A Quiet Siuslaw Tells Story Of Disappearing River Tugs -- Decline Came In Past 20 Years

FLORENCE, Ore. - Once, the tugs skittered around the Siuslaw waterfront like so many water spiders, always busy, always working.

Only a couple of decades ago, it took four or five of them to keep things moving at Florence's harbor and eastward up the river. Now, only the Carol plies that territory as the last independent tug to work the Siuslaw.

Frank Brooks, who shepherds the Carol on its rounds, does it with a philosophy that old-time river-tug operators would understand.

``In this business,'' he says, ``you learn to do everything with patience. You work with the tide, always with the tide. There's no hurrying it. You do things when the time is right.''

Recently, Brooks, 70, got the call to help berth the huge new barge crane purchased by the Port of Siuslaw. But such jobs are a rarity for a local tug these days.

The truth is that there's little of the classic push-and-pull work left for the Carol to do. The work of setting piling and building new docks has become the prime reason for its existence. That keeps it from joining some of its old companions, the Iris J. and the Norsky, which now sit on dry land berths amid riverside weeds.

It's worse at most of the small ports up and down the coast. The Carol is an oddity. Waldport has no local tugs. Nor does Newport, even though it gets an occasional visit from an oceangoing ship that needs assistance. When it happens, the tugs come from as far away as Coos Bay.

John Mohr, manager of the Port of Newport, knows why.

``People who drive around Oregon go along the rivers and wonder why they see all the old pilings that run for miles and miles,'' he says. ``They were for tying up log rafts. It was all the log rafts that kept all the tugs busy.''

In the same era that logs were being moved to mills by water, a fair amount of finished lumber was shipped by barge. The small tugs that could work upstream from the coast jockeyed their way down to the ocean with barges that sometimes packed as much as 4 million board feet of lumber. There, the loads were picked up by larger, oceangoing tugs.

But precious few logs are moved by water anymore. And truck and rail carrier have largely replaced the lumber barges that once floated down the coast's smaller rivers.

What's left for Brooks and the Carol is pushing up and down the Siuslaw with a work barge and a pile driver. Sometimes, when they get as far upstream as Mapleton, they pass the Davidson Industries mill complex, where a company tug, the Mary Ann, still shoves logs around in the river. But the Mary Ann sticks close to its corporate home; only the Carol ranges the river.

Brooks has operated the Carol only since 1986. But he knows well the story of Oregon's disappearing river tugs.

``Everything just changed real fast in the late 1970s,'' he recalls. ``The ecologists pretty much put an end to the business of storing big log rafts in the river. And the mills were going to dry land storage of their logs instead of water storage, anyhow.

``They were starting to get away from shipping by barge, too. And then we had that recession in 1980 and mills started closing. It just never came back.''

Brooks' tiny operation has the grand name of Oceanway Tug and Barge Co. Deadwood businessman Don Wilbur, a former lumber-mill operator, is a partner in the tiny company, mainly because he wanted to make sure a tug and pile-driving operation remained on the river.

The real history of tug operations on the Siuslaw rests with Trygve Nordahl, a veteran Norwegian skipper who once ran five tugs. In a lifetime on the river, Nordahl, now 76 and retired, did every imaginable task on the Siuslaw from delivering mail to moving houses.

``I was the only one,'' says Nordahl, who occasionally joins Brooks for a bit of river work. ``I had all the tugs on the river. I hired skippers and kept them going. There was always enough work.''

When Nordahl began in the years just after World War II, the river was still the prime conduit for moving logs. Sometimes they'd be floated down creeks from high up in the Siuslaw drainage system. More often, they'd be dumped into the river by trucks. The tugs assembled them into rope-bound rafts 55 feet wide and 360 feet long and moved them, as needed, to the mills.

Between logs and lumber barges, pile-driving and odd jobs along the river, Nordahl stayed busy until his retirement in 1975. When he sold out, three of his tugs, including the Carol, were still operating.

The business passed through a couple of hands over the next decade.

By the time Brooks got the Carol in 1986, the old way of doing business on the river was mostly gone. It's been two years since a lumber barge has traveled the Siuslaw.

In the pile-driving operation, Brooks sets the wooden posts on which docks are built for houses and businesses along the river. The pile driver and other equipment needed for that work are carried on an ancient wooden barge that's moved by the Carol.

``It's a good way to work,'' Brooks says. ``It's the kind of job where people figure you're the one who knows how it needs to be done. And I think there's enough work out there to keep the tug going for a few years.''