Just north of Black River Falls was where the bald eagle descended, cannonballing at the lump of deer decomposing on the shoulder of WIS 27. I screeched the car to a halt on the empty two-lane road as the bird coolly appraised me, fanning its six-foot wingspan. Tornado warnings had been issued from Milwaukee to Antigo, with four separate funnel clouds confirmed across the state; now the gray-green light of early afternoon was conspiring with the humidity and my broken AC to stupify me into a minor trance, before the bird took off like the angel of death. I’d been driving through Wisconsin for something like five hours. Once I passed Chippewa Falls, it was time for a drink.

“Whaddaya want?” snorted the bartender of Cookie’s Holcombe Inn, immediately pegging me for what I was, a FIB — as in, a “Fuckin’ Illinois Bastard,” Wisconsin’s less-than-kindly nickname for their neighbors to the south who flood the state come summertime. The patrons of the packed bar had white hair and farmer’s tans, rolling dice or peeling off the strips of cardboard known as pull-tabs, a favored gambling tradition among the dives of the Midwest. I’d stopped in Chippewa County, once the richest lumber district in the state during Wisconsin’s logging boom of the latter nineteenth century. Here one-sixth of all the white pine in the United States was said to have stood, before logging companies razed the great forests of the north. 

The fellow seated to my right was friendlier than the barkeep, tossing back a couple Busch Lights after his construction job. He perked up when I told him I was heading up to Hayward. “My grandpa built the giant muskie there!” he bragged, referring to the 143-foot-long, 4-story-tall fiberglass muskie which sits outside of Hayward’s Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame. He’d spent some time working construction there back in the day, he said, then leaned in closer: “Just outside of town, there’s a trashy little strip club in the woods.” 

For a city of about 2,500 people, Hayward’s a pretty happening place — home to North America’s largest cross-country skiing marathon, a famous Ojibwe powwow, and a handful of the biggest muskies ever caught on record, one of which is preserved and mounted inside Hayward’s Moccasin Bar. (That’s Cal Johnson’s 67-lb, 8-oz muskie, caught in 1949 and still recognized as the IGFA’s all-tackle world record. Louis Spray would pull a 69-lb, 11-ouncer months later, technically breaking the IGFA’s rules by shooting “Chin-Whiskered Charlie” twice in the head before landing.) “Hayward, Wisconsin’s Best Kept Secret!” declared the strip club’s website near a photo of a woman with the physique of a Bavarian barmaid and an inky bear claw tattooed across one prodigious ass-cheek.

What called me to Hayward were the Lumberjack World Championships, held here in the Northwoods for the past 65 years. Each July, tourists pour into the small town to watch the world’s best timber-sports athletes swing axes, sprint across wet logs, and wield customized chainsaws jacked up with Jet Ski engines.

My interest in lumberjacks was, I’ll admit, somewhat quixotic — visions of brawny men in flannel passing around bottles of brandy, swapping tall tales by the fireside beneath the snowy pines. I was tickled by the notion of the great myths of America originating in the ramblings of half-crazed Midwestern men spending their winters risking life and limb in Northwoods lumber camps, then emerging in the spring to blow their winnings at saloons. The earliest mention of Paul Bunyan dates back to the winter of 1885, when two detailed descriptions came from Tomahawk, Wisconsin, due west of the rumored site of the giant’s logging camp. “All lumberjacks believe, or pretend to believe, that Paul really lived and was the pioneer axeman in the lumber country,” wrote the folklorist Charles E. Brown in his 1922 pamphlet, Paul Bunyan Tales. “Some of the older ‘river pigs’ even claim to have worked for him.” 

