This is our 101st issue, which adds up to thousands of stories. There are a lot I remember fondly, but one in particular sticks in my mind – a story entitled “The Man Who Freed a Giant” in the Winter 2012 issue. It was a feature about the sculptor Joe Wheelright, who, with the help of loggers and truckers and arborists and steelworkers, plucked a 40-foot-tall, 8,000-pound tree out of the ground, flipped it upside down, and turned it into a man. I guess I remember it so clearly because it took two years to report and the story had a surprise ending no one saw coming; also because four years later Joe died of cancer, a reminder to us all to build our giants while we can.
As we were putting this twenty-fifth anniversary issue together, I got a note from Brittani Osmer-Fisk, whose father, Scott, was one of the loggers who helped Joe move the Giant. She told me that Scott had died unexpectedly last autumn. Brittani asked us for a couple copies of that old issue, remembering how excited her father had been to be a part of the magazine. “He felt like a king to have been in that article,” she wrote.
She also told us about the sendoff that friends and family had given her father, which I’ll share here because it’s a great story in its own right.
Scott died on September 14, 2018. The next day, his daughter Courtni posted on Facebook “calling all truckers and loggers” to meet at Scott’s shop in Bradford, Vermont, for a final ride. Fellow trucker Allen Thurston and trucking and logging business owner Stacey Thomson chipped in, spreading the word and fine-tuning the logistics.
A week later, on a bluebird day, 69 trucks and drivers gathered at Scott’s yard and then drove west. Neighbor Ted Salomaa, driving Scott’s first truck, led the pack; Scott’s daughters Courtni, Brittani, Dayna, and a family friend each drove a different truck from the Fisk fleet. The line of trucks wound through the little Vermont hill towns that remain the spiritual home of this magazine, even if our mailing address has changed – Corinth, Orange, Washington, Chelsea, Tunbridge.
By the time the convoy arrived at the Tunbridge fairgrounds – an oasis nestled in a green valley along the banks of the White River – there were 80 trucks. Sam Lincoln, deputy commissioner of Vermont’s Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation, was there with his personal truck, and he and Brittani’s father-in-law Harold Osmer shuttled 300-plus people to the graveside event and then to the pig roast-potluck that was held afterward. “There was a steady song of truck horns that echoed through that valley,” Courtni remembered. “We’re forever grateful to our father for bringing us up into such an amazing network of hardworking and incredible people.”
This magazine is foremost a celebration of nature and the forest. But it’s also a celebration of hardworking and incredible rural people. People like Scott Fisk and Joe Wheelright, who built their lives amid, and with, trees. One who made his living with a truck and a feller-buncher, the other with a paper sketchbook and a chisel, but whose orbits overlapped in the forests they both loved.
I can’t think of a better way to open our twenty-fifth anniversary issue than by putting a frame around this spirit.