The Wannabe Doctor: A Man's Quest Amid Psychiatry's Identity Crisis

By John Gill

In the 1970s in the United States, many medical professionals held psychiatry in contempt. An innovative study designed by psychologist David Rosenhan, and published in Science in 1973, provided strong evidence that psychiatrists could not reliably distinguish between normality and mental illness.

In early 1974, the American Psychiatric Association “settled” a notable scientific issue by popular vote of its members. As soon as the votes were counted, homosexuality was no longer a psychiatric diagnosis.

Critics of psychiatry were asking the APA questions about the profession’s core concepts. What is the difference between a mental disorder and distress that is a normal occurrence in our lives? What are the causes of mental disorders? The APA’s answers were evasive.

The APA decided the best way to improve psychiatry’s medical image was to extensively revise its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The first two editions of the DSM were little used by psychiatrists and were almost unknown to the public.

But DSM-III would be vastly different. To this day, DSM-III significantly affects millions of Americans, often in harmful ways.

The Wannabe Doctor tells how the career of a fictional psychiatrist was affected by psychiatry’s desperate claim to be a branch of medicine. Our story also tells how the APA’s diagnostic criteria jeopardized the life of one of Dr. Grant Hauser’s patients, eighteen-year-old Quentin Holt.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662442933

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Big Blow

Who has seen the wind?

Neither I nor you:

But when the leaves hang trembling,

The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I:

But when the trees bow down their heads,

The wind is passing by.

—Christina Rossetti

Who Has Seen the Wind?

In Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872)

The Columbus Day Storm of 1962 harmed many people. Among those whose lives were changed forever were three young loggers who, after the storm, helped salvage blowdown timber from Oregon’s Cascade Mountains.

In continual danger, choker setters Grant Hauser, Clayton Holt, and Kevin Meadows watched out for each other. The strenuous work and frequent peril forged a friendship that would last the rest of their lives.

The Big Blow struck Northwestern California then moved north to Western Oregon, Western Washington, and Southwestern British Columbia. Winds exceeded 100 miles per hour at many locations. In Oregon, they gusted to 145 at Cape Blanco and 138 at Monmouth. At some places, the top speed wasn’t measured because the wind gauge was blown away.

Sixty-three people were officially listed as having died from either direct or indirect effects of the storm. The wind injured hundreds more, destroyed homes, collapsed barns onto livestock, downed hundreds of miles of electrical lines, and knocked down millions of trees. In the three West Coast states, fifteen billion board feet of timber—enough to frame a million homes—were laid low.

The storm had formed in the North Pacific Ocean about twenty degrees west of the international date line and fifteen degrees north latitude. This was just far enough north of the equator for the Coriolis force to cause the wind to spin counterclockwise, as winds do in the Northern Hemisphere.

After the storm traveled thousands of miles easterly across the Pacific, it turned north, beginning at the latitude of Eureka, California. From there on, the storm’s low-pressure center streamed parallel to North America’s West Coast, moving at an average speed of forty miles per hour. For this last leg of the storm’s journey, its center stayed on a northerly path about fifty miles offshore, close enough to send powerful pressure gradients inland.

The force from the south along with the west-to-east pressure gradients funneled the wind north up Oregon’s Willamette Valley between the Coast Range and the Cascade Range. Constricted, it speeded up. As the wind streamed north through the valley, the Coriolis force caused its eastern edge to spin along the west slopes of the Cascade Range.

Rain had saturated the ground. More trees were uprooted than snapped off. Vast stands of Douglas fir, western red cedar, and western hemlock were laid low.

Weyerhaeuser Company owned many of these damaged areas, including land that harbored patches of old-growth timber. Especially hard-hit were trees along exposed ridges. But at that, the haphazard winds did not make a clean sweep.

Just below a ridge top, two huge Douglas firs stood near each other, having sprouted eight hundred years earlier from seeds of the same cone. On that Friday afternoon, October 12, 1962, the wind swirled past one giant but uprooted its twin, unearthing a mass of roots seven times the diameter of the tree’s trunk at its base.

Trees lay at every angle, crisscrossed in layers as if titans had been interrupted in a game of jackstraw. Some trees lay downslope from their root wads, some upslope, and some across slope. Many of the downed trees were bowed by other trees lying under or over them. Each mass of radiating roots was laced with soil and rocks. For some trees, the roots had separated completely from the ground. Other trees remained anchored even though they were now horizontal or canted.