You would think I’d have grown weary of men and their tall tales, having dated enough fabulists and lunatics and lingered long enough in bars. But there is fabulous romance in this account from a young writer named Franz Rickaby who traveled the Upper Midwest at the turn of the twentieth century, studying the folk songs of what were then called shanty boys: “Up and down and across the country he roamed — here today, there tomorrow; chopping, skidding, rolling, hauling, driving great logs that the snarling saws might be fed. The free life called him, the thunder of falling majesties intoxicated him. Amid this stately presence, along these avenues of endless upward reaches, he rudely trampled the whiteness of the earth. His axe bit deep as it shouted, and his saw-blade sang in the brittle air... The great crests trembled, tottered, and thundered to the earth in a blinding swirl of needles and snow-dust, and the sun and sky at last looked in. Long hours of hard labor, simple fare, and primitive accommodations hardened him; the constant presence of danger rendered him resourceful, self-reliant, agile. It was as if the physical strength and bold vitality, the regal aloofness of the fallen giants, flowed in full tide into him and he thus came to know neither weariness nor fear. Neither Life nor Death was his master.”

The town of Hayward was established in 1883 when Anthony Hayward built a sawmill along the Namekagon River, where a small logging camp had existed years before. By the 1890s, logging and lumbering employed a quarter of all working Wisconsinites, and from 1899 to 1904, Wisconsin was America’s main lumber producer. By then, Northwoods white pine had built the Midwest’s growing cities: Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Omaha. But though it had once seemed that this galaxy of pine was an endless natural resource, the landscape of the Northwoods by the early twentieth century had been reduced to stumps and bare treetops which fueled massive fires that often rampaged through the upper Great Lakes region. 

Few old-growth trees remain in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, whose hemlock, maple, birch, and pine were mostly planted in the 1930s. In Hayward, the main reminder of the city’s logging heyday is Fred Scheer’s Lumberjack Village, where family-friendly lumberjack shows go on throughout the summer, and where, since 1960, the best lumberjacks and jills alive have fought for the world title at the Olympics of the Forest.

Moccasin Bar is the oldest building left in Hayward, built in 1875 as an office for the North Wisconsin Lumber Company, then acquired by Hamm’s Brewery and remade into a saloon. Inside the bar, the waxen corpse of Cal Johnson’s prize muskie hangs alongside menageries of wacky taxidermy: Over here, a weasel cop breaks up a wild chipmunk party; across the way, a groundhog referees a raccoon boxing match. It was the night before the first day of the three-day competition, and though I’d hoped to run into a few lumberjacks carousing, the place was mostly quiet but for the TouchTunes’ stream of hot country hits. I nursed a High Life and briefly contemplated the filmy jar of pickled eggs placed behind the bar beside the Sour Apple Schnapps.

I’d been here once before in the winter of 2020, the weekend my boyfriend proposed to drown me in a frozen pond. The irony had not escaped me that the man who’d won me over with his small-town family values was, in fact, quite insane; just weeks before our trip, I’d watched his eyeballs turn completely black. In any case, I’d hoped to customize a jolly mood, having brought to our Northwoods cabin a generous stimulant ration. But chemical intervention would not suffice to quell my lover’s rage when he suddenly decided that I was possessed by demons. For the next 48 hours, between fat rails of cocaine, he would plot my icy death while I pranced around the cabin like some kind of Chinese courtesan, trying to be wonderful enough to change his mind. Venturing to town the third day for drinks at Moccasin Bar, I scanned the eyes of local sportsmen in their snowsuits and camo, looking for someone to pick up my psychic distress signals. But no one did, so I got back in his truck.

“We gotta kill this damn fly. Been bothering me all morning,” said an ancient man in flannel, swatting the air vaguely with one liver-spotted hand. I’d stopped inside of Somewhere Else, a bar along the highway, for a lunch of beer and peanuts before the first day of the competition. “You must’ve brought him with you, Bill,” noted his tan and surly seatmate, upon whose baseball cap “Trump 2024: The Sequel” was stitched. “I didn’t see that fly till around the time that you walked in.” The man winced when I mentioned that I had come to town for the big lumberjack party, which usually drew a crowd of 12,000 or thereabouts. “I moved up here to get away from people,” he said, sweeping his pile of peanut shells onto the floor. “Went to Walmart yesterday. Don’t know what I was thinking.”

