Larry "Tweeter" Felion is the old school. His family couldn't afford high school tuition, so he went to work logging with his father after the eighth grade. He's now 81 and is still logging, now with his brother and son. Here he tells writer and photographer George Bellerose about what's always on his mind when he's in the woods: safety.
We watched the older guys and learned from them. Nowadays you can’t spend a lot of time learning on the job. You can’t afford to.
I cut for Homer Mitchell when I was starting out and he’d say, “Tweeter, look at that tree over there. Put it right this way.” Well, how in hell did he know that the tree would come down that way? But it did. It always did.
When I was younger, I could put a tree anywhere I wanted, too. But as you get older your eye isn’t as good. Experience helps but you don’t have the same energy.
When you first work with a new logger you look for his mind. What’s he thinking? Does he have a knack for it? You can tell right off whether a new man is any good or not. If he’s not good you send him down the road. You’re doing him a favor because he could get hurt.
Some people think you have to be a big macho man to be a logger. My son weighs 280. Ronnie (his younger brother) weighs around 220. I’m about 240. But you don’t have to be big. No, you don’t. I have worked with a lot of loggers who weren’t big but who had a knack for it.
And you definitely can’t be a macho man in the woods or you can end up getting killed deader than hell. I remember looking at a job with Ronnie. A guy wanted us to cut some trees on a very steep side-hill, and they’d pull them up onto a shelf with a cable. I looked at the job two or three times and said it was too dangerous.
But the guy was macho and he cut the job himself. It was icy and the skidder went off the road, rolled over, and killed him deader than hell.
There’s always danger and the tree that you think is okay could fool you. You can cut a thousand trees and no matter how good you are, the next one can get you.
I like to fall trees downhill because it’s safer and it’s easier for the skidder to get them out. But sometimes you fall them uphill so they won’t fall so hard. It takes pressure off the tree, but they can still split, especially if they are straight-grained.
You’re always looking up to see what way the tree will go, and where it might get tangled up, and which limbs could come down and crack you on your head. So you have to have a path to run away from it. And sometimes you have to cut surrounding trees to keep the tree you’re after from getting hung up.
But you can still miss things. Years ago, I was cutting a big pine and didn’t see a grapevine about as big as a skidder cable at the very top. The grapevine caught a limb as the tree started to fall, and the limb hit my elbow and broke the trigger of the chain saw. The saw stayed wide open and caught me from just above the socket of my knee to a quarter of an inch below my heart. It took 115 stitches to sew me up. I got cut the 19th of July 1976, and went back to work in October.
Sometimes the butt and the whole tree will come right back at you when it hits the ground. Same way if the tree splits when you’re cutting it. The split can go halfway, three-quarters of the way up the tree until a big sliver of the tree breaks off. You could have a 35-foot piece that comes down at you.
Trees have a lot of tension in them. A small tree that’s bent over can spring up and break your jaw. So you cut it high first and take the tension off and then lower on the bole.
I used to back away six to eight feet once I had cut through a tree. I usually don’t run too far now when the tree starts to fall, maybe two or three feet. I figure I know where it’s going, and you have to save your energy for the next one as you get older.
It used to be when you were notching a tree you could basically fall it pretty easily in three different directions based on its lean. I used to pound a lot of wedges. Trees, even in the flat, will usually have a bit of a lean depending on the sun and wind. Today, my son with his tractor can push [the tree] anywhere I want. Pounding wedges is too hard on the body.
I don’t go around the frontside of the tree anymore except to make the first notch. That notch sets up where the tree will go. You don’t want to make a mistake with it. After you make that cut, never change your direction.
Don’t put in a second notch. You’re always better going with your first one. You can always make the first notch bigger but you can’t go around and start on the other side.
After I have my hinge, I’ll come a little bit to the side and bore to the halfway mark and then come in from the other side. You leave a little corner of wood opposite the notch, which is your trigger. When you cut the corner, the tree should go where you want.
For a logger in Vermont, a 21-inch bar is a good size; if you notch in from both sides you can handle a 42 inch tree. That’s as big as most any you run into today.
Some loggers cut solo. I don’t because it’s not safe to cut alone. Today you have cell phones, but they may not help much if you get pinned. I don’t care how many things you learn, there’s always one that’s going to get you. My thinking is that you should always have at least two guys. You can’t hurt two guys at once.