Neighbors to the Rescue

I like to chop wood. Maybe it was my early training as a Boy Scout. Or those tales of Paul Bunyan, the giant lumberjack in the big woods, got to me. 

Could it be I was moved beyond prudence by the poetry of Robert Frost?

Good blocks of beech it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.

—“Two Tramps in Mud Time”

At any rate, I’ve always enjoyed swinging an axe.

Robert Frost, 1913. Unknown photographer. Public Domain.

This year, however, the task threatened to overwhelm. From wood-gathering efforts chronicled here and here, I had more than enough fresh honey locust in my backyard, needing to be split.

We don’t use those big, round logs mentioned in Christmas carols (“See the blazing Yule before us, falala-lala, lala-lala!”). Logs must be halved, quartered, or even eighthed, to fit our small cast iron stove. Apart from mere size, wood ignites quicker when it has a cleft inner surface to feed the flame. 

An Intervention

I started to split the honey locust, and some river birch from the same source, with my trusty axe. 

My neighbor Dick rented a hydraulic splitter. I helped him use the splitter on his part of the take. I had never used one before, and it’s impressive, the ease with which it shivers great logs into small ones. It’s a good job for two people—one to horse the logs onto the splitting bed and one to push the lever that makes the machine go. 

A small part of my bonanza.

Need I spell it out? Dick did the heavy lifting and I provided the wrist action. A fair distribution of labor, agreed. But I was beginning to think I’m an old man, needing to be spared exertion.

When we had reduced his logs to splinters, he offered the use of the machine for mine.

“I actually enjoy splitting them with my axe,” I said. “Good exercise.”

“Well—”

I grinned. “However, some of my logs are too big and heavy to split easily by axe. So I gratefully accept your offer.”

Fooboo the dog inspects split logs.

We wheeled the machine to the back end of my garage. In a half-hour’s time we split the biggest and baddest of my logs down to halves or quarters. Plenty of logs remained to be split the old way, gratifying the woodsman inside me.

We hitched the splitter to the back of Dick’s car, and he towed it back to Home Depot.

Since then I have used my axe to make three face cords of split wood. That’s probably enough for now, as we head into winter. Tons of prime honey locust still await the axe. It will keep me busy all winter, whenever the snow is low enough.

Why Is This Important?

Ordinarily, the way people keep warm is their own concern. It’s hard to excite others about it. 

There may be curiosity value in historical heating methods. Someday perhaps I’ll tell you what it was like to live in a house heated with a coal furnace, what one had to do—and it was the child’s lot to do it—to keep the flames alight. 

Tom Thompson, Man With Axe, 1915. Public domain.

But this year’s saga of my firewood husbandry is of possible interest only because it shows our dependence on one another. Some of our wood was a gift from my friend Jack. Some was a gift from our neighbors Nick and Shelly, who no longer needed their honey locust tree. 

In processing the huge logs down to burnable firewood, I had help from my neighbor Ben on one side, and my neighbor Dick on the other side. 

They say firewood warms you twice—once when you split it and once when you burn it. But the warmth of working with friends and neighbors is not to be discounted.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

(History is not what you thought!)

Making Firewood

Hardships bring us back to the essentials.

Bereft of people to see and places to be, I turn to the dwindling wood-pile in the rack along my garage wall. 

A couple of years ago our friend Kevin rebuilt our old miscellaneous junk depot, making it into a newly inviting sunroom. It’s an awkwardly long space with a lot of windows but no connection to the furnace that warms the rest of our house. So Kevin installed a cast-iron woodstove at the far end of the room.

The author at work by his woodstove. Lacey the spaniel as Sancho Panza.

That woodstove has become a great blessing to Your New Favorite Writer. It means I can write in the calm of our sunroom in warm weather, in the cooler times of spring and fall, and even in the deepest part of winter.

But the cost is: Procuring enough firewood and splitting the logs to stack for drying and burning.

Into the Trees

Old-timers say firewood warms you twice: First when you cut it, haul it, and stack it; and second when you burn it.

I like to get logs for free, rather than pay money. From time to time, someone in the neighborhood has a tree felled; usually this work is done by hired arborists. If the homeowner does not want the wood, the wood cutters must haul the logs to a dump for disposal—an added expense I can lighten for them by taking some logs off their hands. It never hurts to ask.

