Up Moses Creek: Walking the log
The oak log pinched the saw bar, the hot bar branded the log. Burt Kornegay photo
I’d no sooner opened my book of Robert Frost’s poetry to start the morning right when Neighbor J drove up. A wind had downed trees in his pasture, and he was sawing one up when his chainsaw had gotten pinched — “Can you help me get it out?” A “pinch” happens when the tree trunk suddenly sags or shifts, clamping the saw bar tight in the kerf like gigantic wooden jaws.
Good pinches make good neighbors, and I’d been pinched myself. I closed Frost and changed into work clothes and gassed my saw — “Be there in a pinch!” The trick is to make a tension-relieving cut in the log while keeping the “helper” saw un-pinched. It took me two relieving cuts, plus Neighbor J on a crowbar, to open that log’s jaws.
I left when two other men came to help in exchange for wood.
All told, a scarlet oak, a black locust, a black cherry, a red maple and a yellow poplar had been blown down parallel to each other in the pasture. In names at least, they made a colorful assembly in the grass, still bright with morning dew, though the trees themselves showed only shades of gray bark and green leaves, some already turning brown.
I jumped into our pond to wash off the saw fumes, woodchips and poison ivy sap, then opened Frost again ...
... And read until that afternoon, when, overtired of hearing rhyme on rhyme, my right index finger suddenly itched to pull the saw trigger again. Red oak is my favorite firewood, and I’d had my eye on a dying one in the hollow behind our house. The day was hot but dry, I told myself. It’d be safer now to tractor the wood up out of there than if it was wet. Plus, the tree already leaned in the right direction and my saw was sharp — all the ingredients ready-mixed to begin the felling right. I scratched the itch.
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It’s said that heating with wood warms you twice: first in getting it, second when it’s in the stove. I think it warms you five times: to saw it, haul it, split it, stack it, then carry it inside, before you get to the second part of warm. But while sawing in that hot hollow, wearing earmuffs, heavy chaps, boots and gloves, I felt warm all over all at once. I could hardly see through the sweat to saw.
That’s my excuse, anyway, for felling the oak against a tall yellow poplar, where it lodged at a slant. The oak was thicker than my saw bar was long. It ran 30 feet clear to the first branch. It weighed tons. When cutting a hung-up tree under tension like that, the saw can kick back and kill you. The tree can kick like a horse but with a hoof as heavy as a barrel full of concrete. More than a saw bar can get “pinched.”
First, I cinched a chain to the trunk and tried to drag it down with the tractor. It didn’t budge. And tractoring on a slope has its own risks. I tried to winch it down with two come-alongs. It didn’t come along one inch, so I bucked off length after length on the log’s bottom end, making the trunk fall forward heavily with each cut. My son, a sawyer on a hotshot crew out west, calls it “walking them down.”
I walked the tree about halfway down, sweating every step, while Becky, also sweating, stood a ways off, phone in hand, her finger poised on 911 — not that there’s cell service in the hollow. We’ve gotten our wood for 45 years, and I think I’m good for 50. Becky’s pulled on a rope, winched a come-along, manned the tractor in a pinch. But when the log chomped down on my saw bar, she yelled, “You’re a stumbly old man now when you saw!” Over the engine’s idle I also heard some illogical thing about my old, hard head.
You know how it is with a word like “log”: it rolls off the tongue and you think you know it — until you wrestle with it in the flesh. In this case, with an inert, dense, tensed up, no pulse, silent thing with bark. That oak learned me “log” better than any book.
Unbolting the saw engine from the pinched bar, I lugged it out, telling Becky I planned to put my spare bar on and finish walking the log. “I won’t be gone long. — You come too?”
(Burt and Becky Kornegay live in Jackson County.)
