Alexander Key
The Swamps Go To War
    A different kind of lumbering – by pullboat in the blackest swamps of subtropical America

    Sidney Lanier’s eyes were upon the high red slopes of Georgia when he wrote: “Out of the hills of Habersham, Down the valleys of Hall...” Southward, as his swift Chattahoochee meets the Flint and pours into the shadows of Florida, it becomes a great turgid many-channeled stream of mystery that would have appalled Lanier had he ever seen it. In the black tangles of this lower part, which is called the Apalachicola River, men have been fighting and dying since the time of Andy Jackson to take out its timber treasures. Now, with every available stick of lumber marked for wartime use, the battle of man against swamp is going on harder than ever. And a strange battle it is, in one of the strangest regions of our land.
    For this is a water world where all travel is by boat – a weird world of dense subtropical jungle, home of ivorybill and anhinga, of wild hog and bear and panther, of limpkins that cry like ghouls at night, and frogs that bellow like the big bull ’gators. The river’s many outlets spew a bronze flood into the Gulf, and from them stretch more connected swamps – some 2000 square miles of them – than any one man knows about.
    Darker than the Okefenokee, these swamps have an ominous look even from the sea. There’s Tates Hell, a steaming caldron with continents of cumulus clouds forever boiling from it; there’s the Wimico region; the land of the Dead Lakes; and a score of others. The only dry places in many of them are the crumbling shell mounds of unknown Indian races. Still terra incognita is the Hell, though you’ll hear tales of mighty timber and petrified forests in it. In the Dead Lakes a bit of swamp the size of Manhattan fell through to an underground river, and created some new tangles with a nightmarish beauty that would have delighted Coleridge. Through all this jungle wind a thousand creeks and bayous and interlocking water lanes – bewildering, somberly beautiful, and with their walls of foliage so tightly grown in places that it is literally impossible to get ashore.
    To reach the lumber camps you’ll take a fast speedboat and go roaring up-country for hours without seeing a break in the green – though you’ll pass recently cut-over sections without realizing it. For in this hothouse where matted vines tumble over the water and wistaria and long moss strangle the trees, nature hides her scars in a few weeks. Something is always in bloom. Foot-wide magnolia blossoms hang overhead like huge white doves in the spring; in the shadows you’ll see a profusion of rare lilies and amaryllis, orchids and azaleas, and a host of unnamed things familiar only to the great botanist, Dr. Alvan Chapman, who spent much of his life cataloguing the flora.
    And under the beauty is a dark country’s viciousness – malaria, unknown plants whose touch can put a man on his back for days, water poisoning that cripples all the swamp workers, plagues of blood-sucking flies, rattlers, moccasins, copperheads, coral snakes – but the most dangerous thing has always been man. You can read a history of murder in such names as Bloody Bluff, Dead Man’s Creek, Whisky George, Stiff-and-ugly, Grab-it-and-growl, and Hurricane Reach. Until only recently the country above the Reach was infested by generations of river pirates, and even today its shadows are haunted by men who recognize no law but the rifle.
    Such is the strange homeland of the pullboat – that logging curiosity of the Southern delta swamps.
    At low water on the higher ground, big rumbling tractors sometimes drag the logs to the water’s edge and trip them in for the pontoon crews. At other places you’ll see narrow-gauge railways, half submerged, winding their bumpy way through the darkness. But the pullboat is king. It can operate in a morass where no tractor can. go, where no railway can possibly be built. And it can pull out a quantity and a weight of timber that seems incredible.
    Actually, a pullboat is no more than a big steam winch mounted on a covered barge. The winch controls an endless steel cable often running a half mile into the swamp. Fastened at intervals to the cable are lengths of chain which are shackled to the logs. Such are the bare  essentials of pullboating. It is when you hear the wild root-tooting of the signal whistle, followed by thunderous crashes in the distance, and finally see the huge logs sliding like antediluvian monsters from a black hole in the jungle, that you realize something most out-of-the-ordinary is going on at the other end of the pull line.
    It starts at high water, when a timber scout in a narrow bateau sets out to blaze sections of good timber for the cutters.
    Following the timber scout as the water begins to recede, comes the first crew of cutters to open a way for the pull line. If the water is still too high for wading, they’ll lash a pair of bateaux across a buttressed trunk, sink their axes into either side of the tree for handholds, and lay into it with their saw. After the saw has bitten in deep, wedges must be driven into the cut so the saw will not bind. With the first warning crack of the great trunk they work furiously to get through the last few inches. Then, in the space of seconds, wedges and axes must be freed, the saw removed, the bateaux unlashed, and following is a mad scramble with the paddles to reach safety. It is nearly as bad without the bateaux, for often they are sawing waist-deep in muck and water, and if a man trips over a submerged root it may be the end of him. It has been the end of many.

