I’m Sort of a Cut-Up …
…both figuratively
and literally. The literal sense is that I supply my needs for firewood from
the dead and dying trees on my river-side property. That task, of course,
requires a fair amount of labor to cut-up the logs into wood stove – sized
pieces. The story behind this began in my previous home in Clarkston, Michigan
where I built a family room addition to my two-story colonial home that I and
my family lived in for 30 years before my retirement. Since the new room was an
add-on and since I had promoted myself Chief Engineer for all matters
pertaining to heat and light, I decided that adding a wood stove in the new
room would yield the twin advantages of saving heat dollars and providing a
soft glow on those cold winter evenings that were so common in our area.
Fast forward 37 years to my retirement when it seemed that
prospective buyers of our house weren’t interested in a home with a wood stove
prominently displayed in the family room. Accordingly, I removed the stove and
all traces of its presence including the piles of firewood stacked under the
apple trees along the side of the lawn, before listing the home for sale. Then,
just about the time that the realty firm wanted to show the home, we had a
ferocious storm that dropped dozens of limbs and a few trees from the score of
Black Locust trees that adorned our back yard.
Surely, no one would want to buy a house that had downed
trees and limbs in the back yard. Or, at least, the mess in the back would
reduce the amount buyers would be willing to spend. The only solution I could
think of was for me to clean up the mess ASAP. For that, I needed a chain saw.
Off to the chain saw shop I went. Unfortunately, a large gaggle of men had the
same idea as me. The store was jammed and it seemed that every man who left the
shop was carrying a chain saw out the door.
I managed to nab a sales clerk. “That one hanging on the
wall is the last one I have,” he said. It was an overpriced saw, too large and
too heavy for the work I had to do. Clearly, it wasn’t what I wanted to pay nor
was it the small, lightweight saw that I envisioned taking home. I watched as
another buyer crept toward the saw on the wall.
“I’ll take it,” I told the salesman.
And so it was that I became owner of a large, heavy,
professional style chain saw that I was coerced into using, until yesterday’s
death of the old girl. You may be thinking that my purchase of the saw had
worked out OK since I have been using it for the last 20 years. But not so
fast. The heavy old thing did not die from overuse nor was it the result of
some lack of maintenance. The truth is I killed it. Not intentionally -it was
more like an accident that was not my fault. Here's a picture of the dead saw.
You’ll see that it has been crushed.
I turned off the saw and then attempted a removal. It didn’t
budge. Even my choicest swear words didn’t’ help dislodge the damned … durn
thing. “Aha,” I said to myself as I had used up all my choicest swear words,
“I’ll go to the barn and retrieve my longest and heaviest bar that I can position
under the tree, then l can use it to
to free the saw.” I made the trip to the barn and
back and I put the bar in a position to lift the downed log. After I bent the
long and heavy pole, I returned it to its place in the barn.
For my next idea, I decided on using the diesel truck to
move the heavy log. Making another trip to the garage and then the barn to
retrieve a stout rope, I determined that the rope wasn’t long enough since the
truck couldn’t get close enough to the log. I made another trip to the barn for
more rope. This one was long enough, but one other problem became apparent after
I had secured the rope to the truck and the log: the downed log was wedged
against a small tree that had recklessly chosen to grow in the pathway leading
to the truck. I pondered the problem and arrived at the potential solution of
using the truck to pull on the log, hopefully getting enough motion that would
allow me to retrieve the crushed saw while I had adequate tension on the log.
I climbed into the truck and slowly pulled forward. Of
course, the big truck moved forward with no hint of a thousand-pound log*
inhibiting its forward movement. When I concluded that I surely must have gone
far enough, I shifted the truck gear into park, jumped from the running truck
and beat it back to the log, reaching under the log to wrestle the crushed saw
away from its partial burial in the soft soil. It worked. I beat it back to the
truck and slowly moved it backwards before something bad happened.
I took the crushed saw back to its home in the barn. It
didn’t take much pondering to decide that something bad had already happened:
the saw was ruined.
*I don’t really know how much it weighed but it seemed like
a thousand pounds
The next day I went to a chainsaw store intent on buying a
new, lightweight saw that I could use around my forest of heavy, dead oak trees.
The salesman was effective. He sold me the latest saw that had several new
features compared to my old saw. Unfortunately, the new features added extra
weight to the saw. Here is a picture of the new saw that looks very much like
the old saw. Who would have guessed?
I keep you appraised of progress after I take another shot
at the big oak log laying near the road. You are right … I may be a slow
learner.
