Wood Cutting

Every year, as the summer draws to an end, and as days grow shorter, and nights grow colder we take to the woods to spend the day storing up wood for the winter. Now if you are one of the many people who heat their houses with gas or electric heat you truly miss out on one of the most satisfying days of the year. That is, wood cutting day. Well let me fill you in on today, our first wood cutting day of the season.


After a good nights rest and a morning of chores and preparing equipent for the day's labors, we headed out to the woods pulling our sixteen foot stock trailer. In it we had all the necessary tools for the task: chainsaw, axes, splitting malls, gloves, ect. For the next twenty minutes we wound up our valley and off onto logging roads to a remote place where cull logs had been left from a recent logging opperation. Daddy fired up the chainsaw and began cutting off rounds of wood.

The race was on: man and machine against malls and muscles. We were feeling our oats but we knew the name of the game was endurance.

As round after round was cut, Stephen and I began hauling them to the trailer and splitting for all we were worth. First it was one log, then two, then ten. The trailer began to fill with split pieces.

After we had exausted one area of accessible wood we moved to another. Although our backs began to ache and sweat covered our foreheads the satisfying feeling of a large log cracking and splintering under a powerful well placed blow was enough to keep us going.

When ever we paused for a moment to catch our breaths we could hear the drone of the chainsaw, and knowing that every second we paused caused us to fall behind, we again pushed on.

Although it felt like days, after four hours of intense labor, our trailer was filled to the gills with aproximately three cords of wood. (Which being translated means a whole lot.) As we straightened up after throwing the last log in, we could not help but smile at the amount of work our three man opperation had just accomplished and the months of warmth we had just stored up for the winter to come.