    Remote Control
    At last comes the pullboat – a long aquatic procession headed by a little chugging towboat towing the pullboat, quarter boat, “drudge boat,” dynamite boat and several score “gunboats.” Often there is a store boat along, carrying everything from machine parts to outboard gas and chocolate bars. The men live on the quarter boat, which is a two-story house on a barge. The “drudge” is a dredge for opening a water lane or cutting a basin where the pullboat can work. The dynamite boat carries explosives for clearing the pull line; and the “gunboats” – simply pontoons on a frame – are for floating the heavy green logs, most of which would sink.
    After the pullboat has been warped into position and made fast, a light “baby line” is dragged through the jungle, run through a block shackled to a tree, and the other end attached to the pull line. Thus the big pull line is quickly rigged by windingin the babyline. Meanwhile the second crew of cutters has felled and trimmed the timber within working distance, and the dynamite Negroes are singing: “Gonna blow dem stumps – pick a tree an’ hide!” Then you’ll hear them splashing off and crying: “Ain’t a-gonna do me no har-r-r-m!”
    You crouch in the water behind a thick gum tree. Wham! Bam! The swamp turns over and muck and debris rain down in the half dark.
    When everything is ready you’ll see a big Negro sloshing up to the logging crew and dragging behind him the all-important whistle line from the pullboat. He leans back on the handle until the line is taut, and cocks a watchful eye to keep everyone in view.
    A nod from the boss man, and the head Negro sings: “Let ’er roll, oh ro-o-o-ll!” The whistle man jerks mightily. A half mile away the whistle on the pullboat gives an eerie toot-toot-toot-to-to-o-o-o-t! And instantly the pull line is in movement.
    From out of the confusion of fallen timber comes a huge tupelo, drawn by an extra length of cable fastened to the pull line. It thunderously batters everything aside until it is lined up for the long pull to the boat. A “Wboa!” a jerk, a toot and it stops on the second.
    To haul up all these trees and chain them to the pull line is a matter requiring an intricate series of whistle signals and perfect teamwork between the timber crew, the whistle man and the pullboat crew. For the pull line must be run back and forth, yards, feet, sometimes a hand’s breadth. A mistake may mean a life or a man horribly mangled. Yet, while the swampers are struggling thigh deep around the dangerously whipping chains that can cut a tree in half, you’ll hear only the head Negro’s cryptic singing:
    “Lay me down, Ah’s gwine to heav’n!” – which sends the whistle man jerking, the whistle tooting, and the pull line creeping a few inches.
    “Oh, help us, Lawd!” – back comes the line.
    “Grab ’er, bo, an’ buy ’er clo-o-o-thes! ” – forward again.
    ” Root-tee – oot – tee – oot – tee – o-o-o-o-o!” – and a half dozen big trees go rumbling, grumbling, tearing and smashing their way to the waiting pontoon crew at the boat.
    Some of these are hardwoods like oak and ash, and you’re surprised to see they’ve become amphibious and developed great bottle-shaped trunks like the water-loving cypress. But strangest of all is the tupelo. A deciduous tree with a tropical look, its pale blooms give a rare honey that never turns to sugar. It can assume the most demoniac shapes, and the buttressed trunk and tangled roots of even a small one often form a twenty-foot island in the water.
    For years lumbermen ignored the tupelo’s smooth creamy wood and cut only the cypress. Then a curious thing happened wherever the cypress shade was removed, for the sun reached the tupelo tops for the first time, and old trees took on new life and became huge.

    Buried Treasure
    It is in such places that some of the most valuable timber needs no cutting. You probe for it. Then the cable from tractor or pull line unearths a “choctaw” – long-buried relic of the days before pullboating when trees were deadened before being felled, and then floated out at high water. Thousands of them went astray and were lost in the muck – to be perfectly preserved, since heart cypress never rots when submerged.
    Immediately upon being dragged to the pullboat, the trees are unshackled and made fast to the “gunboats,” and soon the towboat is taking them on the long journey to the mill. Almost before their leaves have withered in the swamp, they have gone through band saw, dry kiln, planer and joiner and are on their way to war. Tupelo for the new double-decker beds in the Army camps, for crates and ammunition boxes; ash and pine and oak and cypress for a hundred vital things from cots to ships.
    Yet war seems too remote for reality when you are back in the swamps. A few turns beyond the Reach is like being whisked into an antediluvian era.
    So vast are the seldom-seen tangles farther back that the swamp foreman often travels a hundred miles a day by outboard, to keep track of operations.
    Said the foreman, “You wouldn’t believe it, but there’s folks livin’ ’way in here that hardly ever come out. Wild as the catamounts. Last week I come across an old feller in a bateau I hadn’t seen in years. When I told him we were cuttin’ timber to help whip the Germans, he said, ’Hell, is that damn war still a-goin’ on?’”

    1942
    (Saturday Evening Post, vol. 215, issue 15, October 10)

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