there were four generations of Bowens and Ratliffs and other branches of the family all logging with Grandpa," said Bill Ratliff. The uncle who originally lured Roy's father here had 12 children. Roy was one of eight children and he and Grandma Shorty had two sons and a daughter. Add to that 10 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren - most living in the area and you have something of a Buckley dynasty.

The fact that Roy has a chain saw on his kitchen floor and a portable electric generator in his living room doesn't mean he's taken too many snag hits in the head. "People just come along when I'm gone at work and they cut the locks on my sheds and take anything that's not nailed down!" he said bitterly. He's lost a couple of good power saws to thieves.

The first power saws in the woods, heavy two-man rigs called "malls," were considerably harder to use than the first Homelite power saws, Roy recalled. But even the best brand of power saws these days "last only about six to nine months with full-time use in the woods, before they need major work, and you keep buying new and keeping your repaired one in reserve," Roy's grandson said.

As he grew older, Roy once tried retiring and working closer to home in a septic-system business. That didn't last long before he was back in the woods. Another time a chronic dizziness problem forced him into retirement, but that disappeared when he had all his teeth pulled, Roy said.

He can't recall the logging accident that creased his skull in the days before hard hats were required in the woods. His nose was reconstructed by a tree that was pinned down like a piece of spring steel and knocked him across a logging road when he cut it.

Another time, he said he recalled the lyrics from a funny old song when a dead treetop fell out of nowhere and hit his head, opening a huge gash above his eyebrow and driving him to his knees. "And my brother-in-law came up and said: 'Are you hurt?' and it was so damn funny we all started laughing!"

That's the kind of give-and-take thinking that gets you through a day and a lifetime in the woods. Roy has seen friends killed in logging accidents, and he's seen wildlife and scenery most of us never get close to.

Most work for small logging operations these days involves thinning and hard-to-reach timber that other, larger operations don't want to touch. Old-growth timber, when you can cut it, is almost too big and rotten inside to be good for anything but pulp.

Roy Bowen is the kind of old-growth you don't much find in set-asides or local historical society museums, because he's still out there working at what he's loved to do for the past half-century.