From beneath an orange hardhat, the logger stares up at a conifer spire. The Douglas fir reaches more than 100 feet into the sky. It is as wide and hardy as he is and has been on this land nearly as long.

“That one there might be a little too big,” Ken Risseeuw says, finally.

Risseeuw’s looking for a tree 20 to 22 inches in diameter. He rocks back with his thumbs hooked into the pockets of stiff blue jeans and studies the stand of trees.

“There’s one down there,” offers James Siegfried, who wears protective chaps covered in sawdust.

Risseeuw follows the gaze of the younger man down a gravel logging road to a slightly smaller evergreen, one wrapped in a blanket of moss and surrounded by ferns.

“That one there,” Risseeuw says, “might be pretty good.”

It is a gray morning in April outside of Grand Ronde in the Oregon Coast Range. The sounds of a shovel loader humming and clanking on the other side of Cosper Creek echo through the forest.

Most of these trees have important but anonymous futures: Within the day, they will be felled by heavy machinery and later loaded onto trucks that will carry them to a nearby mill where they will become boards and beams. The bones of infrastructure.

Certified forest products, they’ll be called.

But this particular tree, carefully identified by two men of the woods, has a different destiny. Siegfried will cut this one by hand and saw off a 12-foot cylinder that will avoid the mill. Risseeuw will place it on a trailer and comb his hair to take it into the city for its very specific form of arboreal acclaim.

And the next time the Portland Timbers score a goal, it will be this log that Timber Joey — a certified forest product in his own right, a man who grew up in the tiny Oregon timber town of Wren — will cut into with a 36-inch STIHL chainsaw, sending thousands of fans into delirium.

Just like a tree tells time with its rings, Portland’s soccer season can be measured with that log. A slice is lopped off and ceremoniously presented to players for every goal and every shutout. The more successful the team is, the shorter the log gets. And when the Timbers score many times — as they have this season, ranking fifth among the 30 teams in MLS with 39 goals — there comes a time when a replacement log is needed.

This is the story of that log.

• • •

What differentiates one tree from any other? From the sky, this would just be a single fiber in a carpet of Douglas fir, indistinguishable from the other tiny fibers.

And perhaps that’s how most people will view it by the time this tree is cut and delivered to Providence Park. But where some may see only a tree trunk, people like Risseeuw and Joey Webber — Timber Joey — see a tradition of legacy and hard work. They see family and dedication and history.

“It’s taking a part of my past and a part of my heritage and showing that to people who may not have the same past,” Webber says.

A counting of the rings will later reveal this tree to have been 55 years old, the same age as Jennifer Aniston and Ice Cube. If it first sprouted in 1969, six years before the Timbers ever played a game, it might have survived the winter storm of that year that paralyzed the region. There was so much snow that the play shed at nearby Grand Ronde Elementary collapsed under the weight of the snow.

Or perhaps it was a product of that storm, which left the forest strewn with branches and fallen trees and millions upon millions of seeds.

The tree has a twin, a second towering evergreen that has sprouted from the same footprint. For decades the two trees have fought as they’ve grown side by side, as siblings do. Only their battles have been over natural resources like carbon dioxide and oxygen, sunlight and the nutrients in this rich coastal soil.

Anything this tree has seen in its 55 years, Risseeuw has seen, too.

“We’ve been up here a long time together,” he says.

He too grew up in these hills. Standing in the woods back in April, he tells of his father, Ike, who arrived in Grand Ronde in 1936 from South Dakota to join the booming timber industry. Risseeuw — rhymes with “kazoo” — was raised on a farm across Oregon Route 22 along the South Yamhill River.

Now 69, he remembers when this dense forest was all still pasture, a former cattle ranch that Hampton Lumber purchased in 1942.

As a teenager, Risseeuw rode his Yamaha 250 up here. He camped out in an old barn on what he knew as the “back ranch” and drank Olde English 800.

“I learned real quick that wasn’t for me,” he says, leaving open the possibility that he means either the motorcycle or malt liquor, or both.

After these trees are harvested, more will be planted in the winter.

There is a rhythm to this world that is almost musical and is certainly generational. The shovel loader working across the creek is operated by Risseeuw’s son, Kenny.

There is another forested area outside of Grand Ronde, Risseeuw said, that is ready to be harvested. He logged it in the 1970s and his dad logged it in the ′40s.

“In another 40 or 50 years,” he says, “we’ll do it again.”

If the lumberjack feels like a myth of Oregon’s past, existing only in Paul Bunyan statues and Northwest menswear, Risseeuw is the genuine article.

