Friday, May 31, 2013

When I think of woodcutters, I think of Hansel and Gretels’ father, or of the lumberjack that rescued Little Red Riding Hood, or maybe the lumberjacks in the silly Monty Python Lumberjack song.  They are always pictured with a big, sharp axe and that is the way woodcutting was done for eons.  In the Yukon Territory during the gold rush in the late 1800s, entire forests were cleared away by hand to provide fuel for the steamboats that moved freight and people from Whitehorse to Dawson.  Being way too mechanized for an axe, when I needed to cut firewood for wintertime heat, I opted for a chain saw.  My first was a small Homelite purchased at Costco when we were stationed at Ft. Huachuaca.  Our historical house on the parade field had a fireplace and we were determined to have a fire.  There was a woodcutting area on the post, and after reading the manual, I took my new saw out and began by cutting up some wood on the ground and soon was felling trees.  As I became more experienced, I was much more at ease using the chain saw, and I filled up the bed of my 1958 International Harvester ¾ ton pickup and hauled it home, only to burn very little of it.  The chimney didn’t really draw very well, and that smoky flavor we found delicious on our steaks just wasn’t as attractive inside the house.  In Kentucky, we also had a fireplace and I cut and burned firewood there, but it really wasn’t until we moved to Alaska that I began to think of myself as a woodcutter, even without the fairy tale.  Our first home had 2 fireplaces and I cut enough to burn in them.  I even put a log lighter in so that building a fire was as easy as turning on the gas and striking a match.  When we built our first cabin however, was when I began felling trees for use in construction as well as to cut and split for heat.  We built the cabin on piers which were spruce logs I cut and that we debarked, treated, and planted in holes to support the cabin 4 feet off the ground.  On each wintertime visit, we burned what I had cut and stacked in the summer, and if we weren’t very careful, the inside temperature would be in the 90s, even when it was -20 outside.  We learned to cut trees that were dangerously near the house by winching them in the opposite direction or using an ATV to put enough traction on them to get them to fall away from the building.  The new cabin in Trapper Creek is much larger and more comfortable, and uses lots more wood.  Fortunately, there is a lot of downed wood around.  I spent a good deal of time this winter cutting, splitting and stacking firewood so that next winter we will have seasoned wood ready to burn.  It is actually easier to cut it in the winter because the snow allows you to go nearly anywhere, and in the summer the vegetation and the swamps limit your ability to travel.  Robert heats his home with wood, and as I was driving through an area of road construction on Eagle River Road, I saw a big pile of wood.  A workman told me it was free for the taking so I called Robert and off we went to cut wood for next winter.  The trees were stacked on the side of the road and we pulled his truck and trailer as close as we could get and set about cutting the logs into bite-size pieces.  We actually were aiming for 6-8 foot lengths which we could end-over-end to the trailer or truck and muscle into place.  We maxed out both the trailer and the truck and got home safely where we unloaded the truck onto the ground.  He will cut it and he claims his kids will stack it.  Hmmm.   Sounds just a little hokey to me.