The wind-thrown timber would be unmarketable within months if left exposed to the Douglas fir beetle. And as the trees dried, the risk of wildfire mounted. For timber owners, salvage logging was the obvious solution.

Thousands of root wads dotted the hillsides and created complex hazards that loggers had never seen. When a bucker sawed a downed tree into logs, he inescapably freed the root wad from its stem. Sooner or later, the wad was apt to tumble downslope and ricochet from sidehill to sidehill.

The steepness and roughness of the slopes and ravines directed and redirected each careening mass, sometimes causing a root wad to skip and bounce sideways in its overall downhill journey.

Don Hall Rodgers

Chapter 2

Salvaging Timber by High Lead

With cable systems, the logs are moved to the machine. The machine, or yarder, is stationary and transfers power to the logs by flexible steel cables called lines. The process of moving logs to the machine on a landing is called yarding. The term yarding is applied to cable systems capable of vertical lift. This means the logs can be at least partially suspended part of the time during the yarding cycle.

[…]

The spar is perhaps the most important element in cable yarding. Spars, along with the natural terrain and some other physical factors, allow the vertical lift so important to cable logging.

—Steve Conway

Logging Practices: Principles of Timber Harvesting Systems (1976)

In November 1962, Weyerhauser began to extract blowdown timber from the Cascade Mountains above Marcola, Oregon, a former sawmill town.

In 1939, Fischer Lumber Company had built a large sawmill and log pond in Marcola. The mill provided good jobs until 1956 when accessible timber was playing out, and a labor dispute was heating up. Dale Fischer, the mill’s owner, closed down and left for better business opportunities.

After the sawmill shut down, it was hard to find work around Marcola. The few employers included gyppo logging outfits, some cattle ranches, and a turkey farm. A married couple learned that raising chinchillas and nutrias wasn’t as profitable as advertised. Wayne Mason’s Market employed a few locals who sold groceries and hunting rifles until the building burned down. Wayne built a new store a quarter mile from the original one’s charred remains.

Art Moran’s service station sold the only gas between Springfield and Brownsville, and employed Art full-time as well as another three men part-time. After the Victory movie theater shut down, Chuck Radspinner removed the seats and made furniture there. He kept his day job at the Weyerhaeuser wood products plant on the edge of Springfield, twelve miles to the west. Some Marcola residents drove twelve to twenty miles to sawmill jobs on the outskirts of Springfield and Eugene.

* * *

Buckers worked the hillsides above Marcola, and cut the wind-thrown trees from their root wads. They sawed most of the logs into standard sawmill lengths, depending on where trees may have broken or twisted. But sometimes they cut the most entangled trees into shorter logs. This lowered their commercial value but made it possible to extract them, as well as the standard-length logs, from the worst of the jackstraw tangles.

Hook tender Don Landau and rigging slinger Alan Janowski inspected the salvage area just as the buckers were finishing their work. They looked for anything to do with trees, logs, root wads, or terrain that could endanger the choker setters who would take over where the buckers left off. If Don and Alan could not eliminate a specific hazard, at least they would know of it so they could warn their men.

They made their way to the wind-thrown twin fir. The giant had fallen so the stem lay straight downslope from its root wad. The buckers had freed the stem from the wad and cut it into logs.

Don and Alan stood where they could see both the root wad and the logs.

You don’t see many this big anymore, Don said. They were common when I was your age.

Looks like three truckloads of logs. All from one tree.

Good, but not so good is this granddaddy root wad. I hate to think of us working downhill from it.

Alan said, I’ll check it out.

Try to see if any roots still hold Godzilla in place.

Alan used a stick to probe the ground, looking for roots. But the wad hid a large area where roots might still anchor it.

There’s a lot I can’t see.

Make a judgment call.

When we start yarding, Alan said, we can hit Godzilla with a log on its way to the landing. That could send him downhill before our crew has to work down there. If that doesn’t do the job, there’s probably nothing else we can do except watch him whenever we’re downslope.

Don said, Anything more?

It’s possible there are roots that aren’t broken off that still hold the wad in place. I’m worried that Godzilla doesn’t seem settled in. Seems perched like a bird ready to take flight.

Yeah, I’d rather he was nestled in.