He has a thick white beard and nine-and-a-half fingers. The deficit is a reminder of an accident suffered just two weeks into his first job back in 1973. Eight years later, a log loader tipped over on him and he was crushed under 80,000 pounds of machinery.

After fracturing one of his shoulders, all of his ribs, a hip, femur, knee, both ankles, his pelvis and his back, he was hospitalized for four months and out of work for nine.

“I thought about making a change then,” he says, “but it’s just kind of what you are, you know?”

Risseeuw had never seen a Timbers game before Hampton Lumber became a sponsor of the team and in 2017 started providing eponymous timber from one of its tree farms.

He was unaware of the tradition that began in the 1970s with Jim Serrill — Timber Jim — sneaking a chainsaw into the stands of what was then Civic Stadium to exhort fans, eventually earning his way onto the field to cut slabs, at first from a heavy beam and eventually a hunk of Douglas fir, every time the home team scored.

“The log represents Oregon,” Serrill says.

Hampton has long contracted with Risseeuw’s company, a 30-person family business, to harvest timber from its operation out of Willamina. A number of years ago, the company’s owner, David Hampton, asked Risseeuw if he wouldn’t mind taking on one more responsibility.

Every few months during soccer season, Risseeuw gets a call saying the Timbers will soon be ready for another log and he sets out to finding the right one.

He has watched as members of the Timbers Army bless the log once a year, jostling for a chance to touch it and pocket handfuls of sawdust. Risseeuw has attended games on the sideline at Providence Park and watched as fans begged Timber Joey for scraps.

“It’s funny,” he says, “how they can be so passionate about that log when we’ve chopped them up a thousand times. ... They take it literally to heart and that’s what makes it worth it to me.”

When it’s time to bring down the tree — the Timbers call it the “victory log” — Siegfried adjusts the choke on his chainsaw and tugs the cord six times before it roars to life.

Asked what he knows about the tradition he is contributing to, the 39-year-old responds, “I don’t watch many sports. I like loggin.’”

He makes one angled cut into the base of 85-foot fir, then slices in with a horizontal cut. He gently guides the tree with a gloved hand, it makes a loud boom then topples over, quivering as it hits the ground.

Nobody, it should be noted, actually yells, “Timber!”

• • •

Portland got its start as a timber town. Loggers used to drag logs along greased-up skids on Burnside Street to deliver them to boats waiting on the Willamette River. No state produces more lumber than Oregon.

Even with that heritage, there is still something unexpected about seeing a single log move through the city streets like it does on the morning of June 18, strapped atop a 22-foot trailer being towed by Risseeuw’s GMC pickup truck along Southwest 18th Avenue.

The log has sat in the corner of Risseeuw’s shop for two months. When he got the call, he loaded it onto the trailer and drove to town.

It is three days before the log will make its debut when the Timbers host Vancouver in the Cascadia Cup rivalry. Stadium workers expected Risseeuw to arrive at 10 a.m., but he is more than two hours late, delayed after pulling over on the Terwilliger Curves during morning rush hour to empty his bladder. He accidentally locked his keys — and, vitally, his cell phone — in the cab of his truck.

After the log is loaded onto a forklift to be taken into the stadium, Risseeuw, who for this event has combed his hair and worn a pressed shirt with pearl snaps, hops back into the cab of his pickup and announces, “Gotta run across town to get parts from Papé!”

With that, Risseeuw has handed off custody of the log, which will be loaded onto a stand in front of the north end seating, where the loudest and most zealous Timbers fans will root for its destruction, because the more that log gives of itself, the more success the Timbers are having.

Each slab becomes a symbol of a moment of joy.

While there is no accounting for all of the slabs that have been cut throughout the history of the tradition, first with Serrill through the Timbers’ various early iterations and with Webber starting in 2008, the log pieces have gone on to have many afterlives. Some players keep them. Prolific goal scorers like Diego Valeri, who scored 100 goals for the Timbers, donate them to charity. Others stack them in their lockers for inspiration. You’ll find them in bars and living rooms.

“Most players are going to keep their first few,” Webber says.

When Jack Jewsbury scored a goal in front of his dad on Father’s Day, the elder Jewsbury talked Southwest Airlines into allowing it as his carry-on for the flight back home to Kansas City. It remains mounted above his fireplace.

Timber Joey gets his first look at the new log hours before kickoff against Vancouver. It is 12 feet, 2 inches long and, as specified, 22 inches on the wide end. Risseeuw had a good eye. Sawdust from the original cutting is caught in the blanket of moss. The log is caked in dried mud from where it lay in the dirt in the hills near Cosper Creek. It has a slight hump in the middle.

Webber does not do anything to clean up the new arrival.

