Up Moses Creek: ‘Hit them hard!’
‘And every piece I squarely hit / Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.’ Robert Frost.
Burt Kornegay photo
A man who lives up Caney Fork once told me he didn’t split red oak for firewood because its sap smelled like urine. He called it “piss oak.” His remark came back to me one day in September while I stood in my woodlot filling my lungs with the odor from a ton of freshly bucked-up red oak waiting to be split, and all I can say is that one man’s stench is another’s sweet aroma.
Along with its pleasingly pungent smell, I like red oak simply because it’s a tree that’s ready at hand in our woods, and it makes for a long-lasting woodstove fire. Red oak splits cleanly too when the grain is straight, and I’ve learned how to work with it when the grain is not — as in knot.
But here’s the icing on the cake: red oak draws hoverflies. Hoverflies are insects that look like big yellow jackets, but they don’t have a stinger. And they don’t bite. No sooner have I split the first redolent piece of red oak than one of these flies will zoom up out of nowhere and, living up to its name, hover with a high-pitched whine just inches from the freshly opened face, savoring its fragrance. A hoverfly doesn’t smell with nostrils but with hair-like olfactory sensors on its antennae. Below the blur of its wings, I can see the creature in mid-air rubbing its front legs together like hands, “Mmm mmm, gonna be good!” Then it walks around on the surface sucking up sap with an elongated “proboscis,” a kind of shop-vac of a mouth. Once I become scented, the fly even sups on me.
But, truth to tell, I’d wade into any old pile of wood, even if it wasn’t red oak. I love the heat that splitting wood builds inside me as much as I love backing my outside up to our woodstove on a frigid day. Splitting wood brings the tree and tool and me, hand and eye, together in a work that’s hale and whole. No gas-powered wood splitter, please! Why let a machine have all the fun? Why turn such satisfying labor into a mere chore to get done? It’s one thing to make a living selling firewood — you need to split a lot of cords. It’s another to chop wood for home.
Besides, how can I hear poetry with an engine at my ear?
My favorite woodlot poem is Robert Frost’s “Two Tramps in Mud Time.” He’s in his yard happily splitting oak “as round about as the chopping block,” when suddenly “out of the mud two strangers came.” They looked to be out-of-work lumberjacks. And one of them puts Frost off his aim by shouting, “Hit them hard!”
Related Items
Up Moses Creek: “I’m from Moses Creek”
The Joyful Botanist: Soil Life
Virtual plant clinic in Haywood
2025 A Look Back: Hold my beer award
“I knew pretty well why he dropped behind
And let the other go on a way.
I knew pretty well what he had in mind:
He wanted to take my job for pay.”
Poor Frost. One minute he’s chopping wood and “giving a loose to my soul,” and the next, feeling the stares of the jobless men, he finds himself torn between “my love and their need.” The lumberjacks split him.
So he turns from splitting wood to stacking words into a poem:
“You’d think I never had felt before
The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip on earth of outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.”
Chant those verses, and if they don’t power-up your swing, go get yourself a word splitter.
Itinerate loggers have never put me on the spot. And when I keep the pleasing work to about an hour a day, I can stretch it out for weeks. But if my son Henry gets wind of it and takes over the splitting maul, I’m hard pressed to set the wood on the chopping block fast enough to keep up with the tool’s rise and fall. In one afternoon, my ton of red oak dwindles to mere pounds, and he’s standing thigh-deep in fragrant pieces.
So far this fall I’ve had the oak to myself. It was a tree that had been slowly dying for no reason I could see. It was 90 years old by ring count — red oak’s prime of life. It stretched out 100 feet when measured on the ground. According to a wood-weight chart, each bolt I sawed the thick trunk into weighed more than 200 pounds.
To split a chunk like that in half, I look for the check that’s almost always in the center of the sawed-off end. That thin crack betrays a fatal gap in the wood’s defenses. Now, hit it hard! Hit it true too, and the crack will spread. Hit it again, and again, if need be, until you hear a distinctive, hollow “pop.” That sound comes out of the block’s core like a mortal groan. It tells you the sharp steel bit just breached its 90 rings of armor. Now swing again, and the block will fall apart, “splinterless as a cloven rock.”
The Ajax of the tree is its base or “butt bolt,” and it can kick your butt. It is just there that the oak has built itself to withstand great tension, connecting as it does the tree’s anchoring roots with its airy crown, up there where tens of thousands of leaves are lifted up to combine earth’s nutrients with sunlight and grow the whole.
Though the usual idea is to split firewood into pie-shaped pieces when viewed on end, I also chop out squares, rectangles, parallelograms and half-rounds, and stack them as I go — custom-chopping to fit each piece into the rising wall. I work like a mason who dry-stacks rocks, though the wood I stack is wet. My object is to build a wood wall chin high and seven paces long. Given a year to dry, it contains a winter’s heat. Also mason-like, I use accumulating chips and slivers as steadying shims. Leftovers go into the kindling box. It’s a wise use of things my country kin taught me when, as a boy, I helped them at hog-killing time: “Everything but the squeal.” What an old-fashioned notion in today’s throwaway world!
When you fell it, buck it up and split it, you break a forest tree down into smaller and smaller pieces. But once you start to stack what falls off the chopping block, another kind of tree grows in your woodlot, one that during the short days of winter will bring the summer’s sun indoors.
(Burt and Becky Kornegay live in Jackson County. “Up Moses Creek” comes out the second week of the month.)
