Careful
when you’re cutting down trees!
by
Robert LaFrance
As I write this column, people are
mourning yesterday’s deaths in New York City where a religious fanatic with a
pickup truck killed eight people and injured eleven. Since the terrotist was originally
from Uzbekistan, U.S. President Trump immediately called for closing down more
borders to terrorists, something he forgot to do after the Las Vegas shootings
done by an American nut case. We all forget sometimes.
Enough of that and on to another subject.
Since it is now November, we are hearing that nasty 4-letter word more and
more. I’m talking about wood.
Every day dozens of cords of
stovewood go by here on their way to heater stoves and furnaces across our
land. I was sitting and sipping on the porch yesterday afternoon when three
huge pickup loads of wood went by heading west. One after another the trucks,
each followed by a large trailer also full of stovewood, headed that way. A
while later I headed for town and, although it was 15ºC, still warm, chimneys
poured out the blue smoke of wood fires.
It all reminded me of the first time
I cut my own firewood, or tried to. Moving back to Tilley from the Northwest
Territories in 1976, I built a cabin at the edge of our family farm’s woods and
stuck a stovepipe out through the roof after buying one of those grey coloured
wood heaters whose walls were about as thick as a piece of paper. Very safe.
Then, as fall approached, it came
time to gather up some firewood for winter. My father casually mentioned that I
could cut my own *&^#*%$ wood. He would buy his with money the government
sent him – for some reason – every month since he turned 65.
One Monday morning, after waking at
the crack of noon, I had a gourmet breakfast of Froot Loops and boiled eggs,
grabbed father’s old bucksaw and a pole-ax that John Diefenbaker might have
used building his log cabin at Meech Lake, and headed for the woods. I was
whistling a tune from a Mexican opera entitled “La Senorita hermosa chica” which I think refered to a beautiful girl, but I couldn’t
think of the Spanish word for ‘woman’.
I
should have paid more attention to sawing than to singing, because on my very
first tree, a small beech, I drew the bucksaw blade across my wrist and the
blood flew three feet into the air. “Aieeeee!” I threw down the saw, used my
other hand to grip my cut wrist and try not to bleed to death, and headed for
father’s house, the old homestead. Would I make it?
Walking
briskly (no kidding!) I got back to the house in ten minutes. As I got closer,
I could see my brother Lawrence there working on an engine in the garage.
“He’ll save me,” I thought to myself (which is my favourite way of thinking)
and as I got closer I took my hand off my wrist to show him how serious it was.
Not
a drop, not a dribble.
“Why
hello,” I said nonchalantly. “How are you doing? Indeed, what are you doing?”
“You
look like a canary that’s trying to swallow an anvil,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
I told him about my brush with death. He snorted, if that’s not too impolite a
way to phrase it.
“You
must have lost a lot of blood,” he said, and for a moment looked almost
sympathetic, but no, I was asking too much. “It must have drained out of your
head,” he finished. And he went back to working on the engine, which I later
learned was out of a 1939 Ford truck
and he was going to put it into a 1928 Chevrolet car, something I would
have thought impossible.
Looking
back on it now, I remember that car and my brush with death, as it were. It was
that day that I decided I would obtain my stovewood from somebody other than
myself, and who better than my brother?
As
I mentioned, this all happened in 1976 when I was setting up housekeeping in my
19 foot x 12 foot cabin. I stayed all winter in that cabin and it was warm as
toast except when I had been away a while and the fire had burned itself out.
Why the cabin never burned itself out – the stovepipe was about an inch from
the roof boards – was a mystery I have never questioned. If it ain’t broke
don’t fix it.
The next summer one of my neighbours,
my late cousin and friend Murray Paris, and I got together and jacked up the
cabin, put two fir skids under it, and he hauled it with his skidder closer to
Churchland Road. I imported an outhouse from the farm of my late grandfather
Muff LaFrance (1881-1976) and, although using the toilet at 3:00 am was brisk, it all worked out well. Thanks,
grampy...and Lawrence.-end-
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