I regularly review the plan for the sugarhouse in Vermont and pick out those items that I can do from a distance. My BIL (Warren) has been looking for a place to source rough cut lumber. I have been taking pictures of some silver coins and putting them up on eBay and sending them out when they sell (eight coins so far). I also contacted an excavator that has penciled us in for June of 2023.
One of many needed items is a chainsaw. The chainsaw will be used to cut various trees as support beams in the sugarhouse. In addition, we will be using a wood-fired arch and evaporator. This will require about 10 cords of wood annually. In this case, a cord is a stack of wood 4 feet high, 24 feet long, and wood cut to 18 inches. This is referred to as a face cord.
In a previous blog “Blog Updates and Detailed Plans for the Sugarhouse 'Cabane'," I mentioned I had ordered a chainsaw at 4:00 a.m. one morning. The chainsaw came in and it was in a box. As some of you know, I don’t do well with “some assembly required”. I recorded the process of assembling the chainsaw and getting it started. The movie clip can be seen here.
Another story about a chainsaw begins when I was around age 12 on the farm in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom (NEK). To provide a little context, winter was spent cutting wood for the following season. The house I grew up in had a wood stove as our primary heat source. The farmhouse where my grandparents lived also had a wood stove as their primary heat source. Firewood was something plentiful on the farm and so it was something that my father took the opportunity to sell to pay the annual property tax.
One Saturday winter morning, I was in the shop roaming around when I found a box of old chainsaw parts. There were multiple discarded engines, chains, sprockets and the like. I was always the curious type and before long I had things taken apart and put back together. With coaching from my father, I had an assembled chainsaw. It was a rough looking, and took the usual 30-40 yanks on the pull cord to get it to start and you had to keep your finger on the throttle to keep it running, but it worked.
I was considered too young to use the saw, although I had been driving the pickup truck through the fields since I was nine.
When the weather started to get cold and the ground was covered with snow and ice, my father would go to the woods with the big farm tractor, cut down a large tree, and drag it to an area in front of the barn. From this location the wood would be cut to firewood length, split, and stacked. There was a large light on a telephone pole in the area that made it easy to work later in the day when it was usually dark. After school it was my job to split the wood and stack it.
One particular day, late afternoon, I was getting ready to head to the barn with my father when I was asked to continue to split and stack the wood in the barn area. I made an argument with both my parents that I thought it was time that I did some of the easy and fun work too. I’m not sure why I thought cutting the wood with a chainsaw was easy or fun, but that argument seemed to cause my father a little pause. However, my mother was adamant that I was too young and there would be no using the chainsaw this day. I continued to work my father's hesitation to my advantage as we walked to the barn to begin the afternoon/evening chores. I’m not sure if it was sympathy, fatigue, or I simply wore him down, but about 30 minutes into the evening chores he agreed to let me use the chainsaw to experience the fun, easy part of working with firewood. After several minutes of instruction and warnings to be careful, I ventured out, grab the saw. Growing up in a very isolated area of the country, in a deep cold winter, I was about to experience a portion of transitioning from boyhood to manhood.
The chainsaw had me a little fatigued when I finally got it started. I held the throttle to keep it running and finally, I was over a large branch. The teeth of the saw expertly began chewing the wood creating a rooster tail of sawdust as I made my way through the branch. Three more pieces of wood met their same fate. The third piece I had cut fell to the ground but leaning on the branch, I took my left leg and foot and kicked at the piece to get it out of the way. When I kicked, and while my hand was on the throttle, I felt something grab at me just above my left knee. I looked down and saw a tear.
I got a little sick to my stomach and felt some pain. I shut off the saw, returned it to the shop and quietly went back in the barn. My father asked why I had stopped. I told him I wasn’t feeling that well. I stayed quiet the rest of the time until we headed back to the house after the chores were completed.
As we walked into the basement of the house, my mother was doing laundry. I pulled off my boot and my sock on my left foot was red while the other was white. My mother quickly saw the difference and asked, “What happened to you?” She then turned to my father and asked, “What happened to him?” Then my father turned to me and said, "Yeah, what happened to you"? I will let the reader fill in the rest of the story. It would be another year before I would use a chainsaw again and quickly decided that using a chainsaw is neither easy, nor fun. I still have the scar and I tell the story from time to time when appropriate.
Comments