After hauling a few heavy, 4- to 6-foot logs home in the back of my SUV, I need to cut them to fireplace lengths. I use a small, seven-pound Stihl chainsaw with a 14-inch bar. Small beats large where chainsaws are concerned. Schlepping a 23-pound, 20-inch murder machine around a tangled logjam will knock the stuffing out of you in half an hour. Very few men or women who are not woodsmen by trade can put a large chainsaw to good use. And fatigue will make the urban lumberjack a danger to self and others.

The essential tool.

The timber is sawn, ideally, into 16-inch segments; then the real fun begins. Logs need to be split (1) so they’ll dry more efficiently, for the bark holds moisture in; (2) so they’ll fit conveniently in the stove; (3) so they’ll burn more readily as flames lap at their exposed innards; and (4) so Your New Favorite Writer may enjoy the satisfaction of cleaving a pillar of wood with the bite of a sharp axe.

Verse in the Vernal Heat

Robert Frost in 1941. Fred Palumbo photo. Library of Congress, New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection. Public Domain.

Robert Frost waxes lyrical over chopping in his poem “Two Tramps in Mud-time”—

Good blocks of beech it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.
The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good
That day, giving a loose to my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.

Scavenging for wood seldom brings me “good blocks of beech” that fall “splinterless as a cloven rock.” Quite often I’m using, by turns, my axe, a heavy splitting maul, or even wedges and a sledgehammer to demolish a twisty, knotted specimen of brutish maple or fruitwood with desperately cross-tangled fibers. It’s frustrating to try to smash such a godforsaken glob of sylvan perversity to flinders.

Larry the logger levitates lumber. Jo Sommers photo, used by permission.

But, ah! when I do score a nice chunk of straight-grained hardwood—such a joy to plummet the steel down upon it and pick up the halves on either side, to set the halves again on the chopping block and knock them into clean, glistening quarters. If you have ever done this kind of elemental work, then you know the peace it bestows.

Splitting wood adds rest and harmony to the soul.

Some of my neighbors use hydraulic splitters that can shiver a timber to its component parts in seconds. I have no quarrel with this efficient practice. I just like my way better.

Pride of Axemanship

Frost mentions a pair of bystanders who watched him at his beech-splitting chore: 

Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
They judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax,
They had no way of knowing a fool.

So there’s that, too. Pride, you see, rears its ugly head. I am proud of the little wood lore I have gained over my 75 years on God’s green earth, starting as a Boy Scout and continuing to the present day. Whatever small skill of axemanship I possess has been earned through uncounted hours of practice on “the unimportant wood.”

Let us say, rather: The importance of wood may be more in its first warming than in the second.

A beautiful Danish woodpile. Photo by BKP, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

Owing to my amateur status as an axeman, and also to the amateur status of some of the trees I scrounge, my woodpile is far from a thing of beauty. Unlike those geometric wonders of forest engineering you see gracing the pages of coffee table books, my woodrack has all sorts of bent and twisted knots and gnarls, wood of all descriptions protruding rudely to snag the sweater of a careless passer-by. It’s almost disgraceful.

But here’s the thing, Gentle Reader: I intend to burn up all the evidence.

The motley wood in my garage.

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The menace of this season’s global pandemic, with its mandated idleness, has simply led back to roots, and branches, that are dear to me for their own sake. 

Here’s hoping you likewise may find blessed paths to pursue as we patiently await good tidings from our common future.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

(History is not what you thought!)

Flim-flammery and the Long Foul Ball

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” wrote Robert Frost.

Something there is, in us, that prefers to deny boundaries. 

I don’t know whether this is only American or universal. But when faced with limitations, hemmed in by rules and customs of society, or bound by mere laws of physics—our minds skip sideways, embracing whatever solution is beyond reach and all the more attractive for that.

Lottery Mindset

Lottery promotion in Dickensian London. Public Domain.

Think about this when you’re in line at the Kwik-Trip waiting for someone ahead of you to buy a Powerball ticket. Don’t imagine he or she is longing to get four dollars or seven dollars back on a two-dollar bet. It’s the big jackpot that draws wagering interest—the forty-gazillion-dollar, once-in-many-lifetimes win. Never mind that it’s all but impossible.

For the same reason, fifty thousand spec scripts are registered each year with the Writers Guild of America. The chance of success is slender, but fifty thousand people see themselves on stage at the Academy Awards. They see that so clearly and convincingly that they write 120 pages of screenplay—a hard thing to do—in case it may come true. 