We’re spending a lot of time on this one problem, Alan said. Old man Weyerhaeuser would be hacked off if he saw us standing here talking. Better move on to problems we can do something about.

You’re right. We’ll bump the wad with a log. If that fails, we’ll just watch him. Watching for something that might kill you—that’s logging, always has been.

* * *

High-climber Harvey Lawrence spat out a stream of Copenhagen tobacco juice.

Thanks for asking me to help you pick the spar tree.

I learned my lesson, Don said. You cussed me out when I picked a spar that turned out to have rot about seventy feet up. You said I put you and the crew in danger. Threatened to kick my butt.

Two heads are better than one. You know more about logging than I ever will, but high climbing gives me a certain perspective.

I know where you’re going. To avoid hang-ups, the log’s lead end has to be lifted up, and that takes a solid spar tree. I knew that when you were still in diapers.

Don and Harvey chose the twin fir that the swirling winds had missed. One hundred ninety feet tall, at a ridgetop, on mostly level ground, and apparently well rooted, the tree seemed to be the perfect spar.

Harvey put a coil of rope and a wedge in his knapsack, tethered a chain saw and a single-bladed ax to his tool belt, and strapped spurs onto his calk boots.

He tied a special rope to a steel loop on the right side of his safety belt. He accepted Don’s help in passing the rope around the massive trunk. Then he threaded it through loops on the left side of his belt. Using a slipknot, he tied the cord to a left-side loop. A cable within the rope would prevent him from accidentally cutting it in two.

Harvey sank his spurs into the thick bark and flipped the bight of the rope up the tree as he stepped up the trunk. He leaned back into the rope that encircled him and the tree. While he climbed, he cinched up the rope as the tree’s circumference shrank.

Harvey sawed off limbs as he came to them. He tested for rot every few feet by thumping the stem with the hammer side of his ax and listening carefully.

He stopped climbing when he was twenty feet from the top and where the tree was still two feet in diameter. A spar needed a sturdy top to support the heavy rigging—the straps, blocks, and cables—that Harvey would install.

He judged the safest direction for the top to fall, and chopped an undercut notch on that side of the tree. He sawed the back cut and drove his wedge into the cleft so the top would not kick back at him. He gave the wedge a final tap and moved down the tree several feet. He sank his spurs into the bark and leaned back into the rope, gripping it with both hands.

The massive top leaned until it reached ninety degrees then fell. The Douglas fir swayed back and forth twenty feet in each direction, with Harvey along for the ride. Each cycle was slightly shorter and less violent, but the to-and-fro continued for three minutes.

Harvey leaned to the side and puked. The ground crew dodged and laughed and pointed at their high climber. He gave them the finger.

Harvey stayed where he was till he felt better then he spoke to the tree he had just killed.

Way to go, Doug. After surviving a century and a big storm, you earned the right to protest. Please understand that I’m just following orders.

Harvey removed the rope from his backpack and lowered one end. The ground crew tied the rope to a small block and strap. Hand over hand, Harvey pulled them up and used the strap to hang the block from the spar. He opened the side of the pass block, placed his rope on the sheave, and snapped the block shut. He let both ends of the rope fall to the ground.

Harvey had rigged the spar as much as he could for now. He would complete the job after a yarder and a log loader were delivered to the landing. Having climbed up a tree, Harvey climbed down from a pole.

A truck towing a flatbed trailer delivered a massive sled-mounted yarder to the landing. The yarder would haul in logs from the hillside below. A separate truck and trailer delivered a log-loading vehicle for moving the logs from the landing onto trucks that would haul them to Weyerhauser’s Springfield mill.

Besides a diesel engine, the yarder had three large horizontal drums on which cables were wound. Like a fishing reel, each drum could pay out or reel in the particular cable that it stored. The first drum held the main line, which was one and one-fourth inches in diameter. After the spar was fully rigged, it would be the main line that would pull the logs to the landing.

The second drum held a seven-eighth-inch diameter haulback cable. After a turn of logs was delivered to the landing, the haulback line would return the main line to the choker setters. The main line and the haulback line were called the running lines.

Butt rigging—a series of heavy steel links, swivels, and shackles—connected the main line to the haulback line and carried up to six chokers.

