Cutting Wood

Neighbor Joe White and I cut down a tree in the corner of his property today. His chain saw was ailing and it took quite a while. The project was a great success, however, and the old beech tree, perhaps 18" in diameter, fell almost precisely as predicted. There was a good deal of rot in the center, which displeased Joe, who was hoping for a good harvest of firewood. During one of our many breaks, George Andrews, who lives down the road aways, came by with his very friendly golden retriever named Natasha. We talked up local real estate values (George is a salesman), the Final Four, ice hockey, the various permits required to add onto existing boathouses, and some of the local bigwigs. It was a long break but we all enjoyed it, including 'Tasha.

Cutting down a tree with Joe brought back many memories of the same activity with my dad. Joe has a different approach to the process. He starts the saw and cuts. Dad would spend the first hour engineering the whole thing and then devising an impossible network of ropes designed to guarantee, totally, that the tree would fall as planned. Sometimes it worked. Joe practices what I like to call "The fine art of incremental engineering, " which translates into "Making it up as you go along." Still, when I took the saw, it felt familiar, and dad was watching approvingly.

Joe's wife Ann watched the final 20 minutes or so of the felling from a safe distance and was clearly relieved when the tree was on the ground and Joe uninjured. Joe was apprehensive about the whole deal because he had left his hat back at the house (a MSU cap), but we succeeded nonetheless. After the tree was safely on the ground across the dirt, or rather mud, road that runs behind our houses, I cut it into four pieces - the base of the tree, the top, and two pieces which we labored to roll to the side of the road in the unlikely event that someone would want to pass through. The saw seemed to run better held on the vertical, but Joe's going to change the spark plug before we hack the tree into firewood.

It was a good couple of hours work. Got some needed exercise, met a guy down the road and his nice dog, learned a bit about the neighborhood, remembered my dad, joshed with Joe, and helped bring a little heat into his old house next winter.

"He who chops his own wood warms himself twice." - Confucius
"In many ways." - Burnside