The Timber Cutter

January 15 

The rain has fallen for two straight days. I had a date with the loggers over the mountain this week, but they have had it just as bad or worse than us. Rained Friday and all weekend as well up there. They are an aggressive outfit, so not working for them must mean a deluge.

The yard at the shop is holding so much water that pieces of bark are sailing from one end of the mill to the next. All this water makes me wonder if my basement is flooding at the house. I rub wax on a customer’s table top and then spend the day running second-grade hurleys on the lathe.

When I call, my timber cutter he is cranky. On the phone I can hear his television. I can hear small children playing in the background. He grumbles and answers my question saying yes, they will be there next week if this rain ever lets up. Then he hangs up the phone.

He has missed too many days from the rain and this month will be tight.

His name is Jim. He wears a blond mustache and though short, is built like a weightlifter. He either wears his logging helmet or a ball cap. On the rare occasion that I see him quickly switch between the two, I am always taken aback by a large bald spot on top of his head, which sharlpy contrasts with the long blond hair on the sides and back of his head.

He speaks with a rhotacistic “r” like Elmer Fudd, but with an Tennessee hill accent. You would never kid him about it—he would kick your ass. I would like to add that I won’t try to imitate his diction in my writing as I will with other people I introduce—I have far too much respect for him, even if we don’t always get along.

He is the best cutter I have ever seen. He is death to the forest.

One clear blue day we both stood on the side of a steep hill, high above a hollow below, watching the dozer skid off some thick poplars that Jim had just dropped and bucked. I had been observing his skill at dropping trees, his thoroughness on the clear-cut—not leaving even the smallest tree, watching him speed down the steep hill to buck the tops, then haul his saw back up the steep hillside to where I was, his feet sure on the loose soil.

I said to him, you love cutting timber, don’t you. What do you mean, he asked. I mean, hauling your saw around the side of the mountain, dropping trees, being good at what you do. Jim shook his head, grinned and said, you know I don’t ever come up here and think, I love cutting timber. His smile turned to a sneer as he said, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have to be. He turned abruptly and went on with his work. 

— Ain’t nothing easy on a sawmill.

— Ain’t nothin' easy on a sawmill.

When I’m cutting Hickory Pecan and changing out blades every logs, or when I am sawing wet, muddy logs, when equipment breaks, when my luck runs out, I always quote Jim Lukens’s sawyer— Ain’t nothin' easy on a sawmill.

The first ash I ever bought was from Lukens in Whitestown, Indiana. He ran a bandmill, edger, a good sized kiln, and sold rough lumber to the public. Lukens never could quite figure out the specs I wanted, how I wanted it sawn, or what I was going to do with it. He was in his seventies  with an imposing build from years of moving lumber trough his mill. He never said much to me, choosing instead to stare me in the eyes until I looked away uncomfortably, and when I looked back a half smile formed around his chewed up unlit cigar.

I met him at the mill and we walked out to the log yard. It was a cold, wet spring, and the leaves had yet to bud on the trees.  The ash butt log he brought me lay in the mud half way across the yard. It was cut straight across the ground, 28” on the small end but it still had large tines.  The ends were dark grey from sitting in some log yard through the winter. Not being able to see the grain well, I wasn’t sure what I was getting, but I didn’t have much choice. It was a ten foot log and I had to buy the whole thing. He sold it to me for seventy-five cents a board foot and told me it would be 45 dollars an hour to saw it up. Mike, Lukens’s sawyer, was a few years younger than Lukens. He wore a pair of winter-weight blue wool coveralls and a logging helmet. He moved with a limp over to the old loader and pulled himself up into the cab. Mike forked the log into the air with his loader and laid it on the deck of the mill.  

The log lay crooked on the deck and I wondered at its massive size and how I would load the thing in my Honda Civic. I stood next to Mike at the controls of the mill and told him how we needed to cut it. The log was too big for to be quartered. We’d have to come through one of the sides that was more straight as a sacrifice. With his hydraulics, Mike turned the the log around on the deck until we found the weakest side. He leveled the log, engaged the motor and the mill screamed its way through the log. I shuffled my feet in anticipation. Dust filled the air and I could smell the ash the same as when I cut ash in my workshop. Once the head moved through, we used levers to remove that first large section. My eyes lit up when I saw the whiteness of the ancient wood and the long thick plain sawn grains, like long strokes with a paintbrush. We moved on through that side, until the mill approached the yield of the next quarters. Then Mike flipped the log up with the sawn side against the dogs, and ran the mill through the middle.

