HUNGRY FOR WOOD
by
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Perhaps my earliest recollection of being vested in God's traumatic world was visiting the Pacific Ocean, witnessing the thunderous applause of surf and sea that inflicted itself onto welcoming flat-handed beaches at our very corner of America, Northwest Washington. My love affair with the ocean began when I was a mere toddler, searching for razor clams to dig, hunting crab shell souvenirs, sand dollars and contorted driftwood riddled with toredo worm holes. I enjoyed the smell of salt and visions of white foam, skipping away from crumbling breakers, racing across gray, glistening sand, offering a momentary protective blanket like fresh snow. Wailing seagulls and legions of sand pipers, drilled and marched short of surf lines like Roman legions, pecking away at dwarfed shrimp. I remember bonfires and bare foot picnics amidst massive sticks of drift logs at the high tide line. Capping beach excitement were visits to Uncle Jack Rhodes, a beach hermit, blacksmith and logger, who devoted years to drinking up and then smashing up bars in Hoguiam. Uncle Jack frequently arrived intoxicated at our front door, snapping broad red suspenders holding 'tin pants,' only to collapse dead drunk on the living room floor. That is where he slept it off, much to the consternation of my steel-lipped mother. Uncle jack was a logger of bygone days: springboards and double blade axes, cross cut saws men and tools as tough as the giant Douglas fir, Sitka spruce and Western cedar that fell before their skillful, rhythmic steel blades. Advent of the chain saw sent Uncle jack into a euphoric "banana" land from which he would never return. For a bucker and a faller, the world came to an end. Yet, he is famous, even to this very day. Uncle jack invented the clam shovel and is credited with adding the "Westport Hook," a turn in the shovel at the top of the blade, that is still prevalent today seven decades later. Razor clam harvesting was an early industry and diggers, along with their prowess, became legends along the Pacific waterway. Most important was the shovel. Early blacksmiths bought garden shovels, then sawed off handles and narrowed the blades. A number of them became well-known as clam "gun" makers, but none surpassed the glory and fame of Uncle Jack. After creating "the hook," he manufactured and sold shovels at $10 a clip, a steep price indeed when lesser tools went for $1.50 each. But the Rhodes shovels were different; each one was registered with a serial number and carried a guarantee for life. Today they are prized by collectors. Uncle Jack owned a water "stomped" 12' by 12' frame cabin at Oyhut, a village among sand dunes overlooking the Pacific. He won fame also as a wet beach digger, a surf performer, as opposed to dry beach diggers. Skill and talent came in many varieties. Seeking clam holes in the surf was one, and Uncle Jack was a master at filling his bag while Mr. Drybeach Digger was still seeking an initial target. While Uncle Jack's clam guns were branded "fasted in the West," so was he as a digger. In those days, commercial diggers enjoyed the courtesy of their own section of beach. No one dug in front of them. Times change, however, and now clam seekers pour in from Tacoma and Seattle and turn beaches into virtual Oklahoma land rushes. Tradition, like Uncle Jack, lies smoldering in the grave.
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About the Book
"Hungry for Wood" derives its title from an Indian translation of the author's hometown of Hoquiam (Washington), a hamlet bordering the big tree country of the Olympic peninsula while being washed by the Pacific Ocean to the westward. Perhaps the story is both a romance of the sea and an epic that coincides with Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation," middle Americans, surviving the Depression, going off to win World War II and coming home, rolling up their sleeves and building the greatest nation in the world. Beyond the horizon of Hoquiam lurked a foreboding, militant empire of Japan that poised in 1941 an ominous invasion threat to the writer's homeland. Japanese bullets ultimately would strike down both the author and his father. Adventure anew came with the writer going to Alaska after the war, meeting newspaper investigative reporting challenges and recording exciting wildlife encounters with wolves, moose, bear, and even a friendly seagull across Cook Inlet from Anchorage at Pt. MacKenzie. And of course, then there was Mac, a yellow dog of the North.
About the Author
Perhaps the most appropriate single word to describe writer Herb Rhodes is the noun courage. At the age of ten, at the apex of the Great Depression, he and his unemployed father went into tall timber country of Western Washington to eke out a meager family living harvesting blackberries, picking sword ferns and peeling cascara bark. Tough gray days of work and rain, but the strenuous outdoor experience and poverty escapade surely tempered him for the pitfalls and ambushes awaiting in life's wings down the road. Hoquiam, an Indian word meaning "Hungry for Wood", was a bristling lumber hamlet of tooting tugboats, clanking logging trains and whining sawmills. Until the dark cloak of Depression descended. Huddled on the shores of a vast Pacific Ocean, Hoquiam feared invasion by militant Japanese forces with the advent of attack on Pearl Harbor. A recurring dream for the young Rhodes was of Japanese soldiers arriving at his home, ordering his family into the street and shooting his dad. Perhaps this was an omen since during World War II, Nipponese submariners machine-gunned his Dad in a lifeboat after sinking the Liberty Ship on which he served. Four months later Rhodes himself, a Navy gunnery officer with amphibious assault forces fell critically wounded while landing with Marines on D-Day at bloody Iwo Jima. After winning a communications degree at Washington State University, Rhodes came to Alaska where he won a reputation for courageous investigative journalism, purging Anchorage of a corrupt police force in 1948. Rhodes carried anti-corruption banners with his own newspaper, the Great Lander, for sixteen years, winning numerous awards. Four times he was a finalist for Alaskan of the Year. He established the first commercial offset rotary newspaper press in Alaska, a facility that paved the way for many "bush" communities to establish their own newspaper voices. In 1950 he cut native Spruce and built a log cabin to prove up on a homesite high atop a cliff looking over Cook Inlet. The cabin, still standing, is now a visitor attraction, redecorated and affectionately called the "West Rhodesia Hysterical Society Museum." Adventures with black bear, giant moose, foxes, coyotes, eagles, his own yellow lab dog, Mac, and a stunning Alpha wolf that emerged from the sea are "best memories" of West Rhodesia.