Woodcutting skills as dull as ax
Timberrrrr… I come from a long line of woodsmen. Or maybe I should say the long line of woodsmen in my family ended at me.
My great-grandfather worked as a sawyer and also would, for other companies, examine a stand of timber to give them an estimate of how many board feet they could expect to harvest.
He was also an excellent carpenter, a skill he passed on to his son and grandson (my dad).
His acumen in this was so good that when my grandfather, his son, decided to build a large, three-bay garage big enough for coal trucks, my great-grandfather, measurements in hand, told him exactly how many board feet of lumber to buy.
Apparently my grandfather, while good at it, didn’t much care for carpentry, or so dad tells me. My father, to his credit, has built a couple of houses in his lifetime, including the one he and my mother now occupy.
I can’t hammer a nail straight.
Anyway, that’s all about the finer end of woodworking. There’s another side to it, one made up of cuts and scratches and sore muscles.
My dad and my late brother spent quite a few hours in the woods cutting logs that they would use to stoke their stoves, fireplaces and furnaces. When my brother built his home, he installed a combination wood-coal furnace rather than something more conventional.
It seemed like nearly every decent weekend during summer mom would complain that dad and my brother were off again, filling their four-wheel-drive pickups to near overflowing.
I tagged along a couple of times. But, like I said, the ax blade dulled when it came to me. Or maybe that should be the other way around.
Well, there we were on one occasion, in what I would call the middle of nowhere situated somewhere in the middle of a greater nowhere that we had just spent some time getting to in a bone-jarring ride on a road so rutted it reminded me of the Grand Canyon.
My bones ached. My kidneys hurt. I had a headaches.
And we hadn’t chipped so much as a piece of bark let alone cut down a tree.
I looked over the thickly wooded area. “Do you think there are any snakes around here?’ I said.
“Don’t worry about it. If there are they’ll disappear as soon as we start the chain saws,’ my brother said.
“Why?’
“They don’t like the noise,’ he replied.
And after a couple of hours of that ear-piercing, head-shaking rrrrrring noise, I understood why.
We only cut down two trees. But they each seemed like giant redwoods.
In some cases it took a pair of us to heave one cut log onto a truck. When we left, the vehicles were so laden I thought the springs were going to break.
“Don’t worry,’ my brother said. “I have heavy duty springs on this truck.’ That explained why it was such a tortuous ride to get to the site.
So, last week, when my dad was looking at his greatly reduced wood pile, and commented, “I’m going to have to get that built up again,’ I was curious.
“Where are you going to get your wood? You don’t still go out into the woods to cut down trees, do you?’
“Oh no. I have a couple of trees here that I need to take down,’ he replied.
“Well, maybe later this summer I can help you with that. But is that going to be enough?’
“There’s a fellow I have bought wood from in the past,’ he said.
And this guy supplies it cut, split and ready to stack.
Now that’s my kind of woodsmanship.
Have a good day.
Jim Pletcher is the Herald-Standard’s business editor. E-mail: jpletcher@heraldstandard.com.