Terror in Taffeltown 1.1

Very early in my boyhood, Taffeltown found a special place in my heart.

Even today, saying this name elicits an unexplainable joy in me. It has a nice ring about it. And, takes me back to a time, when covering your hands with butter and pulling taffy was a family event.

But now, terror had totally griped me. I was watching a 120 foot tall White Pine tree, which I had weakened with my chain saw, sway in the wrong direction, due to the breaking of a cable meant to pull it away from our house. At any moment this Goliath of a tree could break off and come crashing down on our house.

As a boy, I remember passing by Taffeltown, on our way to fishing trips in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or Canada, with my Dad and brother. For some reason we never stopped to check out this scenic spot. Not even once. It was probably because there was nothing really there, but an old log building, with a sign “Taffeltown USA” out front.

It was many years later, when my wife and I started camping, hunting and fishing along the Manistee River and its tributaries, that the allure of Taffeltown once again captured my imagination.

So it was not surprising that we would pick this spot to enjoy our retirement years.

I was sure that Taffeltown, like its nearby sister towns of Moorestown, Pioneer and Sharon was just one of many early logging towns established during the late 1800’s, in Michigan’s northern lower peninsula.
(I have since discovered that Taffeltown was never a town at all. But just the name of the bar / restaurant built in the late 1940's.)

The sandy rolling lands near the banks of the Manistee River were well suited to producing an abundance of pine trees. For thousands of years these pine forests grew undisturbed. The native indigenous peoples would have had no use for virgin White Pine trees. So, since the last ice age, the species of conifer tree called the Eastern White Pine had been left untouched.

White Pine trees can grow to tremendous size, with heights over 150 feet and girths of over six feet wide. One mature White Pine tree alone can provide enough wood to build several modest sized houses.

With the arrival of European settlers to North America, along with their technology for producing lumber, these dense virgin pine forests were quickly transformed into fields of stumps extending to the horizon.

Manistee means “Spirit of the Woods” in the language of the indigenous people, who lived among these towering giants. Now the “Spirit of the Woods” was no more. This beautiful cold shaded river now lay totally exposed to the heat of the sun and the once plentiful Grayling soon became extinct.

Just how beautiful and appealing this part of Michigan once was, (and I believe still is) is epitomized by an 1878 article in a popular fishing magazine of that time. The article is an account of an angler from the east, who had traveled to Michigan’s vanishing wilderness, just to fish for Grayling.

He traveled for days by train, then horse drawn wagon, to finally arrive at a lumber camp site first know as Jam One and later as Sharon, located on the upper reaches of the Manistee. Sharon is only about 10 miles as the tree falls from Taffeltown.

In this article written 130 years in the past, he told of a first days catch by him and his two companions of over 200 Grayling. It is unclear whether most of these fish were released or kept. But it is likely that over fishing may have also played a notable part in the demise of this hard fighting large dorsal finned fish, called the Grayling, along with the warming of water after removal of the virgin pines.

It was during this epic change in the Manistee that I imaged Taffeltown must have come into existence.

Now, as a senior citizen, with chainsaw in hand, I was acting out a role as lumberjack, all be it in a tentative manner, that my ancestors played in cutting down this once virgin pines forest.

Most people would never tackle by themselves the daunting and dangerous job of cutting down a 10 ton tree, without professional assistance. But I felt I was up to the task, right up until my wife shocked me back into reality with her scream “David, the cable just broke!

I had made all the proper chainsaw cuts and had signaled my wife to start pulling the tree away from our house with a cable attached to our truck.

Instantly my wife’s, day earlier comment “Are you sure this cable is not going the break”, came stalking me (and my pride) like a wolf about to devour a poor defenseless fawn.

But wait, maybe my reputation, as a woodman, could still be salvageable. For a quick check of the cable and tow strap showed me that they were still attached to the truck.

Ah, clearly she only felt the cable readjusting itself, where it made its way through some dense brush near the pulley strapped to an anchor tree. The anchor tree pulley allowed the redirecting of the cable, so the truck could be positioned out of harm’s way from the falling tree.

Thank God, it was just a faults alert. But now my wife was no longer willing to continue her responsibilities as the “puller over of the tree”.

It was clear to her, that if the tree did fall backward and crushing our beautiful home, then some of the blame would come her way. So she bailed out of the truck, leaving me as the lone warrior on the battlefield to face Goliath.

I, with great trepidation, slide into the truck.

Then, the worst possible thing happened!

As I began so gently to apply pressure to the cable, I felt the power of the truck's engine straining against the cable and sensed the tires starting to spin in the soft sand. Neither the truck nor Goliath seemed to be moving. I was caught is a brief state of limbo, where everything seems to stop for what seemed like a mind wrenching eternity.

The truck lurched ahead!

I heard the whipping sound of the tow strap shooting backward, to be lodged in the branches of anchor tree and knew my big fear was coming true.

This can't be happening.

Panic griped me.

It was panic almost as great as I felt 5 years earlier, when I heard my wife scream, as she fell 15 feet from her bow hunting tree stand.

Thank God, she survived that accident, with only a broken leg


Trees have always been special to me.

As a boy I grew up in the rural setting of a small west Michigan village, climbing and playing in trees was a daily summertime activity.

Looking back, it is amazing to me that none of my friends, or I, ever experienced anything bad related to trees. Trees were our special places of escape from parental control. We build tree forts, check out bird nests and played games of tag, all in the airy and open spaces among the branches our favorite trees.

Climbing to the very top of a 30 foot high pine tree and straddling its branches and then sliding all the way to the ground was a thrilling game we invented. I seriously doubt it is a game practiced by many boys today. It was great fun, but our mothers were not all the happy when we would come home covered in pine pitch.