The Lumberjack World Championships grounds were alive with the wholesome scents and sounds of a modest county fair — corn dogs and funnel cakes, the slap of beanbags on cornhole boards, a newish Morgan Wallen song as covered by a man with a thick Minnesota accent in the Swinging Axe Beer Tent. Mingling with these familiarities were headier sensations — axes ker-chunking into wood, the distant purr of chainsaws, all grounded by the base note of freshly cut white pine. No fragrance in this world could be more madeleine-like, and suddenly I’m five again in moccasins and a bowl cut, kicking up pine needles as I trip down to the lake with a loaf of Wonder Bread to feed the local ducks. Tonight I will sleep to the clack of the fan and the sound of my grandmother’s snores, and when I wake, I’ll watch cartoons and then we’ll all go swimming.

Of the few toys I favored as a grave, no-nonsense child, the best were Lincoln Logs, whose interlocking wooden pieces (designed by John Lloyd Wright, second son of Frank) implied a cosmic order. I was not an outdoor child, though my favorite book was Hatchet, the 1987 young-adult wilderness novel where a boy survives a summer stranded in the Yukon woods with nothing but a hand axe, with which he prepares fires and fashions bows and fishing spears. Its author, Gary Paulsen, spent much of his lonely childhood in the Minnesota woods, and much of his adult life (outside of writing some 200 YA novels) running sled dogs, training horses, accumulating wives, and generally living like a misanthropic recluse. “I don’t have anything against individuals, but the species is a mess,” he said in a 2006 profile, in which he later lets slip that he’s really a romantic: “I still want Bambi to make it out of the fire.”

Tattooed across Tristan VanBeek’s knuckles is a mantra in block letters: “CHOP WOOD.” The 27-year-old lumberjack from Helena, Montana, would be competing throughout the weekend in the springboard chop, standing block chop, underhand chop, single- and double-block chops, boom run, axe throw, and both the 60-foot and 90-foot speed climbs — in which battling lumberjacks race up a cedar spar-pole using nothing more than spiked shoes and a steel-core climbing rope. VanBeek is tan, ripped, blonde, and covered in tattoos — more hot surfer bro than recluse. Like many of the lumberjacks competing here today, he’s spent the last four years in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, performing for a living at Paula Deen’s Lumberjack Feud Supper Show — which is sort of like Medieval Times, but for lumberjacks.

I loitered with VanBeek beneath the climbing poles an hour before the quarterfinals began, examining the scars he’d earned over the years. “Almost cut my arm off with an axe a couple years ago,” he said of the four-inch gash mark above his armpit from an injury incurred live at the Paula Deen show. “I went to the hospital, and the show went on.” 

“I’ve had a couple ligament tears, nothing too crazy,” said his friend and fellow Lumberjack Feud performer Caleb Graves, strapping on his metal climbing gaffs nearby. “But I know a kid who fell sixty feet and broke his back.” 

Born here in Hayward, Graves learned to logroll at age nine and began working at Fred Scheer’s Lumberjack Show in his early twenties, quickly picking up the nuances of chopping and speed climbing. Darker and quieter than VanBeek, he is modest about his status, though he’s won the 90-foot climb for five years in a row.

“You think you’ll win again this year?” I asked. “I’ll give it my all,” Graves shrugged. “But there’s some awfully fast guys. Sean Yokoyama’s probably the best speed climber in the world, besides myself.” He nodded towards a tan and puckish fellow whose shorts stopped well before his chafed and splintered thighs, stalking the grounds with the ease of a man who has never once failed in his life.

“My friends out west don’t really understand what I’m even doing, or why I’m doing it so obsessively,” VanBeek admitted as he flashed another tattoo just above his wrist — an angry frog hoisting a chainsaw. “But there’s a lot of legacy involved in the sport. It’s the reason the country was built, you know — logging and timber.” His grandpa was a logger and sawfiler in Montana, so he grew up in the shop, building saws and felling trees. There’s history, he said, behind an event like boom running — a sprint across spinning, floating logs from dock to dock, drawing from the days when crews of men rode logs downstream as they steered thousands more down a raging river during the spring melt. “Everything we’re doing now is a lot less dangerous than what they were doing,” he said. “But it’s all we can really do to pay respects.”

