Oregon Man Honors Heritage Carving Totem Poles In Cedar

GLIDE, Ore. - A wild woman has been occupying Larry Cole's time.

She stares back at him with a formidable face - her nostrils flaring, her lips pursed, her cheekbones jutting out just below her eye sockets.

The more intense she looks, the more pleased Cole becomes.

The woman is one of four characters Cole is carving on a 25-foot totem pole.

"When I start carving on the face, I get really excited," said the 62-year-old Cole as he sat on a thick foam pad on the cedar pole and chipped away at the figure with a tiny knife. Cedar shavings lined the ground around him and the sound of rushing water drifted up from nearby Little River.

Native American legend says the wild woman, called Dzunkwa, hides in the forest, makes a strange clucking sound with her tongue and will try to steal children.

"I think that's how the Indians got their children home from the forest," he said.

Cole is carving the totem pole on the site where it will be erected in front of Red Butte Pack Station, the home and business of Steve and Barbara McElmurray, 14 miles southeast of Glide on Little River Road.

The McElmurrays, who raise goats to use as pack animals for guided trail hikes, cut the cedar tree on their property and Cole has been whittling away at it on rain-free mornings since late November.

"Cedar is traditional so that's what we used," Cole said.

He drives by his work in progress just after 6 each morning while on his way home from working the graveyard shift at Glide Lumber Products, where he's the cleanup crew, night watchman and boiler and kiln operator. He took that job after working 34 years at the Champion International mill in Roseburg that closed in 1992. Then Cole eats breakfast and travels three miles back downstream to begin chiseling, as long as he has a minimum of four hours to work.

Cole began at the top of the totem pole, carving out three watchmen - one to look out to sea and the other two to look up the coastline in each direction.

Sitting in crouched positions, with their knees in front of them and their hands and shoulders at their sides, the watchmen wear conical-shaped chief's hats.

Below the watchmen is a raven with an outstretched beak, large wings folded at his sides and pronounced claws. A sea bear, a mythical Native American creature that lives in the water, is the pole's final character. When finished, he will be holding a chinook salmon in his paws.

This is the second 25-foot totem pole Cole has carved since he started sculpting figures out of wood about six years ago. He picked up the hobby after his middle daughter - he has five grown children - gave him a book called "The Totem Carvers."

It was the same daughter, Lori, who traced the family's roots back to Chief Comcomly, a Chinook Indian who befriended members of the Lewis and Clark expedition when they reached the mouth of the Columbia River.

Though his full-blooded Native American ancestors are about seven generations back, Cole has always been proud of his heritage and carving Native American figures seemed a fascinating way to honor it.

Cole, who models his work after the British Columbia tribe of Kwakiutl Indians, taught himself to carve by reading books and practicing.

"I'd never done anything with my art," said Cole, whose father and sister were both talented artists. "I tried this. It intrigued me and it worked. It's one of the most fascinating things I've ever done."

Cole carved some Native American masks and a peace pipe out of pipestone before tackling his first 25-foot totem pole, which he spent 140 hours working on over several months' time.

When he retires in a few years, he would like to work up to a 50-foot pole and make one or two a year to sell. Like today, his carving will have to allow him time for his other favorite hobby, hunting.

Cole does nearly all of his carving by hand, wielding an antique hatchet to remove the bark and an adz, which the Native Americans used to hollow out canoes, to make initial cuts. He said he sometimes "cheats a little bit" by using an electric angle grinder with a disk to hew large areas, such as the raven's wings.