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My father, with max education of Grade Eight, (not unusual at the time) told of making frequent treks from his office in the shop to other offices in planning to discuss an engineering proposal. 

Dad’s accounts were (to me as a schoolboy) boringly repetitive. He’d first have to praise the plan with ample buttery sauce to calm all egos (his education hadn’t stopped at Grade Eight) before saying with great sadness and sorrow that their mining company and no other he knew of had either the machines or tools able to produce the marvelously designed innovation. 

The same had oft to be said about proposed castings from the foundry. Engineers with advanced degrees were seemingly forever occupied drafting plans overly difficult or impossible to turn into reality. 

From age 13 on I was regularly aware of dad’s kitchen table laments voiced as complaint about sheepskins. In dad’s up-through-the-ranks life as machinist to tool and die maker to foreman, etc. a sheepskin represented a degree held by someone who likely as not couldn’t distinguish milling machine from shaper nor get much beyond finding the STOP-START buttons. 

 No mistake. Dad held great disdain for most clean-hands engineers, expertise gained on paper. I could see why. 

The briefest glance at grandfather’s hands showed deeply embedded stains and injuries gained over decades of operating dangerously primitive belt-driven equipment. 

I never asked into grandfather’s level of education. Why bother when he likely as not learned as an apprentice from ground up menial tasks to a machinist skilled enough to make critical parts for the H Bomb. I used to have part of one such mechanism but returned it to the family rather than have it stuck out-of-place with me. 

The lesson I eventually drew (not when I was 13, to be sure) was that of two worlds meshing and clashing. Imagining and doing weren’t always to agree. Practical constraints were involved, and it was beneficial when thinker and doer put heads together to attempt understanding what each brought to the table. 

 In ways, we bump into the doer-thinker clash all the time. Success selling chairs doesn’t mean a glorious future marketing scooters. Reading a book, 10 books or 10 years experience does not equate expertise. 

My sheepskin-skeptical father was equally dubious of those he saw as talking through their hats (an interesting expression) or he considered shoemakers (another throwback expression). All around us are those who propound grandly with loving reverence to the sound of their own voices. Even when stated with great conviction, flawed notions remain erroneous. 

I am sometimes amazed by what I hear and thankful I’ve time to run the hell away from the nonsense of true belief and believers. I don’t want to burden any of us with outdated categories, but I think it useful to recognize the difference between doing and saying. Keep it simple. 

That brings me to what could be simpler than a log and parts thereof? Take any old log you think of. How many parts has it? Two ends and the outside makes three parts. 

OK, but two ends plus left and right makes four parts, or six if we add top and bottom. Comparatively speaking, the ends are relatively stable and dependable, whereas the sides, top-bottom tend to be roly-poly. 

Does it matter to you how many parts or sides we can tag onto a log? I’d think not. But as an exercise it’s OK to see how even the simplest appearing thing can be difficult to define with exactness. 

Do we include pith, rings and cambium? And what about bark, branches and roots? Are simple things often complex? Can we make things overly complicated? 

Human tendencies and abilities are noteworthy. As Alfred E is supposed to have quipped – the difference between genius and stupidity is genius having limits. 

But I hate to walk away from logs just yet. I’ll get on to a certain kind of log once fairly common in the north country. The boom log. 

First a short review. Running along the breezy north shore as I once did I came across many a “stick” lost from and washed ashore from a boom raft. Sticks were uniform in length (approx. 100 inches) and had usually lost their bark along the way to getting beached. 

If a stick stayed in the lake long enough it became waterlogged and went to the bottom. Partly waterlogged sticks could be flipped further inland to dry somewhat and become more manageable. Collecting accessible sticks for firewood, etc. was commonly done. The number of sticks lost from rafts had to be considerable and a problem because who’d want to lose (let’s say) 10 percent of what you paid for and were transporting to a mill? 

 Even considering losses, it sounds simple enough to dump pulp sticks in the lake and drag them using a powerful tug in a long raft across water from the north shore to a mill in Wisconsin. Simple. Maybe not so. Forming huge log rafts wasn’t at all simple. 

For one you needed boom logs (which I’ll get back to) to keep your raft together. Considerably larger and more robust than the pulp sticks, boom logs had to be bored at each end to accept a sturdy chain. Lacking portable drills, these two+ inch holes were done by hand through a foot or more of solid wood. 

Given the large size of many rafts this meant a lot of well developed arm muscles from drilling. Roughly 20 feet long, a good many boom logs were needed to hold a raft (whether of pulp or saw logs) together. 
Boom logs could end up as saw logs, of course, but some were reused as special boom logs that had to be hauled from the water to prevent waterlogging. Chains dropped through the holes stayed put using a simple toggle, but the best way to keep the chains in line is open to speculation. 

Not counting the holes and counting each boom log as one, I can assure you many a boom log had five distinct parts. I have one or two such parts as evidence.