The weekend’s 102 competitors, representing sixteen states and seven countries, gathered along the edges of the Lumberjack Bowl, an outdoor arena built around an inlet of Hayward Lake used by nineteenth-century loggers as a holding pond for trees. Arranged proudly in their red shirts with numbered backs, they formed a panoramic image of health, vitality, and cheer as a silver-haired officiant logrolled across the cove to light the torch. Thus began the opening ceremonies. 

The dignity of athletes has long made me loathe to be a writer — they discipline mind and body for just one flash of greatness, while I destroy myself to type 500 words a day. Now I crept among them, trying to steal their life force. I cracked one of the dozen beers warming in my backpack as the crowd in the bleachers rose for the national anthem, sung by a local quartet, the Pinery Boys, whose combined age looked to be roughly 300. A couple of beats too late, my hand floated to my heart. One day soon, I pledged, I would become a good person.

Rousing cheers of “Yo-ho!” resounded through the stands as the hot saw event began with a roar. The quickest and loudest of the timber sports, here the brawnier competitors race to complete three clean cuts through a 20-inch diameter white-pine log with absurdist DIY chainsaws. “You cannot find these saws at the hardware store, ladies and gentlemen!” yelped the disembodied voice of the MC. “These bad boys are rigged with Jet Ski or snowmobile engines!” In a spray of woodchips, it was all over in less than seven seconds — more a battle of engineering than pure athleticism, though wielding these behemoths was clearly no easy feat. This end of the dock would host the sawing and chopping events in both the men’s and women’s categories, while the smaller, spryer contenders in logrolling and boom running raced intermittently across the cove throughout the day. Crushing my empty can, I watched, slack-jawed, as two small but jacked teenage girls tap-danced atop one spinning log, maneuvering to topple their opponent into the drink. After almost every matchup, the loser clapped the victor with a sopping wet bear hug.

The inside of the athletes’ tent was like some kind of Mad Max shantytown, reverberating with the sounds of dozens of axes being sharpened all at once. I sat down with Cassidy Scheer, who entered his first Lumberjack World Championship in 1996 and, at 44, has competed every year since. Sandy-haired and freckled, his aura was of Midwestern boyishness, even in middle age. A Hayward native, Scheer hails from a long line of lumberjacks; his father, Fred, a four-time logrolling world champion, began Fred Scheer’s Lumberjack Show in 1979 with some lawn chairs and a $3 admission fee. “I started taking lessons at the logrolling school here in Hayward, where kids start as young as three,” he said. “At 15, I got an axe, learned how to chop and climb, and started performing in my dad’s show.”

Most timber sportsmen specialize in one event, focusing exclusively on speed climbing or sawing. Scheer is among the few all-around athletes — the only competitor in LWC history to win a title in each discipline (speed climbing, boom running/logrolling, chopping, and sawing). “I’ve got 11 titles in speed climbing, one in boom running, one in the springboard chop, and I’ve made the final in every event in my lifetime except the hot saw,” he said, matter-of-factly. By your mid-thirties, he explained, you’re generally past your prime in speed climbing and logrolling, but in technique-based disciplines like chopping or sawing, an athlete can stay competitive well into their fifties. “Hey, Dale! How old are you?” Scheer called out to a stocky man nearby. “Turned 60 last year,” replied Dale Beams in his thick Aussie accent. A competitive woodchopper since 14, the eight-time world-title holder introduced his wife, Amanda, to the sport in the late eighties; in 2022, she set a new underhand-chop world record.

