Chinook
by George Hosier  - August 16

Firewood

I sit at my keyboard, overcome by an acute attack of bafflement. Although I am above the norm in my ability to remain nonplussed when encountering particularly bizarre or inexplicably illogical behavior by a fellow member of the human race, even I have my limits. Consequently, when I passed my buddy Grant on my way to town, what I beheld severely overloaded my credulity banks.

Grant had always struck me as a regular guy. He has a sweet wife and two cute little kids. He holds down a respectable job and volunteers at civic events. He has good credit. He doesn’t kick his dog or play loud music at night. He even keeps his car vacuumed and waxed. What I saw today, however, has created a massive paradigm shift in my opinion of Grant’s normalcy, if not his very sanity. Unbelievably, Grant was driving his battered blue clunker truck, stacked high with fresh cut firewood!

I’m sorry! I’m terribly sorry! I shouldn’t have blurted it out like that. I certainly don’t want to traumatize you, my gentle readers. Most of you are simply not trained to process graphic descriptions of the grotesque weirdness that lurks deep in the cavernous recesses of the human psyche. To callously expose you to such deviancy is to risk destabilization of your mental health status. I apologize.

Now that I’ve mentioned it, though, I suppose we should process through the stark image I have invoked in your minds eye, so that we can reach some sort of therapeutic resolution. That question that I’m sure is ricocheting around in your skull is, “Why?” Why would an otherwise normal husband and father suddenly succumb to the psychotic urge to collect firewood at the beginning of August? I don’t really have an answer that can satisfy a healthy, logical mind, but let’s talk about it, shall we?

I think it would be productive to recap normal firewood gathering behavior before we move on to the more deviant aberrations. Perhaps the most concise summary of normal wood cutting protocol can be found in a brilliant little mnemonic poem I created. It goes like this:

When the nights get raw,
Locate your saw.
At the first hard freeze,
Mark your trees.
When the first snow falls,
Buy coveralls.
At twenty below
It’s time to go.

Normal people don’t become obsessed with hauling firewood until the time is right. If you are one with nature, the earth’s natural cycle will tell you when she is ready to surrender her trees to sustain you with warmth. To collect firewood too soon is to put you out of sync with the ancient rhythm of the seasons and thus offend the very Mother Earth herself. Of mere secondary note is the factor that it would force you to sacrifice some delightful fishing trips during the few and precious balmy weekends of summer.

Although I shudder to admit it, Grant isn’t the first person I have encountered who thinks you should start collecting firewood in August. In fact, I even know some kooks who are out there hauling firewood in June. The earliest I have ever personally cut firewood was March 9th, but that was because our woodshed looked like Mother Hubbard’s cupboard and my wife was threatening to break the icicles off of my moustache and pummel me to death with them if I didn’t stop chopping up her furniture to feed the stove.

I’ve since learned some creative ways to improvise in such a pinch. The easiest way to get emergency firewood is to wait until your neighbor goes to Fairbanks and then transfer some of his surplus to your own woodshed. You can easily calculate that he has enough for the winter, and since he can’t possibly use it all before spring, and knowing what a stickler he is for keeping his place neat, you know he’d thank you for having the foresight to do some early spring cleaning for him. You are only borrowing it, of course. As soon as you get your own firewood, make sure you replace every stick of the old dried up birch junk you borrowed with lush, fresh cottonwood, dripping with life and sap.

Another option is to discover parts of your house that are in need of a facelift and begin your summer remodeling project early. Tear up that old floor. Pull down those kitchen cabinets. Rip out the wall between the family room and the utility room. Such a project will yield you plenty of scrap wood to burn and give you motivation to actually get the work done. Around my house there are about 20 such projects that were each started during a separate firewood crisis, and I can testify to their motivational influence. Some of them have been motivating me deeply since 1982.

I have had countless, brain-numbing circuitous debates with guys like Grant. It never accomplishes anything. That type of person is set in his ways and refuses to recognize the stupidity of his obsession. These folks always parrot the same hackneyed litany of justification for their behavior. The following arguments are just a representative smattering.

“I like to stock up early so I don’t get surprised by an early winter.” What ludicrous fallacy! Since when did winter ever arrive in early August? Besides, what’s wrong with cutting wood in the winter anyway? I can think of a couple of distinct advantages.

To start with, no exercise program in the world can give you a cardiovascular and resistance workout like packing 40 cords of firewood through hip deep snow, a log at a time. An additional perk is the abundance of cold crystalline water available to keep your body hydrated during the workout.

