Reading the Grain

With yesterday’s snow settled and temps finally edging up over zero, I decided to get a dose of sunlight by going out to cut some firewood. Another reason to brave the weather is that firewood is far easier to split when the temperatures are seriously cold. If your aim is good, the wood fairly explodes.

I bundled up, but not too much since I did not want to render myself into a ball of sweat in the frigid morning air. I loaded my splitting maul and chain saw on my sled and headed into the woods.

I had been swinging my six pound splitting maul for 20 minutes so before I rendered the next chunk of oak into fractions, I took a timeout and sat down on a piece of oak remaining whole.. Alone, I enjoyed the solitude and the sense of doing good work. I leaned over and set another chunk of oak upright for the next mauling. I scooped up a handful of clean snow and snowconed it off my mitt. As I rehydrated, I leaned over the piece of oak I had set up. The concentric growth rings were interrupted by a faint crack that zig-zagged across cut surface. That meandering fissure would be the target of my next swing of the maul.

Inspecting the grain, the cracks and irregularities in the wood carried my mind back half a century when I was initiated into the chore of splitting wood. My brother and I would hike the mile or so to our great-grandparents small farm and help with lawn mowing and other tasks. On this particular day, after we finished up our usual chores, our great grandfather asked us to follow him out to the woodshed. We made our way across the yard and slightly uphill to the old woodshed that was set on the side of the hill. The back of the shed was on the uphill side and it was open in the back so that firewood could be split and tossed easily down into the shed for storage.

Grandpa handed us an axe and proceeded to instruct us how to read the grain of the wood. “Reading the grain correctly and then hitting the axe directly on your target will make the job easier,” he growled. “You’ll wear yourselves out just hitting anywhere.”

Brother Scott and I took turns flailing at the chunk of wood  and we only managed to leave hack marks across the whole surface.

Nearby Grandpa sat perched on his own oak chunk. He leaned over and said, It’ll take som practice to consistently hit the spot you want. But you will get better.”  We swung until our arms were weary.By taking turns we could get a minor respite to wipe the sweat from our brow.

Finally we celebrated our first split piece of hardwood. The next one went slightly better. At one point I wondered if the sun was getting to Grandpa when he lamented how much he missed hard work. For a 12 year old boy, the idea of hard work was something to be avoided if possible.

Eventually we did damage both to the pile of firewood and his axe handle and I suspect we slept well that night.

Now years later I’m still splitting wood. I’m on my third maul. Grandpa has long been buried but I bet he would be proud of the scores of winters that I have piled split firewood. I can be stubborn when I am facing a big chunk of oak is nearly two feet wide. But I have learned that if you walk your well placed blows across the oak block, you will eventually be rewarded with a new tenor in the blows. Once you hear the hollow blow rather than the solid “thunk,” you know that the next blow or two will result in a mighty crack.

For me the act of splitting wood is not onerous. It gets me outside. It gets me breathing big and loosens muscles. As one friend noted years ago, you don’t need to join a health club if you put up your own firewood.

This came home to roost a dozen or so years ago when I bumped into an urban dwelling acquaintance in St. Paul. He noted that in chatting with my wife, Nancy, he learned that we heated our home with woodburning stoves. I nodded and then he puffed up, almost to prove that he could talk the talk of a woodcutter. “What kind of splitter do you have?” he asked.

Without hesitating I responded, “You’re looking at it.” His eyes went wide and he only managed a squeaky, “Really?”

There will be a day when I will say “Enough” and then we will either buy our wood or depend solely on our propane forced air furnace. In the meantime, I simply adjust the duration of the workout. My usual routine is to run one tanks worth of gas through my Stihl chain saw and then split up what I have cut. It’s a sustainable workout and it gives me great satisfaction.

Miss Nancy will sometimes split as well. She prefers the sweet little three pound Swedish Gransfors maul. I’ll never forget her first attempt at splitting a stout piece of oak. She scowled at the oak after several inconsistent blows. Staring at it, she stopped for a moment and in between her gasps of breath, she looked at me and ordered,  “Do not split this one! I’ll keep working at it. But I want to do it.”  And by God, she did it. It took her several trips out to the woods to swing at it but her persistence paid off and the oak surrendered into fragments.

I mostly do all the splitting but Nancy insists on sledding all of our wood to the woodshed from our woodlot. I keep talking about buying a small tractor or a quad to pull wood, but she insists that pulling the wood is easier in the long run and it keeps her in shape. She has literally hand-pulled many cords out of the woods.

So on this sunny January day, it actually feels like an honorable January day with the air temps dipping below zero. With the  old wood box full in the porch,, the same wood box that my great-grandparents used, stacked firewood filling a corner of the basement and two wood sheds nearly bursting at the seams with split wood, I I feel like a rich man.

Today, I get to enjoy the benefits of our labor and feel the heat of this wood twice. First from cutting, splitting and hauling and secondly from sitting in my small rocker, book in hand, in front of the pile of pulsing coals in the kitchen stove.

Thanks for the lessons Grandpa.

Filed under: Uncategorized