What I really wanted to know more about were the vendettas. “It seems like everybody’s buddies, but come on — there must be rivalries,” I nagged Scheer, which drew a laugh. “We’re pretty friendly now, but it wasn’t always like that,” he said. “Back in the nineties, guys were getting in fights all the time, guys committing adultery with each other’s wives. There was bad blood, rivalries, people talking shit.” He chalked up the recent harmony to social media: “Seeing each other’s lives and families makes you hate them less.” Only a few guys made a living through competing (the total payout this weekend would be around $77,000, with $1,000 given to first place in each event), but most people put more money into it than they got out. “I net like twenty grand a year, which covers my expenses,” he said. “But we’re not here for the money. We’re here ’cause we like doing it.”

“Tonight, I would like to speak about wood,” said David Lynch at the 2014 premiere of Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces, a compilation of deleted scenes from my favorite TV series. The audience laughed, but the director wasn’t kidding. “There are many times in the world when the phone rings, and someone’s inquiring about wood. This happens primarily at lumber yards, and in this case, it’s necessary to have a phone,” he announced in that ardent, corn-fed voice. “It is only natural that trees are growing, and that they are made of wood. Much happiness can come from observing a tree, and the same can be said observing the many shapes fashioned out of wood. Quite often when we are talking about beauty, we are talking about wood.” With that, he thanked the audience and left the stage.

It may be that wood, of all the gifts of nature, is the most characteristically American. Lynch set Blue Velvet in Lumberton, North Carolina, a logging town whose local radio station (W.O.O.D.) sings to start the day: “Logs! Logs! LOGS!” The town mystic of Twin Peaks is known as the Log Lady, and the wood she carries is a source of secret wisdom: a conduit to supernatural dimensions, including one that’s populated by murderous, chain-smoking woodsmen who stagger around in flannel shirts and trapper hats. A lumberjack appears in the last minutes of Lynch’s final film, sawing away behind the dancers of Inland Empire’s end credits. “What’s that lumberjack doing there?” a reporter asked Lynch later. The director answered brightly: “Cutting wood!”

The second evening of the LWC was underway, and I’d made significant headway through my backpack full of beers. In the shade beside the athletes’ changing room, known as the “Jack Shack,” I watched the women’s boom run with Bradley Kittle, a friendly 26-year-old from upstate New York who, like Graves and VanBeek, had spent the past year in Tennessee with Paula Deen’s Lumberjack Feud. His burly 6’8” frame precluded him from speed and agility events like climbing and boom running, but it came in handy in the ground chops and sawing. “If I had to pick the chop I’m best at, it’s probably the underhand,” he said without pretense, referring to the event in which athletes chop through a horizontal log while standing atop it, mimicking the practice of cutting a felled tree. “Believe it or not, it looks the scariest, but it is the safest,” Kittle assured me. “You’re wearing chainmail socks on your feet, so you’re gonna bruise your toes, but you won’t lose any. And I like all nine of my toes.”

This was Kittle’s first year competing here in Hayward, though he’d been a timber sportsman since 2019, first taking it up in college, then moving to Ketchikan, Alaska, for a job at the Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show. Like almost all the competitors I’d met the past two days, he described the lumberjack lifestyle as all-consuming. “There’s two ways you can go about it — you can be the kind of person that goes to small shows to just enjoy the sport, or you can be the person that wins,” he said. “Those people are competitive as all get-out, spend any extra money that they have on gear, and really work on honing their equipment and their skills.” A decent axe costs $600, and Kittle had brought 12 this weekend; the saws I’d seen cost somewhere in the realm of $2,500, he said, and the hot saws could be upwards of $10,000. “It takes a level of obsession to be at that top level — the same as anything, except that when you say, ‘I’m a competitive lumberjack,’ no one really knows what you mean.”

Like Lynch, Kittle had much to say on the subject of wood, the quality of which varied from day to day and event to event. “Not every tree grows the same,” he explained. “You might get a tree that grew slower and has tighter growth rings, so it might be a bit firmer. A good indication of whether a log’s firm is if it’s got a red hue to it. If it dries out and becomes corky, that can make it hard to chop — you won’t get as much penetration. So it’s nice to have an axe that cuts good wood well,” he went on. “But it’s equally as important to have an axe that cuts bad wood good.”

