Monday
Christmas has come early to the Bates household: we have just purchased a wood splitter, which feels like getting a giant new toy. As I watch the blade cut effortlessly through giant logs, literary references to woodcutting come to mind.
First of all, some background. My mother owns 18 heavily wooded acres surrounding her house by Lake Eva in the Southern Cumberlands. We are surrounded by tall oaks but, because of the shallow soil, the red and black oaks sooner or later hit rock, at which point they begin rotting from within. (The root systems of white oaks are able to work around the rock so they don’t have the same problem.) Then, come winter, the water that has entered the rot freezes, expanding and cracking the foundation. After that, it just takes a strong wind to topple the tree. As a result, just within 50 feet, three red oaks, one hickory and one maple that have all gone down. In addition, a tree service had to take down two trees that threatened to fall on the house.
With all this free wood around, the question has been how to take advantage of it. Finally, I found someone who would cut the trees into chunks, and he in turn persuaded us to buy a log splitter (rather than rent one at $250 a shot). I rev up the machine whenever I want a break from writing.
A Robert Frost poem confirmed me in my decision not to add a chainsaw to the log splitter. You may know “Out, Out,” maybe his most horrifying poem. In it, a boy is sawing logs when the unimaginable happens:
His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’
So. But the hand was gone already.
Better to pay a skilled professional, I figured, than take that risk.
Another Frost poem has me wondering, however, if the wood I split and stack—being so plentiful—will end up like the abandoned woodpile, in the poet’s poem by that name. Frost comes across it quite by accident and figures it is at least three years old.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled—and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see
No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year’s cutting,
Or even last year’s or the year’s before.
The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labor of his ax
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.
So if I turn four fallen oaks into firewood with this wondrous log splitter, that could be enough wood to fuel our woodstove for ten years. But would it stay good for that long? Please write me if you know.
One other literary image comes to mind as I add logs to our fire. I gave Julia a bellows for her birthday and suddenly we feel as though, without it, we’ve been making fires with one hand tied behind our backs. It also makes me think of Flute, who reluctantly plays the female lead in Pyramus and Thisbe in Midsummer Night’s Dream and who is a bellows mender. I’ve never thought of bellows needing mending—much less that there was a special profession dedicated to doing so—but now that we own one, I realize that they can wear out.
Anyway, here’s a fun poem about bellows, by one John Steele, which appeared in The Amethyst Review:
The Bellows
The bellows breath ignites a fire.
Flames purge your nostrils, gut, and brain,
rouse the serpent from its slumber,
coiled up in your sacral cave.Cross-legged, your head bowed
to face your heart, breathe in
to lift your chest up toward your chin.
Exhale, inhale through your nose,pump your gut to blast air out—
in-out, in-out, in-out…
Then with a sharp in-breath,
suck your belly in and hold…Work the bellows till the embers glow.
Breath by breath, surrender to the flow.