Personal Essay by Rick Fordyce in the Seattle Times

3/9/24, 10:22 AM The Seattle Times https://replica.seattletimes.com/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&pubid=84d463e0-c035-4c49-902d-95c722bfe073 1/3 Even on Cape Cod, the smell of cedar takes me back to Granite Falls MY TAKE | Personal essays BY RICK FORDYCE - SPECIAL TO THE SEATTLE TIMES Do you believe in fate? I don’t. But maybe I should, given how it all began. I was 19 when I went to the Fremont bar, the one that on Wednesday nights had a live band and cheap beer and would take any fake ID under the sun. I saw the girl in the corner who was not dancing, downed my beer and after a brief introduction, onto the dance floor we strode. It was a few dates later that I was introduced to her older brother, who happened to drive a supply truck for an Eastside roofing company — for all those hundreds and hundreds of cedar-shake roofs. His regular helper was out, he needed one for the next day and off I went. There’s been no turning back. At first, in that winter of 1972, the job took us all over the Eastside, from Bothell to Renton, with Kirkland, Bellevue and Issaquah in between; a carpet of tract houses unrolling over forests and farms from the shores of Lake Washington to the Cascade Mountains. We started early from the tiny office in Kirkland — 7 a.m., which for a 19- year-old stoner was a challenge. First, it was over to the supply yard, where a forklift loaded the flatbed with enough bundles of cedar shakes for two or three houses. It is one of the purest smells I know of, freshly split cedar; slightly pungent, almost intoxicating when inhaled, a doorway into a world outside of which nothing else exists. And then it was off in the truck to Newport Shores or Somerset or Juanita or Yarrow Point. I’d back the truck up to the newly framed house, put a plank across and handcarry 20 or 30 50-pound bundles of fresh-split cedar shakes onto the roof, slatted so that the cedar could breathe because it still sought oxygen. And then there were the shake mills of North Bend and Granite Falls. Over time, when the Kirkland yard ran out, they trusted me to drive the 40 miles up Highway 9 to Granite Falls, where the shake mill sat at the base of the Mountain Loop Highway. I grew up around the University District of Seattle, which in 1972 looked like a university district, but the shake mill in Granite Falls, which in one form or another had been there since 1900, looked like 1900. Into the muddy yard I pulled the truck, and into the office with the order I went, and then drove the truck to the splitting shed where the pallets of bundles awaited. And it was there that I could catch a glimpse into the shed of the work crew as they split the shakes. In that winter of 1972, the Burt Reynolds movie “Deliverance” was playing in theaters, and had the director ever needed extras to populate the Appalachian hills that the cast wandered into, they could not have done better than the older crew members of the Granite Falls mill. Few had all 10 fingers; their grins, aimed at the green city kid, revealed teeth — those that were remaining — of yellow-green, stained by cigars, the glowing stubs of which angled out through the whiskers of their mouths. Clothing, in warmer weather, was denim and flannel but in the rainy winter months, old, dark, bulky coats, stitched and patched, covered the multiple layers underneath. Muddy boots, and, on some, a pointed wool cap, completed their work garb. The enormous old growth cedar trees that once carpeted the Northwest coast are largely gone, but homes were made to last. By the 1970s, the use of the last of the true old growth for cedar shakes was ending. Before then, that was all that was used and driving around rural Puget Sound one would frequently see a long-ago collapsed barn, or shed or cabin with a still functioning roof. Raining out? No problem, salmon supper’s at noon in my great-great-greatgreatgrandfather’s longhouse, one Indigenous citizen may have said to another, back in the day. I will still occasionally put on a red cedar roof, but only in the wealthiest of neighborhoods, as the price of cedar shingles is now prohibitive despite the use of the inferior quality new growth. Back east on Cape Cod, where once upon a time my shingling trade migrated, the occasional red cedar roof comes along in the wealthiest of ocean-view neighborhoods. There, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, when I open a bundle and the wondrous smell of cedar fills the air, I will snatch the small white label as it blows away and read the mill location, which now is usually Forks, 3,000 miles away. But sometimes the label will say “Granite Falls.” And I remember it all began on a dance floor in Fremont. Rick Fordyce is a Seattle native and third generation Washingtonian. He is the author of three books of fiction, including “I Climbed Mt. Rainier With Jimi Hendrix’s High School Counselor and Other stories of the Pacific Northwest.” He lives in Seattle and on Cape Cod.