My father was a country boy; he grew up on a farm in NE Oklahoma. As a young navy man he spent time in Italy and Africa. His career took him to New York City and Washington DC. But we returned to rural Oklahoma when I was young because this state was his sweet spot. Our yard had 15 - 20 tall oak trees and he turned a vacant lot in our neighborhood into a vegetable garden with fruit trees. My dad was meant to live in rural America.
Dad had truly spent his youth living the life of Billy Colman, the young boy in the book “Where the Red Fern Grows”. Hunting food with his brother, running the woods with a couple of dogs, chasing chickens, riding his horse to school, farming the land, and a house that used firewood for more than ambiance.
So growing up, my brother and I thought nothing of loading the pickup truck with an axe and chainsaw and a sack full of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and heading into the vast clear-cuts of McCurtain County, Oklahoma.
The Weyerhaeuser company owned much of the timber in southeastern Oklahoma where we hunted deer and turkey and camped and fished. This area of the state is filled with pine trees that lumber companies turn into plywood, pulp and paper. After harvesting the softwood pines these clear-cuts were left to the deer and quail and small stands of hardwood.
These lonely pecan and hickory and oaks were usually in small groups, abandoned in the middle or along the edges of the harvested areas, standing as sentinels watching over the bare ground and sawdust. Clear-cuts could be fifty to a hundred acres where we spent winter weekends hunting quail. Quail hunts were also a great time to scout firewood.
As our wood pile dwindled over the winter months, dad would select a few February and March weekends for us to fill the bed of our old blue pickup with living room wood. There were two types of wood in my dad’s youth: kitchen wood and living room wood. Modern appliances, namely the electric oven, had narrowed our work to finding wood to burn in both the fireplace and heating stove our house used to supplement the electric heat. Living room wood!
Spending time with dad and my brother felling, limbing and hauling heavy green firewood was fun work and great bonding time. I remember the hard work and support dad shared with us. His patience in teaching us how to safely use the chainsaw and axe gave me great confidence. We learned how to: read a tree for the direction it wanted to fall, properly cut the wedge and the importance of a good directional hinge, where the relative safe areas are when a tree falls, to limb the tree and keep the chain out of the dirt. We also sharpened and cared for the equipment.
Just once I recall a medium sized tree, we happened to be felling in our backyard, desperately wanted to teach us a lesson in physics. We planned for it to go one direction but a poorly placed back cut (and most importantly a misreading of the mass in the crown of tree) allowed the oak to lean in the opposite direction. Dad must have anticipated this because I remember he had already tied a rope to it about twenty-five feet up and we had a neighbor helping us - probably the guy who lived in the house where the tree was leaning. I think we cut a deeper wedge and/or pulled a lot on that rope because my memory is the tree eventually fell into our yard. Good lesson! Trees and chainsaws are not to be toyed with.
Spring afternoons were spent splitting the wood for stacking and drying and eventual burning the next winter. We used gallons of gasoline running the chainsaw during my youth. I swung that axe a few thousand times. Today my small chainsaw spends most winters on the shelf and most of the felling I witness happens on YouTube. I miss those days harvesting trees in McCurtain County and, of course, I miss my dad.
I am reading “Norwegian Wood”, a book by Lars Mytting. It is a great read for anyone interested in chopping, stacking and drying wood. And who isn’t interested in the history of chainsaws and the security of a fuel that is always available on-site and not dependent on a utility company. And it’s carbon neutral to boot.
Burning firewood is environmentally friendly because the carbon dioxide that trees take up while growing is released when they die. It matters not if they rot on the forest floor or get burned in the stove warming your house. And as Thoreau said, “wood warms twice over, once when you chop it and again when you burn it.”
Mytting writes about techniques in cutting and chopping, drying and burning. He compares different tree wood for its heating value and describes the benefits of the superior Scandinavian steel (axes). Wood piles and storage receive extensive reporting as do stoves and combustion. The history of wood and dependance of the Scandinavian societies on their forests is quite interesting.
Chopping wood is like meditation - it clears the mind and encourages deep breaths. And people just feel closer sitting around a fire than they do a radiator.