Tug: A Log Boom’s Journey

Growing up in Saskatchewan, the only tugboat I knew about was the Little Golden Book’s Scuffy in his storybook setting. Now that I live near British Columbia’s Fraser River, tugboats and their loads are a more familiar sight. In this book, one of my favourite West Coast author-illustrators, who has more than sixty-five publications to his credit, paints a more realistic picture of one of these iconic marine workhorses.

The map on the front end paper of Ritchie’s book outlines the journey of the titular tugboat and its boom, from where a logging truck delivers the logs to the water’s edge in Indian Arm (a finger of the Pacific Ocean at the end of Burrard Inlet) around the perimeter of the city of Vancouver, and through the Fraser River delta upstream to a sawmill.

The author has mined his own childhood memories of watching life on the river to create the first-person narrative here. A boy and his father are at the collection point preparing for a job. Mom has dropped them off at the dock and promises to be at the end of the route with the car, and so this seems to be a special excursion for the youngster.

The process begins:

The boom boat pushes the logs in place. Then the deckhand>

uses his pike pole to pull them together. He’s making the log boom.

The logs around the outside of the book are chained together.

Dad hooks the steel cable to the log boom, and we’re ready to tow.

The sentences are simple and the text brief, but there is still enough detail to allow readers to gain a complete sense of what this day’s work entails.

The tug with its load goes on its way. With a darkly dramatic picture to illustrate the scene, a storm comes up, and the heavy waves that result cause one giant piece of cedar to slip free of the boom.

Dad says logs are valuable, but we can’t go back for it.

We need to get to the river before the tide turns.

Once into the river, Dad has to cut the engine to deal with a submerged log (a ‘deadhead’) that has probably been cast adrift from another boat. The journey upriver resumes.

The wind blows, and the smell of the sea is gone.

Now I smell the sawmill.

The tugboat has arrived safely at its destination, the boom is released to the sawmill workers, and Dad thanks the boy for his help. This acknowledgment, as well as the obvious respect of the child for his father’s work, is heartwarming.

At the end of the book, there is a glossary of logging terms, supplemented by line drawings of some of the log boom’s fittings on the back endpapers. There is also an author’s note about where the idea for the book came from and some thoughts regarding forest conservation.

The tone of the text is workaday, but there is a lot that is bracing in the clear pencil-and-ink illustrations which are full of light and which employ extensive use of white, with blue and gray tones. We feel we are out in the wind, enjoying this time on the water. Although the focus is on the tugboat and its occupants, we can also see what is happening to other craft on the river and take a look at activity on the shoreline along the route. There is an especially engaging centre spread which shows the interior of the tugboat’s cabin. Dad sits at a fixed desk covered in an array of equipment communicating on the radio while the boy kneels on a bench to look out the window. There is a wall map, a small sink and a coffee pot, and an eager little white dog that sharp eyes may have noted on a few other pages of the book.

Ritchie has captured a glimpse of a working waterway and translated it into a pleasant reading experience for primary children. Teachers will find Tug: A Log Boom’s Journey a useful resource in discussions of logging or in a unit on jobs. Other adults will enjoy sharing the book and examining the details in the pictures with young readers.