2 posts tagged “cutting wood”
After playing hockey on Sunday, we headed over to Megan's family farm to cut wood. Before that, we were treated to a yummy lunch of homemade mac and cheese, homemade dill pickles, and some flavored hot cocoa (among other things). Satisfied, we dressed into our cold-weather gear and hopped on the wagon as Megan's dad Greg towed us with his tractor out to the trees.
We were clearing dead trees from a swamp, a task made much easier since the water was frozen solid so it felt like dry land under all the snow. In fact, you could hardly tell if you were on land or water most of the time, and we didn't really care. Greg brought two wagons out for us to load up, and among the group we had three chainsaws to put to work. Most of the work, however, was the arduous task of hauling the cut logs from the swamp to the wagon on the other side of a fence.
One of the highlights of the evening was Amanda using a chainsaw for the first time in her life! I made sure to take a few photos and also caught the event on video:
A few hours went by and slowly but surely we loaded up both wagons with wood. The sun was setting and it was time to head back to the farm, where yet another meal awaited us!
First, though, we took a little tour of the farm, visiting some of the resident cows and calves. Those calves can be pretty cute!
Dinner was yummy, of course, this time with tuna casserole, chicken salad, pickled beets, more flavored cocoa, and finally a "taste test" of the frosting for Ryan and Megan's wedding cake. Naturally we started talking about weddings and us elder folk provided Ryan and Megan (and Eric, since he's getting hitched a month after Ryan) with some cynical wedding advice. Basically we were saying how we don't remember any of the details that seemed so important back then. Plus, all the stuff that got screwed up, it didn't really affect anything. My mom had the best one: "My dad missed my wedding - he spent the day in jail for driving drunk and my mom was too angry to bail him out! But I didn't mind."
Saturday Amanda and I joined some of my relatives out in Grandma's pasture to chop up some trees. Grandma owns 200 acres and we call it "the pasture" because it used to be a cow pasture about 50 years ago. My dad can remember when there used to be very few trees out there; now, it's mostly wooded. A few large oak trees had fallen and a bunch of us trekked out to saw, split, and stack the wood.
Besides Amanda and myself, the crew consisted of my dad Dan, brothers Eric and Ryan, uncle Bob, cousins Kevin and Gabe, and Eric's friends Kenny and Chris. My mom was there for a bit and later on brought us hot cocoa.
Before we could get to cutting, we had to get Bob's 2WD compact truck with the splitter into position - no easy task with all the snow on the ground. A little bit of pushing by Kevin and Gabe solved the problem; luckily the rest of us had AWD/4WD and had little trouble driving back there.
First up were three large oak trees that had fallen. Uncle Bob had earlier trimmed off some of the limbs and cleared a path to tow the splitter back there. Dad, Kenny and Chris each had a chainsaw and they immediately set to work making the sawdust fly. Bob fired up the splitter and Gabe, using a log as his "throne", split logs into firewood. Soon Ryan joined him and they had a rapid production line going! Eric, Amanda and I hauled logs into either the splitter staging area for big logs, or directly to the woodpile for smaller ones. Kevin and Bob worked to stack wood on the pile, which grew quickly.
It was a crisp, cold day but at least the sun was out with blue skies. Soon we were warming up and jackets began to appear hanging on nearby branches. Amanda and I started clearing away the smaller branches and tossed them onto an ever-growing brushpile. Then a few of us starting pondering a problem: when one of the trees fell, three large limbs had lodged themselves in the fork of another nearby oak tree, about 20 feet off the ground. How do we get those limbs down? Then Kenny walks up and says "Hey, I have this chain in the back of my truck..."
Not just any chain... a HUGE chain, like the kind whalers would use to tie whales to the side of a ship, I imagine. This sucker was heavy! After a few tries, I finally got it looped around the end of one limb and four of us played tug-o-war with a tree. We lost round one, but won the second try so suddenly the Kenny had to dodge a falling limb! Then we tied to the second limb and once again were stymied, but a second effort brought the limb down, this time with much better control. The third stuck limb was out of reach for the chain, so we left it alone for the time being since my mom had just arrived with some hot cocoa and coffee.
Everyone welcomed the warm drinks; however, I've never been a big fan of hot cocoa. As a kid after a day of sledding or other snow games, I would make cold chocolate milk while my buddies drank hot cocoa. Being very thirsty, I took my cup of hot cocoa and put a few handfuls of snow into it to cool it off and it hit the spot! Cocoa-slush. Two cups of that and a couple handfuls of marshmallows later, I was ready to get back to work.
The others had written off the last hanging limb but I really wanted to get it down. I was able to grab one end of it but there was no pulling it from that direction as some branches were firmly blocking it's passage. Eric and I worked it for a while, pushing, rotating, and pulling, trying to work it free. No dice. Finally I got creative and asked Dad to fashion me a 10-foot long gaff out of one of the branches, kinda like a long shepherd's hook. I reached it up to grab the high end of the limb and after some tugging, I was finally able to bring the limb down!
Now it was chow time. We drove back to Bob and Therese's house, where Therese had prepared a complete taco buffet! Tortillas, beef or chicken, lettuce, cheese, salsa, chips, guacamole, and veggies & dip were all set out and we enjoyed a great meal. Grandma made it over to join us for lunch, where she watched her grandkids still making messes when trying to eat tacos! Gabe's girlfriend was also there for dinner.
When somebody asked "What time is sunset?" we realized we better get back to work. Soon we had most of those three trees cleaned up and a very large pile of wood to show for it. The woodpile was about eight feet long, six feet wide, and over five feet high! With all of the sawing done and just some splitting left to do, several of us drove to another part of the pasture to tackle a standing tree.
A large three-trunked oak was about to lose a trunk, the one that was dead and rotting. It was oddly shaped in that the trunk arched out far in one direction, a direction different than the one we wanted it to fall. Kenny and Chris devised a strategy for notching and back-cutting that hopefully would make it fall where we wanted. It worked! Amanda caught the whole thing on video. We got the tree all cut up and ready for splitting, but we ran out of daylight for that job. Eric, Ryan and I nevertheless had time to build a 10-foot tall totem pole!
The coolest sight of the day was as the sun was setting when a flock of swans flew overhead in a "V" formation just about about 200 feet above us. They were flying low enough to see them in good detail but the setting sun was even lower, casting a beautiful orange light to illuminate the swans from below against a blue sky! Very neat.
The day wasn't over yet! As we drove back to Bob and Therese's house, Kenny had the alternator on his truck fail! Gabe drove Eric, Kenny and Chris over to the nearest AutoZone (about 20 minutes away) to get spare parts while the rest of us sat around and talked, although Dad drove over to Grandma's house (just a minute away) to look over some of Grandpa's WWII records for a history group that's gathering information. Therese fully pampered Amanda - she surrendered "the best chair in the house", put up Amanda's frozen feet and wrapped them in a down blanket, and then poured her a glass of wine! I was content to munch on some Fritos.
We had just wondered what was taking the AutoZone boys so long when they called to ask the size of Kenny's windshield wipers! When you put some mechanically inclined folks in a parts store, they'll often buy more than they came for. Eventually they made it back, repaired the truck, and then we were on our separate ways back home. It was a 10-hour day!