Winter woodcutting also eliminates the mosquito threat. I see chumps like Grant returning from cutting wood on a hot summer day, and they look like they have just returned from a firefight in a war zone. Their faces and arms are covered with raw weals, and streaks of dried blood and insect parts are smeared around their visage like so much camouflage makeup. Why would any sane person subject themselves to such abuse when it could be so easily solved by simply cutting wood at subzero temperatures?

Another weak argument these folks try to pawn off savants like me is the one that goes, “I like to collect my firewood when I have plenty of daylight to see what I’m doing.” I can barely contain my scorn for such a thinly veiled artifice. It’s not like headlights haven’t been invented yet! I’ve cut many a cord of wood, bathed in the twin beacons of my high beams.

Yet when I attempt to explain this to some pathetic firewood fiend, does he recognize the brilliance of my argument? Not at all. He usually mumbles some nonsense about visibility and safety. I even had one guy go on to make some sort of veiled threat toward my distinguished person. I believe his exact words were, “Well, I just hope you don’t run into a widowmaker when you’re out there by yourself cutting wood in the glow of your headlights.”

I tried not to pay attention to him, but when you get a death threat, it does tend to make you a little jumpy. I find myself flinching now if I’m out cutting firewood and someone unexpectedly shows up. That’s what happened last October just as I was starting on the first of my firewood.

I had driven up and down the road until I found a great big tree that looked like it could supply me with five cords in one fell swoop. I jumped out of the truck, shoveled a path through a snowdrift, cleared some brush, clipped the wire on an obstructing fence and pinned the loose wires out of my way with a “No Trespassing, Private Property” sign that I conveniently found nearby.

Then I maneuvered my vehicle into position so that I could shine the headlights on the base of the trunk. It was a beautiful tree. It was straight and smooth and standing dead. As far as I could follow its silhouette upwards until the tree blurred into the darkness above there was not a single limb to be seen. I breathed a prayer of thankfulness and fired up my chain saw.

I carefully calculated the tree’s angle of fall and commenced cutting about two feet below the little round metal disk with numbers on it that some prankster had playfully nailed into the barkless trunk. I was about three quarters of the way through the trunk when above the snarl of my chain saw I heard someone shout. That’s when I flinched. I inadvertently squeezed the throttle trigger as I did so, and cut through the remainder of the trunk in one sudden lurch.

The tree swayed for a moment, then incredibly slipped laterally at the cut, and drifted apart until it remained poised upright, balancing vertically beside its own stump. I heard the voice shout again, more angrily this time, simultaneous with the sound of hissing, snapping and crackling high above my head. A brilliant arc of blue sparks sizzled in a blinding corona and by its illumination I saw that somehow electric wires had gotten tangled into the pair of thick, straight, square branches at the top of my tree.

It was clear what had happened. Whoever had shouted had been waiting for just the right moment to do so in order to distract me enough that my flinch would nudge the tree out of my carefully calculated trajectory and into the power lines. No doubt my attacker was attempting to murder me by electrocution. A diabolically clever plan!

The shout came again, right behind me. “Hey, Earlobe, what the Wisconsin do you think you’re doing?” That’s not verbatim, but it’s as close of an equivalent as I can approximate in a family newspaper. The guy was obviously unbalanced. Protectively, I revved my chainsaw and swung around to face my assassin.

“Juggle!” squawked the assassin. “You’re a certified lunatic!” He executed a flawless swan dive into the snow bank, burrowed through it like a wolverine on amphetamines, and dematerialized into the night on the other side. I pondered my firewood tree for a desultory moment and concluded that it would be too dangerous to retrieve it with assassins and electrical lines hanging about, so I climbed back in my truck and went down the road to find a more cooperative firewood mother lode.

Maybe someday people like Grant will come to understand that you can only be a real Alaskan firewood cutter if…
 

10. you keep two-cycle mix in a 500 gallon heated thermos out back.
 9. your three favorite fragrances are chain saw exhaust, fresh cut spruce, and bar oil.
 8. you own 17 splitting mauls and all but 2 have cracked or broken handles.
 7. you have lost at least one body part or article of clothing to a chain saw blade.
 6. at least one wooden splinter is imbedded somewhere in your epidermis right now.
 5. you buy earplugs, round files and work gloves by the case lot.
 4. you can cut a log into perfect 12, 18, or 24 inch lengths with your eyes shut.
 3. you can fit 12 cords of firewood in a ¾ ton pickup bed.
 2. spruce pitch is matted somewhere into the fabric of every suit of clothes you own.

…and the number one way to tell if you are a real Alaskan firewood cutter is if…

 1. you have ever had a fractured skull, collarbone or neck accompanied by frostbite and an open wound from which the doctor removed fragments of tree bark.

 

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