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Vernon Patterson (ND-ND) http://tinyurl.com/VPatterson

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Bridgeport

From Wise as a Goose, 1939.

Reader: Kevin Hearle

California's redwood country not only offers some of our most breathtaking scenery, it also offers some of our most precious resources, resources once harvested by skilled workers living in ramshackle company towns.

In his 1939 novel, Wise as a Goose, Vernon Patterson recreates the company lumber towns of the northern coast. Here, a character named Dan arrives in Bridgeport, where he watches an impressive display of skill.

Toward the very center of the town and proceeding toward a background of hills stump-dotted and guttered with rain runnels ran a narrow street lined with shabby unpainted cottages, and on a quarter-mile slope extending up from the river at the right, a gigantic brick smokestack rose from an aggregation of buildings and yards—a lumber mill. Near the mill, twigged by a spur to the main line of the railroad, lay a pond half-covered with floating logs. From his perch on the bluff he watched a man armed with a pike pole guiding a log across open water. When the log had been jockeyed into position and just before it was caught by the jack chains to be dragged up into the mill maw, the man leaped gracefully to another log where, birling the log with his feet, arms uplifted, he balanced himself like a bird on a swaying branch.

In Wise as a Goose, Vernon Patterson explores the labor issues plaguing the lumber industry just before World War II.