Maybe nobody does anymore, if they ever did at all. Maybe Marcus and Paul and Arthur don’t shout timber while they work. But these memories are old and foggy, and it’s easy for the romance to slip back in. We toured logging mills too, saw how boards were made, how trees were processed-it was this memory I used for the book, to imagine the places my loggers worked when they weren’t snowed in.
My city friends freaked out, and though I was more used to the countryside than they were, I wasn’t exactly reassured either. The trees went on endlessly, thick and serious and full of things that made freaky noise all night long. These were woods, the kind fairytales were written for. We called our populated stands of trees “the timber” or “the woods,” but our stands of trees were just that, clumps of trees before we went back to fields.
On the one hand, I’d grown up in smaller, rougher places like we were, but at the same time, these were woods. It was a weird field trip, because I felt like I had my feet in two worlds. Trees For Tomorrow had five of us spend three days in the north country, where we would study trees and woods and other nature things. Then one day a science project took me back into the country. It didn’t take me long to acclimate to a bigger set of environs, and I was happy. Though I’ve lived in Iowa all my life, I spent two years in Appleton, Wisconsin, which though it’s not a terribly big place, was a sprawling city to me then. Most of my Northwoods research came from high school memories, of Wisconsin, not Minnesota. Deciding they would be on a break since most of the book takes place during a blizzard, I learned as little as possible and got out with as much of my romanticism intact as I could. And they do not, I am sad to report, call out “Timber.” I watched a few reality show episodes of Ax Men, but honestly I stopped because it was clear the reality of logging was seriously going to burn my stereotyped joy. There isn’t exactly a wealth of information lying around the Internet about lumberjacks, except I can tell you the first thing I did learn is that they do call themselves loggers, not lumberjacks.
That turned out to be harder than I thought. How can you not? Of course I knew next to nothing about them, so I had to go do research. When I knew I was writing a story set in the Minnesota Northwoods, I knew right away I had to write about lumberjacks.
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