Two summers ago surprise winds pushed over stout oak and cherry trees on three sides of our house. Since then, over the winters, I have been rendering them into firewood. This is known colloquially as “putting up wood.” 

First you cut all the limbs from the tree and saw them into proper lengths to easily feed into the woodburning stoves. We have two stoves in the house, in the basement and the kitchen, and a third in a small log cabin. 

When the limbs are removed and the slash piled, I begin the slower job of cutting the tree trunk into rounds. The world becomes quiet when I turn the chainsaw off and reach for my six-pound splitting maul or the Swedish Gränsfors maul with its hand-forged three-pound head. I pile the split pieces to await their next trip to one of our three wood sheds. 

Now that it is warmer, some of the oak and cherry don’t split so easily. Then I head to the garage to grab some steel wedges from an old galvanized bucket.  

When faced with a stubborn block of wood, I lean over it, scrutinizing its cut surface. I read the grain, inspecting where any branches might have grown out from the trunk (junctions of limb to trunk are difficult to split) and look for telltale wood checking or fissures that will help determine where I should aim my swinging maul. 

Once I determine what looks to be the weakest point of the block, I walk a few blows of the maul across the wood’s cut surface in as straight a line as possible. Many winters of doing this has made me fairly accurate. Using the back of the maul head I tap a wedge into one of the initial maul bites. I gradually pound that wedge deeper into the oak. If the block is especially stubborn, I align a second wedge in another of the original maul bites. On the rare occasion I add a third or fourth to complete the job.

Four generations of my family have been pounding on these wedges. The countless blows have rendered the steel into ragged-edged mushrooms. Over a hundred winters have seen my great grandfather, grandfather, father and now me partner with these old steel artifacts. Such familial knowledge makes the job more like a team effort and for that I am most grateful.

Just over fifty years ago I was helping my Grandpa Anderson put up wood in the same woods that I continue to cut firewood.  Grandpa had recruited his cousin, Gordie Peterson, to help. Gordie drove his unstyled John Deer B a mile and a half to join us. The tractor was equipped with a 30-inch buzz saw mounted on the front of the tractor.

We set 6-8 foot oak limbs on the saw bed and then Gordie would grasp the handle and pull the whining saw blade down on the wood, like a giant electric meat cutter. 

At one point a piece of oak fractured as it was cut and it sent a sharp shard at Gordie’s pulling hand. It left a nasty cut. Gordie casually looked at his hand and without taking his pipe out of his mouth, reached into his pocket, pulled out a bandana, wrapped it tightly around his bleeding wound and resumed sawing.

During a break I asked Grandpa, “How many cords of wood does it take to heat your house?” (It’s a big farmhouse built early in the 20th century.)

“Oh, we usually figure it takes about ten cords to get us through fall, winter and early spring.” 

Now bear in mind this was when winters were colder and a temp of minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit did not send folks into a tizzy. Even at -30 schools were not cancelled.

Wide-eyed, I wondered, “How did you have time to cut all that wood?”

 He looked at me quizzically and answered matter-of-factly, “Well it was our job.”

I suspect the ancestral lineage of wood splitters and wedge carriers will end with my death. The wedges might be passed on as hefty paperweights but in an increasingly digital world who needs to weigh down loose papers.

If these wedges are to continue their divisive work in the decades to come, I may have to forgo the idea of these being family heirlooms and simply pass them on to any wood cutter. 

I feel good about the three cords of wood I’ve put up in in the last month and a half. It’s given me healthy doses of fresh air, a great core workout (proper splitting engages the core more than the arms) and the reward of accumulated wealth.

Every winter I can count on wearing out a pair of leather work gloves. Now, with March upon us, I can optimistically go to the hardware store and pick up a supple new pair for next winter.

Nothing lasts forever. Change is the only constant.

A month ago we stood across the bay from San Francisco on what is known as the Albany Bulb, an artificially made 31-acre spit of land. Its bulb-shaped geology began when truckloads of concrete chunks and twisted rebar were landfilled here for scores of years.

The dumping stopped in 1984. Within a few years local artists began creating art among the mounds of concrete, tangled metal, washed up trash and driftwood. Like our long-ago forebears, they see a hard surface as a canvas for art.

It was ironic that as we strolled on the crude paths meandering through the eruptions of art, that only recently it had been reported that a recent discovery of “new” cave art in Indonesia had been found. The painting of a wild pig and three human-like figures is at least 51,200 years old and are now considered the oldest art known to archaeology. These etchings predate the famous paintings in the French Lascaux cave painting by at least 5,000 years.

Who knows how much earlier humans showed a capacity for creative thought and story telling through images.

Now, more than 40 years later, the art continues and the natural world is slowly reclaiming this once devastated site. Today walking trails radiate in all directions. Among the massive broken blocks of concrete there are sinuous green tangles of vine, bushes, grasses and flowers. Along this maze of trails a multitude of critters reside. Insects, birds, small lizards, mice, ground squirrels, rabbits and the occasional coyote and owl flourish here.  (Over 150 species of flora and fauna have been documented here. I suspect that the real number is substantially greater.) 

Wandering through the sinuous trails I wondered about the concept of “waste.” It occurred to me that there is no waste in the natural world; waste is a human construct and one born only in recent centuries by western cultures. Prior to contact with European settlement, North American indigenous peoples had no name for “waste.” Their shelters were made from organic materials such as animal hides, rock, mud, tree limbs or bark. The natural world would simply take these materials back when the humans were finished with them.

The indigenous understood that even their defecations were food for something else. And given that people were nomadic, there was never a foul  accumulation of feces.

We tend to refer to human feces as “waste.” However for most of the approximately 14,000 years that humans have practiced agriculture we used our feces as well as that of our domesticated animals (cattle, horse, pigs, fowl, etc) as a valuable input for our crops. 

Using chemistry, modern humans have created synthetic materials such as plastics, fiberglass, glass and more to create materials that are stubbornly resistant to natural decay. Consequently we have piled trash on acres and acres of good ground. Cities, towns and villages have departments that deal with the accumulation of our garbage. Fleets of giant garbage trucks move in and out of the thousands of acres that house our accumulated trash. We hide it behind berms and fences thereby pretending it isn’t there. 

Even a tossed cigarette butt can linger for ten years. And plastics are even worse. Plastic islands in the ocean are measured in acres. And since these are so far out in the ocean, out of sight, they are out of our minds. So who cares that sea turtles are eating filmy single use plastic bags thinking they are jellyfish?

Many of the paintings and sculptures on the Albany Bulb stopped me in my tracks. Curved pieces of driftwood melded with twisted rebar bejeweled with old loops of beads, battered phones, or even a typewriter splashed in paint made me smile, wonder, and loudly exclaim. Some were provocative and put me at unease. But that’s what good art is supposed to do. 

Here on the Bulb, the seasonal cycling of birth, death and decomposition is at work. The buildup of organic material will eventually erase all vestiges of the human landfill.  

The Bulb has become a destination for creativity where humans and the processes of the natural world pair together to transform a landscape of ruin into a softer world. A landfill evolving towards rewilding.