The Plane Truth
So my neighbor Pete and his blue ox Babe got those two chunks of 470 year old oldgrowth fir sawed up into two inch slabs, some measuring in at 27 feet long. Perfect for a board room conference table at, oh, Boeing headquarters or Microsoft. I’d been watching this operation since the day I discovered the two logs down a sideroad out of view of the prying eyes of the Island County Sheriff’s Dep’t, if I’m guessing right, one on a lowboy trailer sunk deep into the mud and most of its tires ready to explode from the weight. The other was off to the other side, deep in ooze, a La Brea tarpit for dinosaur trees.
The purported owner later dropped by to see if I might be interested in fencing the timber. Actually, to see if I’d buy it. He claimed ownership and I had no doubt he’d been the boy who had the skill to take it down off the bluff on the east side from me, skid it out, get it up on the trailer and haul it away from the scene of the crime. A storm a few years back had broken the upper hundred feet or more clean off and left the trunk standing to dry and wait for the right gyppo to come along with an idea and a four foot chainsaw. After all, this is how the West was won. And the Midwest. And the East Coast. And now the Amazon and the wilds of Borneo. Global warming’s got nothing on an entrepreneur with a big ass Stihl.
There is, to a dyed-in-the-wool South Ender, a romance to the idea of a tree that was growing here long before Jacinto Camaano sailed by. I have no doubt this will be the last old growth milled up down here in my life time and the lifetimes of all those who will follow after. Call me sentimental and slap me with a dinosaur femur, but I had to have a piece of that tree. So after watching Pete and his brother-in-law Pittsburg Mike spend two weeks on each end of an Alaska portable sawmill, two big saws powering a four foot chain and bar, I said I’d like to have first pick of the slabs if that would be all right.
Now, I have a pretty nice hunk of wood for a dining room table. One with a great history of having traveled from Alaska to Reno to Hawaii and back with stops in between. And the mizzus rightly mentioned that we already have a pretty nice table. But nevertheless, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to jump on a vanishing piece of history. A different man might’ve listened to his wife. A better man certainly would’ve. But … well, I don’t have to tell you what I had to do, now do I?
So I have an eight foot slab on my shop table. It’s 3 feet on one end and tapers down to 3 feet on the other. I spent a day hand planing it. White curls of old growth fir filled the floor around me. I imagined myself building a boat, shaving the hull, planing the gunwales and sanding the deck. There’s a fertilizer for the imagination in this wood, a geography laid out in the continents of its sapwood, topographical swirls in the grain. Dinner, I assure you, will be an adventure from now on….
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