Monday's Poetry: The Frozen Logger

 

by Pa Rock

Poetry Appreciator

Alexa was helping me relax yesterday afternoon with a long, peaceful serenade by Pete Seeger when she suddenly coughed up a wonderful folk song called "The Frozen Logger," that was featured as a duet with Pete Seeger and The Weavers.  I had never heard the song before, but that is on me because it seems to have been recorded by a bunch of artists, including a version by Johnny Cash.

Summer will begin in just a few weeks, and yesterday the temperature in the Ozarks reached into the nineties.  The grass is starting to turn brown and crinkle, and I am already carrying water to my new plants every other evening.  Perhaps it was the many references in this song to ice and cold that made it so especially appealing to me.

"The Frozen Logger" is a "tall tale" of sorts from the Pacific Northwest that was written by James Stevens.   It is something akin to the tales of "Paul Bunyan" and "Babe the Blue Ox" which are rooted in Minnesota and the Midwest.  Here are the lyrics, and if you would like the tune, just ask Alexa to hum a few bars!

The Frozen Logger

by James Stevens

As I sat down one evening, 
In a timber town cafe,
A six foot seven waitress,
These words to me did say

“I see you are a logger, 
And not a common bum,
For no one but a logger 
Stirs his coffee with his thumb.

My lover was a logger —
There’s none like him today,
If you’d sprinkle whiskey on it,
He’d eat a bale of hay.

“He never shaved his whiskers
From off his horny hide,
But he’d pound ‘em in with a hammer,
Then bite ‘em off inside.

My lover came to see me
One freezing winter day,
He held me in a fond embrace
That broke three vertebrae.

He kissed me when we parted
So hard it broke my jaw,
And I could not speak to tell him,
He’d forgot his Mackinaw.

I watched my logger lover 
Going through the snow,
A-sauntering gaily homeward
At forty-eight below.

The weather tried to freeze him,
It tried its level best,
At one-hundred degrees below zero,
He buttoned up his vest.

It froze clear down to China,
It froze to the stars above,
At one-thousand degrees below zero,
It froze my logger love.

They tried in vain to thaw him,
And if you believe it sir,
They made him into ax blades,
To chop the Douglas fir.

That’s how I lost my lover,
And to this cafe I come,
And here I wait ‘til someone 
Stirs his coffee with his thumb.

And then I tell my story,
Of my love they could not thaw,
Who kissed me when we parted,
So hard he broke my jaw.