But Mike knew half way through the cut that he had made a mistake, he stopped for a minute, looked at me and shook his head, then proceeded through the log, the blade squealing, until the blade guide rand straight into the tine of the log and stopped. Mike turned off the motor and grabbed wedges which we drove into the end of the log until we could free the blade enough to back the head out of the log. But Mike explained that it would be best to cut the tine so we could go forward again because repositioning the log would be difficult having started this cut. He pulled an old Stihl chainsaw from a cabinet and pulled on the cord until the chord ripped out. He laughed and set the saw back in the cabinet. Then he grabbed an axe and bad leg and all, climbed up on the mill deck next to the log. I watched as this seventy-year-old man hacked away at the root tine. The axe was sharp and was an accurate. He worked away at it until he figured the head would clear the log, then climbed down. He coughed a sawyer’s cough for a good minute after his effort. His face was wet and it mixed with the dirt and sawdust on his face.  Ain’t nothing easy on a sawmill he said.

The ash I bought from Lukens was old, had poor tines, and thus had poor yield. But I learned much about how ash is cut, what to look for in the log, and that I needed a bigger car. I also learned about the hardness of the work and the hard people I would meet along the way.

January 2

Business grinds in winter. I split wood, haul scrap, build furniture, sell unwanted or underused equipment on ebay. Whatever gets the rent and wife paid. Everything is sold—the sawdust, the chips, the scraps, the filches from the saw logs. I repair machinery. Look for jobs as a sawyer. I tinker with new techniques and look for new business.

Winter is also the time I search for ash. I am like a farmer, investing all of my money and promises on seed and then waiting months for my crop to come in and be sold to balance the ledger. In this cycle debts mount and I complain to wife that this is it. This is the last of this business. Wife tells me to go to bed, knowing full well that when I awaken at first light I will ready the kids for school and go and do something of value with my time. 

New Year's Day

New Year’s Day

The first of January is our first day back in South Carolina having visited with family in Indiana. For me it is a day to get back to the work at the mill. For wife, it is a day to purge and start new. While I head off to the mill to complete the orders made since we left town for our holiday, wife reclaims, reorganizes, reconstitutes. There will be new food for the refrigerator, new gifts for the house and its occupants, new resolutions for work, home, and family, new color samples for the multifarious painting chores to which I will be assigned.

When I return from the mill in the evening it will be to new rules regarding the home. No longer will it be permitted that I stack my catalogs, reference books, and news articles of note on the dining room table.  I will be banished to the small alcove in the study where I built a bookcase of Indiana ash, where I placed a small bureau of golden quartersawn oak that sits neatly in this cold dark space, where I will sit and write.

My days are often days of ritual beginning with coffee—this is the first coffee I have been able to prepare for myself since returning, having drunk watered-down coffee at the old people’s houses, and motor oil from the gas stations along our route.

Though a square pecan cant in the drive remains where it was placed to discourage any would-be trailer thieves, the mill is not as it was left. Branches lay in the yard, whipped from the boughs of the red oak trees. Long channels of washout run down the hillside and into the yard where the water then pooled, then dissipated, leaving contours of gravel and sand that play in the mud among the white oak and cherry logs.  Meanwhile, the kiln smells of wet red oak boards—likened by many a customer to cat piss. The kiln dehumidifier is broken, and as a result, in the back right corner a deep reservoir has formed. It is black, putrid water, reminding me that I cut corners on the foundation.

It is cold inside the shop. I start a fire in the stove first with the curly shavings I pull from my spoke shave, then with the long thin strips of ash that are made when I run the blank through the bandsaw, and finally with the various scrap I consistently produce: the offcuts determined by the length of the hurley, or the long white rectangles bordered on a lone side by rough bark that are removed to make the shaft, and the long, graceful, inverse arc cut away to form the bas of the hurley.  

I mark and cut the day’s hurleys from the blanks, shave them down with my planer and spoke shave—and it is at this step, having been absent from the shop for two weeks, that I am reminded of my skill and my injuries—the skill to shape this blank with a sharp plane and the pain this repetition manifest. In the spring when the orders are rampant, my shoulder will bruise from overuse and I will numb it with painkillers. At the sander, I shape the wood much in the same way a potter works the clay on a wheel. I wear a mask and ear protection, and this, coupled with the motor and the friction of the belt and the hum of the dust collector cancel my sense of sound and smell, leaving only my touch and my eyes—and in this isolation I find a concentration for my work that is both intense and lonely. A hurleymaker’s hands and fingers are most beautiful at this moment, like a fiddler dancing a bow with one hand and running his fingers up and down the strings with the other.

The work finishes with a stamp, a driving of nails into the tin band, and then I let the hurleys stand upright to dry.

I return home where wife has prepared a meal and reorganized home and husband. The meal is fresh greens, a roasted whole chicken with a sweet plum sauce, steamed green beans, and New Year’s cabbage. The home will be kept tidier. When home, husband will keep office in the cold alcove of the study, and when not keeping office he will be kept busy spreading the New Year’s paint.