The third drum held a lightweight cable called haywire that a choker setter could pull by hand. Because of the great weight of the running lines, the area to be logged was initially outlined by stringing haywire. An eye at the end of the haywire could be connected to an eye of either the haulback or the main line as needed for pulling either into place.

The yarder engineer checked the drums, levers, and other moving parts. He had operated this machine on other landings.

The area to be logged would be triangular, outlined by the running lines. One long side of the triangle would be formed by the main line routed between the logs and the landing. The other long side and the base of the triangle would be formed by the haulback line passing through big blocks attached to corner stumps.

To finish rigging the spar pole, Harvey attached a lightweight pass cable to his rope and pulled it through the block that he had hung at the top of the spar. The pass cable replaced the rope. A crewman attached one end of the pass line to the winch of a D-9 cat.

A cat skinner used the winch and the pass cable to hoist Harvey to the top of the pole. Then the cat skinner delivered each piece of rigging to Harvey when he called for it.

Harvey hung the main line’s bull block near the top of the spar and the haulback block a few feet lower. He attached stabilizing guy lines to the spar pole, and the ground crew anchored the guys to notched stumps.

Connected to the haywire, the main line and the haulback line were spooled out from the yarder’s drums and through the corner blocks. Heavy cables now outlined the work area. Fully rigged, the spar was now the center of a web of running lines and stabilizing lines.

The stage was set. The main line could haul in logs from anywhere in the layout.

Chapter 3

You’re Scaring Me

Fear cannot be banished, but it can be calm and without panic; and it can be mitigated by reason and evaluation.

—Vannevar Bush

Modern Arms and Free Men (1949)

One drizzly December morning in 1962, an ex-school bus passed through Marcola and up a mountain road. The yellow crummy stopped at a log landing, and eight men got out, each carrying a lunch bucket. On a typical day, they would have immediately gone to their work locations, but this was their first day at this hazardous logging site, and three of the men were new to logging.

Having arrived earlier on his own, the hook tender convened a safety meeting on the landing in front of the yarder. Don Landau’s crew consisted of a yarder engineer, a rigging slinger, a whistle punk, two chasers, and three choker setters.

Rigging slinger Alan Janowski was second in command. He oversaw the chasers and the choker setters. He picked the logs to make up each turn, and was responsible for getting them to the landing.

The yarder engineer Martin Schroder was a key man at the landing and for the entire logging operation. Martin achieved productivity and crew safety by starting and stopping the yarder’s drums at the right moment.

By motioning to the engineer when to start and stop the main line, the chasers stacked the logs as they were yarded onto the landing. As logs were added to the stack or deck, the chasers unhooked the chokers and got out of the way so the butt rigging and chokers could be returned to the brush.

The whistle punk ran a long electrical cord from a whistle mounted on the yarder down into the brush where he could see the rigging slinger and the choker setters. Using a series of long and short whistles, the punk relayed signals from either the rigging slinger or the hook tender to the yarder engineer.

In their twenties, Clayton Holt, Grant Hauser, and Kevin Meadows were new to logging. This was their first day on the job. As choker setters, they had the most dangerous duties and the lowest pay at $2.37 per hour.

Clay had grown up along Parsons Creek near Marcola and had attended Mohawk High School. Grant had grown up in Coburg, a rival of Mohawk in B-league athletics. Clay and Grant had recently returned to Springfield after serving separate tours in the army. Kevin, the youngest of the three, had grown up in Thurston, a Springfield suburb, and was saving money to pay for the rest of his university education.

Don said, The Columbus Day Storm hit this place hard. I’ve never seen so much blowdown. Our job is to pull logs out of this tangle without getting killed or crippled.

Listen up, you guys, Alan said. Don is Weyerhaeuser’s best hook tender. What he says could save your life.

Don made eye contact with each crew member.

"The Columbus Day Storm was the strongest of my lifetime. Wind blew the cups off the wind gauges at some weather stations. News reporters said so. Think about it. The wind blew the cups off the damn wind gauges. And the soggy ground made things worse.

Here’s what makes this site so dangerous. The amount of downed timber, the helter-skelter lay of the logs, root wads everywhere, slopes steeper than a steer’s face. Some places you can walk a quarter mile on downed timber and never touch the ground. Buckers have worked this area, but there still are logs laying on top of logs. A log in a bind, bent or stressed by other logs, is spring-loaded, waiting to kill you.

What can we do?