Captain’s seen CdA transform

Forrest Schmeling earned his living on the water, wearing cork boots and herding logs across Lake Coeur d’Alene.

For 32 years, he captained tugboats, primarily the Florence Lee.

The green-and-white craft, with its deep-throated whistle, is the grande dame of tug boats on the lake. It makes a 30-hour trip from St. Maries to the lake’s outlet near the Spokane River, delivering logs.

Schmeling retired last month. Over the years, he watched a wholesale transformation of North Idaho’s waterfront from blue-collar industrial uses to high-end real estate. It was a change he observed with interest, and a bracing practicality.

“I think change is here, and it’s going to be for the good,” said the 61-year-old Schmeling. “It’s going to bring more money in, and it looks a lot nicer.”

Coeur d’Alene had five waterfront sawmills that needed log delivery when Schmeling became a tug captain in 1975. Now, it has one.

“We’re a business in transition,” said John Condon, general manager of North Idaho Maritime and Schmeling’s former boss.

The firm’s 12-tug fleet is starting to do more dock work for high-priced homes along the lake. Because of its background in hauling logs, North Idaho Maritime also has the expertise for heavier construction work, Condon said.

Timber was still king when Schmeling signed on as a tug operator. He was working at the Rutledge sawmill, located where the Coeur d’Alene Resort Golf Course now stands. Tugs delivered daily loads of hemlock, fir, larch and cedar logs to the mill. Schmeling got a hankering to sit in the captain’s seat.

Lafferty Transportation Co. – a forerunner to North Idaho Maritime – hired him for about $5 per hour. Since tug operators didn’t need licenses at the time, Schmeling learned the ropes from another captain.

“I remember him telling me to be careful with the boat, not to hurt the propeller,” Schmeling said. The advice served him well for three decades.

Lean as a boy through the waist and hips, Schmeling sports a shock of wiry gray hair and a certain agility of movement. The cleats in his cork boots gave him traction on the tugs’ tar-covered decks. Occasionally, he had to walk the boom sticks – floating logs that are chained together to define the shipping channel.

Did he ever fall in? “Oh, two or three times,” said Schmeling, with characteristic brevity.

Was he ever scared during high water? Schmeling paused. “There were times when I was very, very careful.”

The Florence Lee’s 650-horsepower engine pushes 200 to 300 truckloads of logs across the lake at speeds of less than 1 mph. Managing the load requires a steady hand and a tolerance for diesel fumes.

Schmeling and others like him bring respect to blue-collar occupations, according to Condon.

“When you’re out there in the elements on your own, you have to have a certain amount of skill,” Condon said. “You have to have a certain amount of calmness.”

The job tends to breed longevity, said Ken Parkin, North Idaho Maritime’s tug, barge and crane manager, noting that most of the tug operators have decades of experience on the water.

“It was always decent-paying work,” Parkin added. Most captains earn $15 to $20 an hour.

For tug operators, the weather is a constant character in the lake’s ever-changing script. Fog, wind and ice are givens. During the winter, an ice-breaker is required to shove logs through frozen expanses of water. At 20 below, searing cold radiates from the all-metal tug. The steel hull becomes brittle, which makes it easier to punch holes into the boat.

The St. Joe River was Schmeling’s pathway to landings in St. Maries, where he would collect logs for delivery. One year, the river was frozen from Thanksgiving through March.

“It was just too cold,” Schmeling said. “I won’t miss that at all.”

Nor the heat. On hot summer days, temperatures in the Florence Lee’s engine room hit a blazing 130 degrees.

But spring – a time of ice jams and flooding – was probably the most hazardous season of all. Uprooted trees would hurtle down the St. Joe River, slamming into Schmeling’s carefully bundled logs with the ferocity of battering rams.

Once he lost the equivalent of 100 truckloads of logs in high water. He and a co-worker spent a week rounding up the valuable cargo.

The moments of drama and tedium behind the captain’s wheel took place against stunning backdrops.

This time of year, the tug moves through thousands of Canada geese feeding along the St. Joe. The graceful mass parted for the slow-moving Florence Lee, which seldom startles the geese into flight.

Schmeling kept binoculars on the tug’s dashboard. In addition to spying stray logs, he used them to watch bears and moose on shore.

The tug had closer encounters with deer, which get trapped swimming among the logs. Schmeling sometimes grabbed a hold of a deer’s tail and heaved them up, helping them scramble over the boom sticks.

When he started working aboard the Florence Lee, Schmeling and another captain would head out Monday morning and come back Friday evening. As often as possible, he tried to schedule a short, midweek visit with his wife and young sons.

In later years, operating the tug required fewer overnight shifts. Schmeling and a co-worker would spend several day shifts assembling bundles of logs on the St. Joe before hauling them across the lake.

During the 30-hour tow, they worked six hours on, six hours off. Schmeling napped 4 1/2 to 5 hours at a time in a tiny bunk room – just long enough to accommodate a mattress.

“I could do it, but not everyone can,” he said. “If they couldn’t adjust to the schedule, they didn’t last long at the job.”

Last week, he sat in the captain’s chair for a final time, blowing the Florence Lee’s whistle for visitors.

The Florence Lee’s logbook – full of his neat notations of oil changes and other maintenance – was tucked in a drawer. A pile of clean dishes, recently washed by Schmeling, were piled on the counter, near a jar of peanut butter and Lipton instant tea.

His solitary and self-contained days as a tug captain are over. Schmeling doesn’t regret their passage.

He’ll still see the sunset painting colors over Lake Coeur d’Alene and wispy threads of fog rising from the water.

“But I’ll be out fishing,” he said.