We had one tree, which was by far our most favorite climbing tree. It was unique and special for its ease of climbing. So special was this one tree in our neighborhood that it even warranted a name.

Many a summers’ day would start out with an exclamation from one of the gang “Let’s go play in The Big Tree”. We chased each other through the branches of this arboreal playground for endless hours and never once did any of us suffer any falls.

I don’t remember the specie of this tree. But its expanse branches offered us a Tarzan like freedom we could not realize on the ground.

Needles to say, the hours spent in games of tag among the outstretched arms of “Big Tree” are some of the fondest memories from my boyhood days.

Ranking a close second, to climbing “Big Tree” would have to be the time I spent among the top branches of a large Black Cherry tree. The biggest and sweetest cherries were found in this lofty perch. My mouth and hands would turn purple and stomach would almost burst, before I would reluctantly climb down from this delicious adventure.


Standing beside my wife at a safe distance was our teenage neighbor girl, who had come to see the big event.

They both watched as the towering pine swayed back in the direction of our house, but amazingly hesitated its backward fall and somehow remained in a leaning but still upright position.

My wife sent our neighbor girl running to get her father, while she scrabbled to remove the vehicles for our garage, which lay in the pending path of destruction.

My grandfather Garvey, on my mother’s side of the family, worked in Michigan’s lumbering industry during the era when logging camps, crosscut saws, horse power log skids and mighty river log drives were the norm. He lived in the river mouth town of Muskegon and worked on log drives on the river of the same name passed its water into Lake Michigan.

Fact is, I have always admired lumberjacks and have tried to learn and practice good timber falling methods. So naturally I had done my homework, which included a lot of planning and rigging (over a period of a couple of weeks), just to make sure that this tree did not get away from us and end up falling on our house.

The plan was, after I had notched the tree and completed the back side cut, I would then give a signal to my wife and she would pull the tree over with the truck. So it would fall safely away from the house.
This was a simple plan, which was now going badly wrong.

Thank God, my Irish ancestor lumberman grandfather must have been looking down on me. For Goliath was just barely remaining upright after the cable let loose.

Goliath was wounded, not out of commission. The battle was still under way, with this giant now teetering on the verge of falling prone across the middle of our cedar sided cabin, we had so proudly built.

I have always believed that we Irishmen, have been blessed with a trait called “The Luck of the Irish”, which we use to get us out of trouble, when another Irishman called Murphy Law comes calling.

Luck or no luck, time was of the essence. A sudden gust of wind from the wrong direction could easily topple this over 10 tons of house wrecking timber. Goliath was only being held upright by a narrow 5 inch wide area of wood, I had (per proper timber fall practice) left in the middle of the tree. This small band of wood was meant to act as a hinge, to control the direction a tree will fall.

Always being leery that Murphy would probably be looking to wreak havoc with my plans, I intentionally taken another precaution to trip him up. I have learned over the years not to rely totally on my Irish Luck.

So just prior to giving my wife the high sign to start the pull, I had driven a wedge into the back side chainsaw cut, for some added insurance against the unlikely event that the cable should break.

You know we engineers tend to be a belt and suspenders type individuals and having a backup plan in place is a normal practice.

Unfortunately, I had no backup plan, other than to retrieve what remained of the cable and tow straps, from where they had come to rest in the limbs of the anchor tree, and fanatically reattach it to the truck.

My frenzied scramble to get the cable reconnected, now being intently observed by the entire neighbor family, surely must have been comical to watch as I dove through the brush, on a mission to save the day.

My neighbor later told me that he had started to come over at the sound of my chainsaw, to be there in order to offer a few words of encouragement, when the tree end up on top of our house. He was all prepared to say, “It really doesn’t look all that bad”.

Being a little superstition I wisely declined my wife’s suggestion, to set up a video camera by which to capture this event. Something in my gut told me that this would be tempting fate and in no way did I want a disaster tape, of my making, to end up on America’s Funniest Videos.

So after reattaching the cable, I again jumped behind the steering wheel of the truck and ever so gently began to reapply tension to the cable.

It took about all the pulling power our old 454 powered suburban could muster in 4 wheel drive, but finally the tree started to lean away from the house and toward the direction I had intended for its finally resting place.

As a mighty crash reverberated through the woods, this majestic beautiful intimidating giant came to earth and my heart sighed in great relief.

As I reflect on the events of this day, my thoughts went back to the time I first remember hearing the David and Goliath Bible story. It was over 60 years ago, as a young boy attending Sunday school.
In the innocence of a five year mind, I believed my teacher could only be talking about me, as she told our class about heroic deed performed by David.

It was a logical conclusion, because I was the only David that I knew, so I must have been the hero.

I remember smiling with my chest puffed out, as I walked home, thinking about this amazing feat of slaying Goliath, that I had apparently accomplished. Even thou my childhood brain could not grasp how a small boy like me, could have done such a great deed I was more than willing to accept the praise.

I must have harbored this secret ego building misconception for only a brief while. But it was sure nice while it lasted.

Now, as a senior citizen at the age of 65, I feel I have finally really truly slain Goliath, even thou my sling ended up braking in the process.

The morale of this story is to never attach your nylon tow strap to a vehicle, in a way that will bring the strap in contact with any metal corners. The metal corner will cut the nylon strap and you could possible find yourself reliving my Terror in Taffeltown experience.

What is going to happen with Goliath now that he is on the ground? Well, I am now in the process of turning Goliath into many board feet of rough sawn pine lumber (with my chainsaw saw mill), so I can built a nice play house for our grandchildren to enjoy.