For a few months a couple of years ago, my daily dog walk usually involved joining two old-timers — Lloyd “Sawdust” Wilkins. then 82, and his blue-heeler Cindy, who was about 70 in dog years.
Sawdust walked his daily mile — it was on doctor’s orders — slowly with a cane, but he was tough. On subfreezing mornings, I’d be wrapped like a birthday present, while he wore a light jacket, a ball cap with no ear flaps, and no gloves. He seemed immune to cold. And while his Cindy and my Bodie chased each other around, I learned a lot from Sawdust.
He got his nickname because he was a lumber man from a timber-felling family. He grew up in logging camps, back when every little town hereabouts had a sawmill or two.
One day, there was a story in the local paper about the Forest Service trying to close some old logging roads — some of which he’d built with a bulldozer 40 or 50 years ago. How’d he feel about that? “Those roads were quick and dirty. They did the job, but the job’s done. They ought to have been closed the day after we got our cut out.”
Another day I was curious about biofuels because I’d just read that Gilpin County was going to heat its new road-shop building with local wood.
Sawdust had started logging with draft horses and wood-fueled donkey boilers that fed steam engines that turned winches for skidder cables to move the felled trees to their portable sawmill. “The fuel was free, more or less, I’ll give you that, since we had slabs and scraps. But we switched to gasoline as fast as we could. With steam, you needed one guy full-time to feed and watch the boiler, and another to tend the engine and the belts and cables. Gasoline let you get a lot more work done with the same crew, plus you didn’t have to set up near a water supply for the boiler.”
Then as now, the pine-beetle epidemic was in the news. Sawdust took those dying red-needled lodgepole stands in stride, recalling outbreaks in the 1940s and 70s. “The beetles come and go. Forests change all the time. Ten or twenty years from now, they’ll be worried about something else.”
I don’t know if he was right about that or not, but he did provide some perspective, and I hope our dog-walking paths cross again one of these days.
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