Lake of the Pines (LOP) is a man-made lake in the foothills between Auburn and Grass Valley. The lake is surrounded by an 18-hole golf course, which threads through homes in the planned community. My folks built a vacation home, and I was lucky to live there on my own one summer.

I had a couple of jobs that summer. My first job was within walking distance from my house at the LOP Clubhouse doing odd jobs. I loved walking to work at 7:00 AM to see hundreds of swallows warming themselves in the early morning sun while sitting on the telephone wires. As if on cue, they would, at once, burst into the air with deft acrobatic flight.

The Clubhouse intercom directed me to the barge moored at the dock. My favorite job was ferrying golfers across the lake. Many golfers only wanted to play nine holes, so I picked them up and took them across the lake from the first to the ninth hole, or back again. In the fresh, early mornings I was usually the first to break the surface of the water and it had a glass-like smoothness. The smooth surface reflected the sky, surrounding hills, and homes giving me and the golfers breathtaking views.

Eventually, I got a job at a lumber mill about ten miles away, raising my pay from $2.10 to $4.25 an hour. The mill took large logs and cut them into 4-foot pieces. They put the short logs into huge lathes to peel off long pieces of veneer about 3/8th inch thick. The veneer was then split lengthwise and chopped into thin pieces to make the slats used in wooden vegetable crates.

I was a "stacker" at the mill. As the wood was chopped into slats, women sorted them and positioned stacks of 30 for one final chop on the chopper, a machine that moved up and down at regular intervals. The chopper never stopped, unless we failed to keep up, and our bosses hated to see the chopper stop. My job was to remove the final product from the chopper between down stokes and stack the slats on a pallet. It was dangerous, and I could have lost my fingers had my concentration lapsed, even for a moment, while doing this work.

We came to know the women sorting the wood well enough to tease them now and then. I or my stacking partner would say something like, "Did you wake up late today? Your hair looks like my sister's troll doll."

Well, when we irritated one, they stuck together and got back at us. Instead of 30 high, the stacks were 40 high, forcing us to work far faster to keep up. If the stacks fell over when we placed them on the pallet, because we were working too fast, or the stacks were too high, it was even more difficult to keep up.

We'd work in frantic fashion, sweating and panting, to keep the chopper going. The women would laugh at us with smug satisfaction as we suffered from their vengeance. We knew we got what we deserved, and it was all in good fun.

Still, I was glad when that summer was over.

~ Andrew Laufer