Wife and I stopped for food after attending a grandson’s Little League baseball game. She ordered a coffee with cream, but the only stirring utensil presented was a large soup spoon. A phrase from a 1928 song by James Stevens came to mind. I suggested Gwen could stir the coffee with her thumb. Alas, she had not been a logger. It’s not a great song, but the lyrics might bring a smile.
As I stepped out one morning into a small cafe
A 40 year old waitress to me these words did say…
She said, “I see, sir, that you are a logger, and not just a common bum
‘Cause nobody but a logger stirs his coffee with his thumb
My lover was a logger, there’s none like him today
If you’d pour a little whiskey up on it, he’d eat a bale of hay
My lover came to see me twas on one freezing day
He threw his arms around me and broke three vertebrae
I saw my lover leaving, trudging through the snow
Up going gaily homeward at 48 below
The weather tried to freeze him, it tried its level best
At a thousand degrees below zero, he buttoned up his vest
It froze clear through to China, it froze to the stars above
At a million degrees below zero, it froze my logger love
And so I lost my lover, and to this cafe I come
And here I wait ’til someone stirs his coffee with his thumb”
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Categories: Smile
in-sights.ca 
Thanks so much for posting this. It was great fun.
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James Stevens was certainly an interesting character. It seems he was a forest conservationist before it was fashionable. James Stevens (writer) – Wikipedia
He worked in the Oregon lumber camps about the same time as my father-in-law, who like Stevens had many stories to tell, but unlike him put none of them to paper. Safety regulations consisted of basic individual survival instincts. And all too often they failed. The cargo manifest on the outbound leg of the weekly exchange train did not make easy reading.
I visit the logging museum outside Cannon Beach whenever we’re down that way, and my appreciation for how tough those guys were increases just by handling some of the equipment they used. Tools I can barely lift were routinely employed for shifts the duration of which were governed not by labor law, but by available daylight.
The surprising part of loggers stirring coffee with their thumbs may be that they still had thumbs to use.
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Before going to university, I worked for ten weeks in a logging camp at the north end of Powell Lake. We were harvesting large old-growth timber. Mechanization in the 1960s was developing but was still somewhat primitive. At Jim Brown Creek, we went in for 11 days, came out for three, then returned to the camp.
It was an experience that had me saying, “I’m glad I did it, but I don’t ever want to do it again.”
Loggers who worked in remote areas were tough. The work to harvest logs was physically demanding and dangerous. They often faced risks of serious injury or death. When someone was hurt, it would take hours to get them to a hospital. At isolated logging camps, the routine was work-eat-sleep, repeat.
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