Happy belated Leap Year. An extra day in the month of February has never been so useful. I don’t have Internet in my room at the hotel, which has limited my blogging, but I have been mostly out of the room anyway – running around the libraries of Portland, looking at men cutting down trees.

I’ve spent lots of time this week at the Oregon Historical Society, looking at their pictures and watching their videos of loggers from the 20s to the 60s. It’s great stuff, breathtakingly old and strange, but the videos can’t be removed from the library, which makes them only useful for my brain, and not for the cast.

So I spent yesterday going through a bunch of videos from the public library that might or might not have logging footage in them – mostly documentaries on forest fires. Some of them had a little. The best stuff we have, by far, though, is still the footage from the original film of SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION. Though that movie gets almost everything else wrong in the plot, its portrayal of the actual choker-setting scene (wrapping a big cable around a big log before said log gets dragged up a hill) is pretty great.

There’s also a little documentary called The Oregon Story: Logging through Oregon Public Broadcasting that I have on hold and am probably going to break down and order tomorrow.

And there are Youtube clips of recreational logging competitions.

I was saying to Toby the other day that this year of extreme specialization in a variety of very different subjects has given even my short attention span a lot to look at. In 2008 alone, it’s been El Paso, TX and Mexican immigration, the Greek chorus, and now Kesey, the Bus, and Oregon loggers.