MAKING WOOD

On a cool November Saturday morning, after a breakfast of flapjacks and bacon, Pa made the announcement. “Time to start making wood,” he said matter-of-factly as he pushed himself back from the kitchen table. He was looking at me when he said it, and I knew I’d be spending that Saturday in the woods. He hadn’t said a word about making wood when my brothers and I got home from school on Friday afternoon, but we had recognized the signals. I had seen his freshly sharpened double-bitted ax standing in the corner of the pump house when I went out for water that evening; next to it stood the two-handled crosscut saw, along with the single-bitted ax that was mine to use in the woods.

“Making wood” meant turning dead oak trees into hunks of wood suitable for keeping the several woodstoves on our farm operating during the long, cold central Wisconsin winter. About twenty acres of oak trees nuzzled up to the north side of our farmstead, so the wood supply was handy. Nonetheless, making wood was hard work and took considerable time. The saying “Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice” was obviously dreamed up by someone who hadn’t spent any time actually cutting wood. Making wood offers far more than two opportunities for warming.

With the morning barn chores finished, we “shouldered our axes,” as Pa described the proper way to carry what could be a dangerous tool. He carried the crosscut saw with the teeth pointed up. We headed out to the woods, where while squirrel hunting earlier that fall we had spotted several dead oaks—good candidates for the ax and saw.

The ax is one of the oldest human implements. It was a mainstay of the pioneers who settled Wisconsin back in the 1800s and the main tool the loggers used to cut through the vast forests of northern Wisconsin. Pa took good care of his axes and kept them razor sharp. “A sharp tool is a safer tool,” he liked to say. A sharp tool also made the work a bit easier, if swinging an ax can ever be considered easy.

We crunched through fallen leaves on our way to the first candidate for cutting, a dead oak with a trunk three feet across and thirty feet tall with dead limbs sticking out every which way. Pa walked around the tree once, determining its natural lean—the direction it would most likely fall. He also looked for trees that might be in the way when the tree fell. The last thing he wanted was a cut tree “hung up” in another tree. A hung-up tree, referred to as a widow-maker, was more than frustrating; it was dangerous. When a tree fell only partway, you never knew when it would fall the rest of the way.

Pa put down the saw, grabbed his double-bitted ax, and took a mighty swing at the tree. Thwack. He removed the ax and struck the tree again just to the side of where he had previously cut. Thwack. He was notching the tree on the side toward which it should fall—would fall, if his calculations were correct. A pile of wood chips gathered on Pa’s six-buckle rubber boots as he continued chopping. Then, with the notching finished, he picked up the saw and instructed me to take one end of it. He ran the saw across the side of the tree opposite from where he had notched, making the first cutting groove. With the groove complete, Pa and I pulled the saw steadily back and forth, back and forth, always pulling, never pushing. If you pushed, the saw pinched. “Let the saw do the work,” Pa said. “Don’t force it. Work with it.”

These were the days before chainsaws made quick work of sawing through a tree. Sawing with a crosscut saw was slow, hard work, but it had its benefits too, the main one being the sweet smell of the oak sawdust that gathered at my feet as I pulled, and pulled again, and pulled once more until I thought my arms would jerk out of their sockets.

Finally, when I thought I couldn’t pull the saw one more time, Pa said it was time for a break. He stood up and stretched out his back, and I did the same, for pulling a crosscut saw while bent over not only tested your arms but also challenged your back. After a five-minute break we were back pulling on the saw as it slowly bit its way through the giant oak. The tree continued to stand straight and tall and apparently unfazed by either the chopping or the sawing.

“Not long now,” Pa finally said after the saw had made its way through most of the tree and was approaching the notch Pa had made with the ax. And then, with a crack like a rifle shot, the big old oak began toppling, slowly at first and then more rapidly.

“Timber!” Pa yelled. We yanked the saw away from the tree and jumped out of the way as the mighty oak crashed to the ground, the sound of its falling echoing through the quiet woodlot. With the tree down, Pa grabbed the crosscut saw again, and we began cutting the larger limbs off the trunk into pieces about twelve or fourteen feet long. We pulled the pieces off to the side to await loading on our steel-wheeled wagon and hauling to the farmstead, where we’d stack them in a pile. Limbs too small for burning we made into brush piles, “a place for a rabbit to live,” Pa said.

During the following week, while my brothers and I were in school, Pa continued cutting trees with the help of Weston Coombes, a neighbor he sometimes hired to help with tasks such as this. With Frank and Charlie, our draft horses, pulling the wagon, Pa and Weston hauled load after load of dead oak trees, sawed into manageable pieces, to the farmstead. When the pile was thirty or so feet long and six to ten feet tall, Pa stopped cutting trees and hauling limbs and trunks to the pile. On Friday evening he began calling neighbors, starting with the sawyer, Guy York, who lived northwest of our farm and owned a circle saw powered by a big Buick engine. Pa asked Guy if he would bring his rig to our farm the next day to saw the enormous pile of oak limbs and tree trunks. Guy said he would. Next Pa called other neighbors to invite them to the sawing bee: Alan Davis, who lived three-quarters of a mile or so straight north of our place, and Bill Miller, who lived a half mile away to the south; George Kolka, who lived a mile west of us; and Danny and Roman Macijeski, a half mile to the east. Pa told them to be at our farm by ten or so on Saturday morning; by then Guy York would have the saw set up and we’d be ready for sawing wood.

Shortly after ten on Saturday, Guy York fired up the old Buick car engine that he had mounted on the back of a wagon. A belt pulley ran from the engine to the saw frame that sat on the ground near the end of the pile of limbs and tree trunks. The saw, a simple homemade affair, consisted of a large circle saw that ran free without any protection—you learned to stay away from the menacing teeth that cut through dead oak wood like a kitchen knife cuts through a pound of warm butter—and a movable table where you placed the wood to be cut. Once the wood was on the table, York pushed it into the fast-spinning saw, which immediately sliced off a piece. One person took the cut piece and tossed it onto the woodpile. The rest of the crew brought limbs and trunks to the saw, moving rapidly enough so the saw never stopped, except when a set was complete and the saw was moved.

The men moved the circle saw whenever the pile of cut wood became too tall and the distance between the remaining wood to be sawed and the circle saw became too great. That pile was called a “set.” The size of a farmer’s woodpile was measured by the number of sets. In those days one judged the quality of the neighbor’s ambition by the size of his woodpile, among other criteria. The number of sets of wood sawed was an easy way of determining the size of a woodpile.

At noon York shut down the saw, and the crew filed into the house for a feast consisting of mashed potatoes, pork chops or roast beef, Ma’s home-canned peas and carrots, two kinds of pie, and several cups of black coffee for each worker. Ma had been busy in the kitchen all morning preparing the meal. Donald and Darrel mostly watched the goings on, helped Ma some in the kitchen, and of course enjoyed the big meal, even though they were stuck eating in the kitchen while the workers, me included, ate in the dining room. After a brief rest the crew was back at work. Usually before dark—and dark came early in late fall—the sawing bee was done. The men filed into the house once more for supper and then made their way home to do their chores. Each farmer in our community would have one or more sawing bees before winter had passed, as each had several hungry woodstoves of their own.