Letters to the Editors - Winter 2006
You Can Do it With an Axe
To the Editors:
The Knot Maul v. Axe, by Chuck Wooster in the Autumn 2006 issue, brought back memories.
I grew up on a farm in northern New York, on the St. Lawrence River. We had about 100 acres of woods in a forest community that used to be labeled elm-cottonwood-ash. We had many, many standing dead elm on our land. Unfortunately, there on the edge of what felt like the Arctic Circle, we also had a huge old brick house heated strictly by wood.
So, I spent my childhood and teenage years cutting and splitting elm to feed the appetites of a big parlor stove, a cookstove, and a furnace that my Dad referred to as The Morphodite. The only thing we burned was what my grandfather called “ellum.” We didn’t have a maul or hydraulic splitter. We split wood using axes, wedges, and sledge hammers, and sometimes blocks were “split with a chainsaw.” I don’t know how many times I had three wedges, a couple axes, maybe a hammer or two, and some sharpened branches (we used to drive them into the slot to help retrieve a wedge) – all these items – stuck in a block. I considered using dynamite.
Even when it splits well, elm is stringy, tough, miserable stuff. I really had to work for the few BTUs that the dead, half-rotten elm provided. To split with an axe, you set the block upside-down and take skinny slabs off the outside of the block. Once you get the outside ring off, you can take bigger bites. The trick is to twist the axe just as it strikes the top of the block, and that will flick the piece right off. You look for cracks or indications in the grain that something might give, if you hit it right. It’s more of a finesse to separate the pieces than a brute-force separation. Do it right and the side of the axe will slap the top of the block with a distinctive ringing sound, very encouraging. Do it wrong, and the axe is caught fast in the block, or sometimes it will bounce back at you, very discouraging. You need to be aware of the bouncing thing, especially when using a double-bitted axe.
As a result of this specialized exercise, I developed a strange muscle near my elbow that allowed me to blast a pretty respectable wrist shot when I played hockey. When my kids were little, they got a kick out of the golf-ball-sized bulge under my skin. When I was courting my wife, whose father burns only oak, I got a real surprise. That stuff splits. I told him I’d been pounding on blocks of firewood for years and had no idea it could be opened up like that. It was satisfying to go to his place and work up a wood pile. After a few hours, I had something to show for myself, other than a mangled axe handle and a wheelbarrow-full of wood, like I did at home.
He had the first splitting maul I’d ever seen, too. That made the job sort of pleasant, although it lacks the intellectual challenge of coaxing wood apart with a double bit. It’s funny how your eye gets trained so that you know when to stop splitting. All you need to do is make it fit through the stove door. Some of those crotch pieces were very strangely shaped, but rarely did any have to go back to the woodshed to be trimmed. The parlor stove had a bigger door and took a bigger piece than the furnace. It would hold three or four blocks the size of five-gallon buckets. Occasionally, one would get caught in the door when loading the stove. This would cause a little pandemonium with the crashing and rattling around trying to fix things, as sparks and coals fell on the floor and smoke billowed around the place. Then all the doors were opened to let the smoke out, usually on a day when it was 40 below and breezy.
I still like to split with an axe: it’s faster than a maul or hydraulic splitter, as long as it’s the right kind of wood. Wood heats you three times: once when you cut it, once when you split it, and once when you burn it.
Pat Whalen, Herkimer, New York
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You Can Do it With an Axe
To the Editors:
Thanks for the article explaining the difference between an axe and a maul. I personally use a maul but my mentor, Paul Cate, splits his wood completely by axe. I really learned how to split wood watching him and splitting with him. On really gnarly pieces of wood, we split together, avoiding the need for a wedge. I use the same techniques that he uses with a maul. First, I rarely ever attempt to split a piece of wood through the center to begin with. I generally pick the most defect-free sides and split slabs off of them, kind of like peeling a banana. As you come down on the side of the block, you need to twist your wrist at the moment of impact and pop the slab off of the round. On really big chunks of wood, you can go around and around several times. After shaving the reasonably straight-grained portions off of the round, I will try to center-split what’s left. At this point, it often makes sense to go right at the defect or parallel with the branch forks. If it proves to be too tough, flipping the piece over often helps. An axe holds two important advantages: the speed is greater, and you can swing an axe for a much longer time than you can a maul.
