When I was young and my head full of mush, I thought ‘logging’, as I practiced that art, was quite manly. I was ushered into that thinking in that was my job to keep our large drafty homestead in New York warm, mainly with firewood. Many’s the tree I bought down, many’s the wee critter I must have rendered homeless, mindlessly on about my business.
In the days before I bethought myself to use Dad’s chain saw, and summoned the cheek to ‘borrow’ it while he was off at work, my principle tools of destruction were a double-bit axe and a two man saw. I now know that in the early days of logging, the two man bucksaw was nicknamed ‘the misery whip’ for shudder and whip it did, adding fifty percent to the muscular outputting required for a cut.
On the rare days I had a friend foolish enough to help. Remember Tom Sawyer getting his friends to whitewash the fence? Well, Tom got it better than I; he stood and watched the others work. There was no such luxury with the buck saw. You either pulled your weight, or no wood got cut.]
The rhythm and the skill of working that saw was you always pulled it to you; you never pushed it to your work-mate. To do so would create an immediate clinching which would so bind it, you would both have to strain to free the saw from its groove. So the chant began: I give to you, you give to me, etc.; and thus, albeit slowly and at great effort, the wood was harvested.
The blade was of simple design; it had a ‘peg’ and ’raker’ – the peg cut the fiber, the raker pulled the ‘noodle’ – or sawdust- free. I tried a single buck [one-man saw] but it had its own ‘misery whip’ plus this: you had to pull and push for there was no one else to ‘give it to.’
As mentioned, in those days, I never gave a thought to the carnage I, in my enthusiasm, left in my wake. Times do change. Now I shudder any time I hear a chainsaw running anytime but dead winter. As often as not, if the sawing is close by, there’ll come a knock at our door with injured or displaced wildlife.
The need for wood, at least in America’s future is growing. I recognize that fact, yet am distressed by it. It warms me, but only to a certain degree, that tree farms are replacing the fallen timber; but recall, a tree farm does not a forest make. Forests are a complex ecosystem of which trees play but a part. It could be argued America is not losing timber, but forests.
Chain saws, ever growing in power, and now tracked machines that can seize a tree, cut it off, rotate it 90 degrees, limb it all in one rapid process, making harvest far more efficient. Then there’s the loss of the God-created beauty of a single tree; think of the towering Sequoias and Douglas firs, of walnut trees and cedars.
Finally, it must be said that professional logging is the most dangerous profession in America. Its death-rate is thirty times the national average of other employments. That’s very impressive in a not so good sort of way.
There is yet in me a fascination to saw down a tree, but now it must be deep winter, and the tree not too old, for even in an old, ‘good-for-nothin’ tree, there’s a bounty of bugs, a bouquet for the birds, or a hidey-hole for cavity-dwelling critters. So I watch for diseased trees, or those fatally maimed by lightning. There must be a balance.
Look for Lucky’s books locally and on-line: The Oath of Hippocrates; The Cotillian; A Journey Long Delayed; Campfire Tales; Sabonics