This urge to shoot for the moon is, not coincidentally, the theme of many Hollywood films, which often feature, again not coincidentally, flim-flam artists.

A pair of examples: 

Flux capacitor. Photo by JMortonPhoto.com  & OtoGodfrey.com. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
  • In Back to the Future, Marty McFly is a lad stuck in a doomed cycle of frustration at home and humiliation at school. It’s a cycle from which he has no chance of escape—except that his friend, Doc Brown, has invented a Time Machine. Now, Dear Reader, the beauty thing about a Time Machine, for a screenwriter, is the many strange plot twists you can set up and pay off—as Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale realized when they wrote the script. But the beauty thing about a Time Machine for the character Marty McFly is that you can escape the bounds imposed on you by the Space-Time Continuum. All you need is a Flux Capacitor and a DeLorean. How cool is that? You might think Doc Brown, inventor of the Time Machine, is some kind of a flim-flam artist. But you would be wrong, due to Exception 7a of the Screenwriters’ Rules of Plot Etiquette: “If an eccentric inventor somehow finds his way around the Laws of Physics . . . Well, that’s okay, then—because he’s a Scientist!” 

But my main point is, we love the story because Marty cheats the normal rules of reality and (SPOILER ALERT) hits a home run.

  • On the other hand, the wonderful Wizard of Oz, in the MGM film of that name, clearly is a con artist. He is nothing but a carnival trickster, transported to a fairyland where he bamboozles the locals into thinking he’s something special. When Toto the dog gets too curious, Oz desperately pleads, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” But it’s too late. The jig is up. He is exposed as a fraud. But, wait—He solves the besetting problems of the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and the Tin Man. Three up, three down, just like that. Then, he takes Dorothy Gale back home to Kansas—which is all she’s ever wanted, anyway. So maybe he’s not a fraud, after all. That would fall under Exception 7b: “If an inveterate charlatan somehow solves real problems by the Power of Suggestion . . . Well, that’s okay, then—because he’s a Psychologist!” (Or maybe a Meteorologist; cf. Burt Lancaster as The Rainmaker.

Again, the point is: We love the story because Dorothy solves her problems not within the dull, inelastic boundaries of her life, but by escaping to a magical world where she gets a magical fix. Case closed.

Inside Baseball

Hermann R. Muelder. Special Collections and Archives, Knox College Library, Galesburg, Illinois. Used by permission.

How can all this fail to bring to mind the late Hermann R. Muelder? Muelder was a distinguished professor of History at Knox College, but he was also well-known for his campaign to eliminate the outside-the-park home run from the game of baseball. “The home run takes less skill than a well placed hit that a fielder can’t get to,” Muelder said. “You don’t have to know anything about baseball to hit a home run. You just have to be strong.

“Nothing happens when a homer goes out of the park. All the fielders stand there, helpless. There`s nothing they can do. There`s no finesse in a home run. I want to see finesse returned to the game.

“The bunt is more interesting than a home run.”

Another of Muelder’s arguments: “Baseball is the only game in which it is the person—and not the ball—that does the scoring. And that is essentially the game. The home run violates that principle.”

Sadaharu Oh, world record holder for “long foul balls.” Photo by Mori Chan. Licensed under CC BY 2.0

Dr. Muelder’s argument was logical to a fault. Its essence was that the game consists in how well the players make use of the ball within the field of play. The beauty of the thing lay in its exquisite timing—the duel between pitcher and batter and the race between fielder and base runner to determine the score. Removing from the field of play the object of all this dueling and racing extinguished the whole point of baseball. To cure this outrage, Muelder proposed that if you should happen to belt one over the outfield fence, it would simply be a long foul ball. On the other hand, if you hit the ball so cunningly, and ran so fast, as to score an inside-the-park home run, well—THAT was real baseball. Exempting the ball from any possibility of defense was the only thing Muelder wanted to outlaw. 

Despite the obvious logic of these arguments, baseball has not yet criminalized the outside-the-park homer. 

I think that’s for the same reason we admire Marty McFly and plucky Dorothy Gale: We refuse to tolerate a situation in which our limits are absolute. 

There’s got to be a way to beat the system. Anything else would be un-American.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

(History is not what you thought!)