“The scars that go on that log, the moss and sap and sawdust, that’s just part of the game,” he says. “Nobody comes out clean and without sweat.”

He adds: “There’s no perfect tree out there. Except that all of them are perfect.”

Because the log was cut two months earlier, the ends are dried and cracked from all the sap that has been pulled toward the cut ends.

“It’s like a wound,” Webber says. “It’s going to bleed.”

To ensure players’ uniforms don’t become stained by difficult-to-remove sap, Webber makes a fresh cut on each end before games. He calls this the Younie Cut, in honor of the man whose life he is trying to make easier — team equipment director Sam Younie.

Yes, the uni man is named Younie.

When Risseeuw makes these cuts pregame on June 22, the slices break into several pieces when they hit the ground. That can’t happen after a goal. So he makes an additional Younie Cut to get to greener wood.

After the game, members of the Timbers Army will lean over the railing and reach out to Webber for those broken bits. Their own pieces of an eventual victory.

Webber is not all that different from Risseeuw, save for having five fingers on each hand and the fact he stopped working full-time in the woods in his 20s. But he grew up cutting timber along the coast and later rode bulls in the rodeo. He may technically be the Timbers mascot, but for Webber — and the legendary Timber Jim before him, who was a forest service firefighter and jumped from helicopters — this is not an act.

“It’s that authenticity of the small-town logging culture coming to the city,” he says.

As Timber Joey, Webber dons a silver hard hat and suspenders. He wears protective chaps and fire boots. He could step onto a Risseeuw job any day.

Webber circumnavigates Providence Park in the early moments of the match. Revving his chainsaw to excite the crowd. He poses for photos with fans.

If the Timbers score, he has to hustle back to the north end of the stadium, where the log has been dressed in team scarves and exposed to perhaps the harshest elements of its 55-year existence: The expletive-laden chants and singalongs of the Timbers Army.

In the 25th minute of the match, Jonathan Rodriguez has a golden opportunity to score from the left side, but the shot is blocked at the near post. However, one minute later … magic.

Santiago Moreno brings the ball up the right side of the field and plays it to Felipe Mora in the middle. Mora nearly loses the ball, but gets it to Brazilian midfielder Evander.

Evander lets the ball settle off his knee, then lobs it into the box to Rodriguez, who sends it past Vancouver’s goalkeeper into the opposite corner of the net.

Webber hops up onto the podium, he revs his chainsaw — pap-pap-pap — and lowers it into the narrow end of the log. After 15 seconds, the slice falls. Webber grabs it and hoists it over his head. He carries it onto another platform and into the Timbers Army.

As he begins to walk the thick round along the concourse, as is custom, a Hampton Lumber employee arrives to scoop sawdust into a labeled plastic bag that will be saved and catalogued. Last year, season ticket holders received medallions filled with the desirable debris.

Before Webber can return with the log, the Timbers score again. Mora this time has found the back of the net. Webber is sweating when he gets back to the north end and says, “Big log right there.”

He grabs his chainsaw and cuts again, kicking out a leg as he does.

Webber celebrates with the Timbers Army once again. Hampton’s designated scooper reappears.

Back home in Grand Ronde, Risseeuw sees none of this unfold. There is a wedding on the farm, and he is in charge of making sure everything works as it should.

After halftime, the Timbers remain on the attack but cannot find another score. On this night, Rodriguez and Mora will be the only Timbers to receive mementos of goals. But as time winds down and the Timbers move closer to a shutout, it occurs to goalkeeper James Pantemis that he is on the verge of receiving one, too.

Tradition dictates that another slab is cut for a goalkeeper who delivers a clean sheet. Pantemis is making his seventh start for the Timbers and just his third at home.

Later, he says, “I was looking at the clock thinking we’re like five minutes away from me getting this log.”

It is his first.

After the final whistle, the three players arrive at the north end of the stadium. Mora and Rodriguez’s children circle at their feet. Webber lays out the three logs. The players hoist them in front of the Timbers Army.

Pantemis knows where he will store his keepsake, his piece of a mighty fir that was born in the Oregon Coast Range and lovingly delivered to a new home 75 miles from where it was raised. It will go on the patio of his condo, on a table next to the grill.

“I’m going to have my beer on it tomorrow,” he says.

And when he earns more?

“Stack them up!” he declares. “Have to.”

Rodriguez hands his log round back to Webber, who stands it against next to his boots while the star goes to greet family. When Rodriguez returns, his 1-year-old son, Tiziano, approaches his dad’s celebratory slice.

The boy is not much taller than the log. He looks at it for a moment, then reaches out and places his small hand flat on the log, feeling the center of its rings.

The journey is complete.

-- Bill Oram