In Missouri: Outdoor Work, Very Heavy Lifting

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One evening soon someone is going to go out in his backyard and grill a steak over charcoal made from the blackjack oak Ray Tune cut this morning in the Ozarks.

Ray is a woodcutter who lives near West Plains, Mo. He is 58 years old. He is 6 ft. 1 in. tall, a handsome man with a weathered face and a small mustache. He is in physical trim that a weight lifter would envy. Ray cuts wood every day, stacking six tons on his truck and unloading it inside one of the kilns at Craig's Industries in Mountain View, Mo., before the sun gets too high. He figures he lifts 24,000 lbs. a day.

When Ray began work, there was a half-moon in the dark sky, circled with a ring of moisture giving promise of the humidity to come. The whippoorwills were still calling, although a yellow-billed cuckoo was sleepily experimenting with his daytime songs.

Ray was in the woods with his one-ton Ford flatbed truck by 7. He had with him his chain saw, an 18-in., yellow Swedish-made Pioneer, a thermos of water and another one of coffee. He was cutting wood on a ranch where loggers had taken the big timber. He had bought what they had left, tops from big trees and an occasional standing tree. He commenced work in a clearing the loggers had left surrounded by woods that cut off the breeze.

He cut several trees quickly and efficiently, not bothering with the notches a lesser woodcutter would have to use to direct their fall. He dropped each tree precisely where he wanted it, blocked up on underbrush, the butt end hinged by a sliver of the tree's outer edge. He cut the heavier ends to 16-in. lengths to make them easier to load. Branches and tops were cut longer. He spent no more than ten minutes on a tree and walked surely through the brush with his chain saw running.

He stopped for a cigarette and coffee. Has he ever had any bad accidents? "Well, some near ones." He cut off the end of an ear twice. And once a branch snapped back and threw the chain saw out of his hands, one of which was laid open; at the same time, he twisted to avoid the running chain and hurt his back badly. He wrapped up his hand in a handkerchief and loaded the truck, but he couldn't unload it because his back hurt too much. "Saw a doctor after I'd put up with it for a week, and he popped my back into place so's I was able to unload it." Has he ever had back trouble since? "No, never."

Ray started to load what he had cut. He had put stakes in the truck bed to hold the wood in place, and he built up the load in one corner to 4 ft. high. He tossed in 100-pounders or more not quite as effortlessly as matchsticks (he grinned after he chunked in a particularly big one, saying "Whew" in mock theatrics), but he was not breathing heavily.