Momentarily distracted by a fish leaping from the water, the giant man grew suddenly sentimental. “The biggest thing about this sport is that you’re not racing anybody else — it’s just you and the block,” he said, watching the ripples in the cove. “Everybody else down the line doesn’t matter. The only thing you can do is pick what you feel is the right axe and just give it your all. You may go through four or five axes to find that one that’s really gonna cut it, and even your best axe might not be the best for that wood.” Shaking from his woodsman’s trance, he gazed longingly at my near-empty can of Hamm’s. “I’m ready to crack a beer, but I gotta cut these last two blocks first. Ohhh, how good it’s gonna taste.”

Smoking was technically forbidden within the LWC grounds, but I’d found some kindred spirits loitering outside the bar overlooking the logrolling dock. “I was originally going to quit on July 13,” said Zeno, a wild-eyed man in a tattered Harley Davidson shirt and silver ponytail. “But I think July 26 might be a good day, too.” 

“Why the 26th?” I wondered. “Don’t you read the Farmer’s Almanac?” he quipped, astonished by my ignorance. Indeed, the Almanac’s website listed the 26th as favorable to quit smoking, slaughter livestock, or get married.

Towards the parking lot, another smoker caught my eye: a dark-haired woman of maybe sixty with wildly expressive eyebrows, dragging from a Pall Mall as she grabbed a Busch Light from a cooler in her truck. Having watched me fish another lukewarm can out of my backpack, she greeted me with an exaggerated wink of recognition. Her youngest son, as it turned out, was Caleb Graves; he’d be competing shortly in the speed-climbing semifinals, hoping to reprise his five-year winning streak. I followed her around the bleachers to the climbing poles, backpack rattling with empties past sunburnt kids absorbed in elaborate card games and old couples dressed in ponchos despite no sign of rain. Together, the two of us looked like trouble.

Chopping, sawing, and logrolling were all well and good, but by now I’d found my place as a speed-climbing groupie. It is the only lumberjack discipline in which safety precautions are all but nonexistent: climbing gaffs (fancy calf braces with spikes at the heels) and a loop of steel-core rope offer only so much insurance against a 90-foot mad vertical dash upwards followed by what looks like a freefall coming down, though contestants must touch the pole three times on the descent. “Seventy-five percent of the time, it’s controlled chaos,” Cassidy Scheer had said the day before. “It’s intentional when we kick our legs out the side and ride the friction of the rope down. Other guys will do a big bail at the top and throw a series of spurs on the way down. But twenty-five percent of the time, it’s actually out of control. Like, there was a guy today who was basically straddling the tree as he was sliding down. That wasn’t intentional.”

He had meant Sean Yokoyama, whose severe road rash was visible today beneath another pair of tiny shorts. Out of control as his performance may have been, the Vancouver native had made by far the best time in yesterday’s qualifying heat — up and down the pole in 21.75 seconds, versus VanBeek’s 27.09 and Graves’s 30.41. All weekend, I’d heard whispers of Yokoyama’s eccentricities — a genius and a maniac rumored to work as a scientist at SpaceX, not to mention a notorious lady’s man. Today he’d face Graves, the returning world champion; the best four times from today’s heats would make tomorrow’s finals.

With one foot on the landing pad and one spike in the pine, the two men faced their poles — eyes fixed to heaven as if waiting for a miracle, forearm muscles rippling like tangled power cords. On the MC’s “GO!” they sprinted 90 degrees upwards, the clank of spurs on wood growing fainter as they climbed. Within 15 seconds, both men had reached the top, with Yokoyama dropping a couple beats ahead. But in a blur of dangling limbs, Graves somehow hit the pad first — 21.84 seconds to Yokoyama’s 22.01. Beside me, his mother, Lisa, nearly showered me with beer.

“What do you know about the strip club in the woods?” I asked her when the excitement had died down. She cocked one eyebrow into an acute angle and laughed. “I won’t say I worked there, exactly, but I’ve spent some quality time there,” she said coyly.

