Michael Scott Baldwin

Mike Baldwin-Bean Creek Ridge area a few days before St Helens erupted. Had it not been for a Sunday, so many of our lives would have ended prematurely.

I was humbled to read of Mike's passing. I was running a log loader for IP when Mike came over to the logging side. By the end of the first season Mike was running a CAT skidder. The next year IP bought the FMC and the next few years we were a four-man crew and given some of the better old growth logs. It was a blast. We were all insane at work and after work we "played" hard, the last of the big old-growth loggers. These photos are from our last job together northwest of St Helens. We watched the Dog's Head grow everyday thinking we would have a front row seat less than a mile from the mountain. As it turned out, we were lucky the eruption happened on a Sunday or we would have been nothing other than spiritual particles. After St Helens I moved to Eugene-Springfield hooktending on a Washington SkyLock swing yarder and did that for two years with IP at Vaughn. I eventually went to work and became a hooktender and headrigger on a Skagit slackline machine for one of the larger private logging companies in Springfield.

I have thought about Mike often. We shared a similar spirituality as did so many of us young men and women of our era. I am grateful he hung onto that. Glad to know he found a path to sobriety. That was a long hard path. I finally admitted that I had a problem in 2007 and it took another couple years to rid myself of those demons.

I wish you and others who loved Mike and those he loved the very best. He is in a good place. I am sure I will meet him again as I approach that final edge of the Universe. And then, well who knows?

Tim
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