Lumber Jack
We had some folks stay with us this week, out from the wild suburbs of Chicago, who had a couple of kids in tow so naturally I took them for a stroll through the rainforest behind the house here. They noticed a large tree I’d felled the week before with about half of it still laying there half cut up waiting for me to put the peavey on it and roll it over so I could finish. Dan, the boy, had never seen a peavey and I’m betting his dad hadn’t either now that the Chicago forests are long gone for toilet paper and baseball bats.
A peavey, in case you might not know either, is a pike with a cant hook attached on a swivel. You get that hook into the meat of a log and pull or push against the pike with a handle 6 feet long and meaty as a horse thigh so you can roll that log over, all this so you won’t saw into dirt on the bottom side and dull your chainsaw chain. It’s an indispensable tool of the woods soon to be relegated to relic in our local museum.
I just came in from rolling a few two ton sections over to finish my cuts. This afternoon I’ll take an 8 pound maul and split my sections, load them in a cart and haul them to the woodshed. Logging, kind of a lost art, even down here on the South End. Guitar Bob, my old drinking partner, once asked what I’d been up to that day and when I said ‘logging’ he smirked. “Oh, right, Paul Bunyan,” he mocked. Bob has his wood hauled in, already sectioned, and he splits it, then stacks it in the shed right beside.
“What’re you laughing at, man?” I asked, laughing myself. “You wouldn’t know a logger from a TV repair man.” And Bob says, “Oh, like you cut down trees ….”
I guess we never really know one another, most of us. That, or we like to keep our friends in our own image. But just between you and me and the Blue Ox Babe, some of us get our heat, not from a thermostat, but from a passing mythology, one soon to be forgotten. Although … maybe my second nephew Dan will tell his friends back in the Windy City how his uncle still stalks the Northwest Woods with a saw and an axe and how the ground shakes when he takes down those giant trees of his. But I doubt it.
Hits: 34