“I’ve heard it’s not that bad,” said Zeno.

“I’ve heard bad,” countered a man with bloodshot eyes whose erratic movements bespoke a fondness for cocaine.

Lisa’s eyebrow did its thing. “Depends whether you like your strip clubs trashy.”

Night had fallen by the time I reached Phipps Tavern, turning off the highway and driving deep into the woods towards a low-slung cabin that could’ve been a dive bar but for the silhouetted sign of a woman on all fours. Hung on the wood-paneled interior alongside bags of chips and pretzels, a glow-in-the-dark sign announced the dancers’ mythic-sounding names: Duchess, Eclipse, Raven, Athena. The cover was $5 for men, but ladies got in free. 

I ordered a High Life from a tough-looking bartender who ran the place like the Navy, settling at a table close enough to see the stage but far enough to indicate that I was neither a lesbian nor a bachelorette, nor a generous person. Onstage, a barefoot woman with video-game-inspired tattoos was compensating for her lack of pole skills by making a lap around the seats along the stage’s perimeter and smothering the gentlemen’s faces, one-by-one, in her cleavage. What she lacked in talent she made up for in enthusiasm. The dozen men encircling the stage — half bachelor-party boys, half regulars, plus one autistic-looking fellow solemnly slipping dollar bills into her thong — barely seemed to notice, much less mind. Nor did they pay attention when I pulled up a chair beside them, drunk enough now to be drawn to the front row by a voluptuous woman who pole-danced with an air of melancholy, her black ponytail skimming the ground. I sat there with a stack of dollars, waiting to be regaled with a show of tits and ass, but it was like I’d suddenly become invisible — an interloper passing through the world of men.

I arrived for the last day of the championships with a buzz on; earlier, at Tiny’s Diner, the bartender had twisted my arm, pouring a concoction that was roughly 3/4 vodka and 1/4 Bloody Mary mix. “Are you Tiny?” I inquired of the 300-pound man. “No — that’s Tiny,” he said, and pointed to the kitchen, where a man no less than 500 pounds fried up bacon and eggs. The bartender lifted his T-shirt, revealing a tattoo that read “100% VIKING” across his belly, like Tupac.

“You’re Sean Yokoyama,” I slurred to the man emerging from the Jack Shack with a fresh layer of gauze on his splintered thighs. “Everyone keeps saying I need to talk to you.” We’d speak after the last heat of the 90-foot climb, he promised, giving me the once-over, then heading to the poles. “Hey, Lisa!” he greeted Caleb’s mother with a hug, inviting her to crash at his house for an upcoming speed-climb event in Squamish, BC. “I don’t think I’m allowed there,” Lisa replied. “You get a DWI, you can’t go to Canada for ten years.”

The crowd had filled the bleachers for the LWC’s final competitions — hunters and fishermen in T-shirts for ATV-race fundraisers, ruddy-cheeked women wielding plates of wilting nachos, men with oxygen tanks driving motorized wheelchairs. A voice over the speakers offered a reminder: The winner of the chainsaw raffle would be announced at intermission. Dressed in flannel and suspenders in the beer tent, the Pinery Boys delivered a rousing performance of an old lumberjack folk song:

A is for axes, you very well know,

B is the boys who can swing them also,

C is for chopping we first do begin,

And D is for danger we often are in.

So merry, so merry, so merry are we,

No mortal on earth is as happy as we.

Sing hi derry, ho derry, hi derry down,

Give a shanty boy whiskey and nothing goes wrong!

On the dock across the water, Cassidy Scheer had won his first single-buck title, sawing through a white-pine log in 13.12 seconds. But I was focused on the 90-foot speed climbing finals, conveniently being held adjacent to the bar; based on the best times of the past two days, VanBeek, Graves, and Yokoyama made up three of the four slots that remained. I cracked a Spotted Cow as VanBeek wet his climbing rope and took his mark beneath the pole, facing off against Chet Isaacson, who looked to have just stepped off of an Archie Comics page. Both starts were explosive, but just past the 30-foot mark, VanBeek lost his footing, slipping down a bit and struggling to gain momentum. By the time he’d reached the top, Isaacson had made it to the bottom; the audience cheered anyway as VanBeek plummeted to earth with a good-natured “Wheeee!” Back on the ground, Graves met him with a hug. “Up and down,” VanBeek shrugged. “Gotta give ’em a show.”

