— 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.