Markus Bradley, Vershire, Vermont
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Roaming Off-Trail
To the Editors:
I enjoyed The Long View in the Autumn 2006 issue of Northern Woodlands.
Looking back over the last 50-plus years of my life, I realized that I did not depend on trails to use the forest. As a teenager, I took off through the woods at random, always exploring a new place. My first job, the summer I graduated from high school, was as a Blister Rust Scout for the Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine. Here, I roamed the woods mapping stands of white pine and locating Ribes. As an avid hunter, beginning in my early teens, I went through the woods in search of partridge and deer. Since graduation from college with a degree in forestry, I have spent over 50 years roaming the woods as a consulting forester and land surveyor.
When following trails, all you see is what others have seen before. To see new sights and make new discoveries, you have to leave the trail.
I like to find a worn trail at the end of the day when I am tired and heading home, but I still like to see what is off the trail, over the next hill, and across the stream.
Fred A. Huntress, Jr., Poland Spring, Maine
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A Good Friend
To the Editors:
Four years ago, I gave a friend of mine, Perry Cavarly, a subscription to your magazine. After a year of receiving it, he called me and said, “Ya know Gibber, I get a lot of magazines in the mail, but Northern Woodlands is the only one I read cover to cover.”
Perry owned around 60 acres of mixed hardwoods and open meadows in Connecticut, and he knew every inch of them. He heated his house with wood from his land, built Windsor chairs from hickory trees, cut and hand-split and writhed fence posts from white oak, and made rails from white and red oak and hickory. He also had a small sugaring operation, and we tapped many maples and spent many hours stoking the arch with wood from his land.
Around his house, it was “park-like,” not a twig or branch out of place. (After reading one of the articles in Northern Woodlands, he realized that was not the healthiest way to manage your woodlands.) But the rest of the woods were left natural, with a few trails to get around on with the tractor. There were great-horned owls, red-tailed hawks, goshawks, turkeys, deer, red fox, coyotes, and black bear.
He fought a long battle with cancer, and right up to the end, he was out in the woods with his chainsaw. He was a true woodsman and a great friend, and I know he’d want me to let you know: “Thanks for a great magazine!”
Gib Geiger, Waitsfield, Vermont
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Trees Forever Lost
To the Editors:
Bernd Heinrich’s recent article, “Timing is Everything,” in the Autumn 2006 issue of Northern Woodlands served as an eerie prediction of what was about to happen in Western New York this October 12th and 13th.
In one of the freakiest freak storms on record, more than 22 inches of heavy, wet snow (maybe best described as “glop”) descended upon Buffalo and its suburbs in a classic lake-effect event. Lightning, thunder, and the crash of trees still clad in their summer leaves and overwhelmed by the wet snow combined to produce a fearful night.
When it was over, 400,000 homes in the Buffalo area were without power, some for more than 10 days. Thirteen people died, some hit by falling limbs, others overcome by carbon monoxide poisoning from portable generators. Schools were closed for more than a week, as were most businesses. The devastation was so widespread that President Bush issued a federal disaster proclamation on October 24th.
Buffalo is known for its snow. It happens here and the city deals with it. But this was different. Snow plows can handle snow, but not downed power lines to 70 percent of the area. Nor could they deal with the hundreds of millions of tons of debris that clogged city and suburban streets.
But the storm did something else – it virtually wiped out the stock of mature trees that over the decades have formed green canopies over the streets of Buffalo. City officials estimated 90 percent of all trees in Buffalo’s Olmsted parks system sustained damage, and of the 12,000 trees that grace six Olmsted parks and some prominent parkways, Mayor Byron W. Brown estimated up to 3,000 may have to be cut down. “We have lost a lot of wealth,” Brown said at an October 25th press conference on the tree situation.
There is as well a psychological effect in this city by Lake Erie. The trees along streets and in backyards have served as part of the family for generations. With many lost or severely damaged, it’s apparent that too many of us took them for granted all along.
Robert McCarthy, Buffalo, New York
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