So this was sportsmanship, I gathered — a noble quality which I did not possess. While friendly to their faces, I long to decimate my nemeses (both real and imagined), though a fight between two writers is too lame to even picture. The early evening sun had yet to set, but I was drunk. Any minute now, I’d be discovered for what I was — a degenerate, a vampire, and moreover, a FIB. Back at home, I would start jogging, drinking smoothies, doing CrossFit. I would be the type of person who attended family-friendly timber sports events without needing to smuggle in a backpack full of beers.

The sky glowed golden at the edges as Graves and Yokoyama took their marks for the final climbing heat, coiled like springs in the long shadows of the poles. “Judges and timers ready,” said the MC. “Contestants ready. Three... two... one...” And they were off, scrambling skyward as Lisa and I screamed, drowning out the rhythm of spurs sinking into pine. For 15 seconds, the two seemed neck and neck. But just past 80 feet, Yokoyama switched into overdrive — exploding to the summit, flinging out his legs, and falling from the sky in three seconds of chaos. With a time of 19.24, he’d beat the five-time title holder by more than two seconds. Leaping to Graves’s landing pad, Yokoyama wrapped his competitor in a tangled embrace that kind of turned me on.

“Climb fast — as fast as you can at the top,” said Yokoyama, still breathing heavy, when I asked him for the secret. “And when you’re at the top, you gotta flay your legs out and give ’er. That’s the technique that I’ve been working on, and it’s fucking scary, right?” We sat outside the Jack Shack, sipping algae-colored rum concoctions while he told me about nearly getting arrested in Japan. “The police were like, ‘You can’t climb telephone poles, buddy.’ Okay, that’s fair, what about a palm tree? ‘No, you can’t do that either.’ Alright, shit. So I bought two logs and floated them in the ocean to practice log rolling, and almost got arrested for that.”

Currently living in Vancouver, where he taught ocean ecology and geology at a local university, Yokoyama was born in Ontario and raised in Japan. (Rumors of his job at SpaceX had been exaggerated, but it was true that he flirted hard with everyone he met.) “So I used to do birds of prey demonstrations,” he said when I asked how he became a lumberjack. “I was flying bald eagles and peregrine falcons and Harris’s hawks. In Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, I met this traveling lumberjack show, and they said, ‘Hey, can we hold your bird?’ I said, ‘Sure! Can I hop on your wet log?’ I hopped on the log, and I was able to beat the crew. So they said, ‘Okay, you wanna climb up this pole? It’s only 40 feet.’ I strapped on some spurs the next day and climbed up to the top. They said, ‘Hey, you’re hired!’ and I thought it was a joke.”

After a week of training, Yokoyama was good enough for shows, and immediately hit the road as a freelance lumberjack performer, flying out to Alaska and Utah and Michigan while finishing his masters in planetary science. Eventually he learned that competitions made better money. In his spare time, he paraglides, scuba dives, and indulges in meteoritics — cracking open meteorites and studying what’s inside. “Oh, you’re one of these guys who needs constant stimulation,” I said. Yokoyama shook his head. “I just say yes to everything. ‘Go climb that thing.’ Alright.”

“Where’s the party at this evening?” I asked.

“Everyone’s going to the Mexican restaurant beside the Holiday Inn,” he said. “We’ll have tequila shots with the logrollers. You should come.”

It was dark when I arrived at Los Portales, where giddy lumberjacks were spilling beers and shouting over mariachi music. I lingered in the doorway, watching the tan and sweaty people clap their competitors with hugs. I pictured myself among them for one happy moment. Oh, to be a lumberjack!