Bigwood Timber

It’s been raining for eight days straight
Hauling timber of the Big Jumbo
The creek is going over the banks
And the road is turning into gumbo
Big wheels are rolling from the mountain to the mill
There’s a logger who’s soaked to the bone
But he is working still
And there’s big wood timber coming down, down, down
There’s big wood timber coming down
He came out West at seventeen
The biggest trees he’d ever seen
Way back when the land was raw
He heard the singing of the crosscut saw
The foreman said «Son are you able
To work the end of a choker cable?»
In the logging camps he paid his dues
To the Douglas Fir and the Sitka Spruce
Big in the shoulders and broad in the back
From driving the wedges and swinging the axe
Faller’s prayer and the lumberjack law
Sawdust flying from a two-stroke saw
Thirty below in the Wintertime
Tamarack, Fir, and Lodgepole Pine
Feller and a buncher and a skidder to drag
A good man lost to a fallin' snag
There’s a big log jam on the river wide
And a suken barge at the log dump site
Two loaded trucks locked their horns
On an icy road in the early morn
Drifting snow and blowing rain
Double shifting on the choker chain
Skidder rolled over on the ridge
Mudslide road and a washed out bridgeAnd a good man lost to a falling snag