My part was to stay ahead of the excavator and cut the big trees in the way as it made a rough road through our woods. Next winter loggers will skid logs along this road because we have enrolled our land in the Vermont Current Use Program.
The good news as we began work on this warm June morning was that it wouldn’t be quite as hot as the day before, when the temperature nearly hit 90. I should say from the outset that although I have been using a chainsaw for 40 years, I am an amateur at best and, at worst, an old one. The night before I had worried aloud to my wife that I might slow down the work. Behind me high on the seat of his excavator was the professional. I’ll call him Eric.
By comparative standards, this will be a small logging operation, a clear-cut of a couple of acres of red pine planted in the 1950s and worth almost nothing, a selective thinning of the large hemlocks on the way to the landlocked pines, and the taking of marked hardwoods, mostly maple and ash and yellow birch, along the way. We hope to break even. The purpose of this logging is to steward the woods into healthy growth and to replace the conifers with hardwoods. Beneath the red pine, already the floor has seeded naturally with small maples that will flourish in the sunlight created by the clear-cut.
Last fall I walked the woods with a forester. First, we sited the road and marked the path with ribbons, then marked with blue paint the trees he decided were ready for logging. In the beginning we were able to follow an old logging road from nearly a century ago, and when it ran out, we had to improvise. End to end, the road would cover half a mile.
For the first hundred yards the old road was so clear that there was little for me to do. I had reopened this road 20 years ago to cut firewood, mostly beech scattered among the hemlocks. Now I retreated, saw in hand, and watched Eric widen the path, clearing from the sides and overhead the branches we always have to duck under in winter when we ski or snowshoe through this section of the woods. He used the bucket and arm of his excavator like a hand clearing cobwebs, and he made a new corridor on another scale, work in a few minutes that would have taken me a day by hand. I watched in wonder as he made piles of the broken limbs. Some of his movements were delicate enough for a game of Pick-up Sticks, and others rough and noisy, more like breaking spaghetti to fit in a narrow pot.
But before long we veered from the old road to avoid a wet spot, and my work began. One by one, I dropped trees that Eric would then drag aside with his bucket, and occasionally he would signal that one needed to be cut in half so he could stow it neatly. I will return to some of these trees later this summer for firewood, the beech and maple, and I will be able to truck it out on my new road. The morning warmed. I felt a wood tick crawling on my neck, and sweat soaked my shirt. Before Eric had arrived that morning, I left my chainsaw in the hayfield where we would begin our work, then walked the ribboned path stashing my chain oil and gasoline cans along the way where I thought I would need them. The theory was economy of effort, but before long we had reached them both, and I had to do what I had hoped to avoid, schlep all three — the saw, the oil and the gas — at once. Actually, there should have been four items to schlep because I started out with a water bottle. At times the work was fast and dangerous, the spaces narrow and tight; and some of the trees I cut hung up on branches and leaned. There was no time for wedges and barely time to notch the trees properly. More than once Eric had to free my pinched saw by nudging the tree with his bucket. It was exciting work, and I felt useful.
Just a few days before I had spent the weekend with classmates from college at our 50th reunion. We are all in our 70s and have entered a mellow era where our grandchildren mean more to us now than everything we have ever done in our lives. Still, I was surprised by the number of classmates who are still at work in some capacity, in medicine or law or business. Professional experience is always valuable and always in demand, but I am fully retired and occasionally struggle to explain to skeptics how I spend my days.
By 2 p.m. we had reached the red pine. For Eric this was a first draft of the eventual road, but my part in the operation was complete. He turned the excavator around and continued to work the rest of the day and most of the next, widening and smoothing the road and setting the culverts. When it was done, I walked the road with my wife, pointing out the trees beside the road I intend to return to for firewood. The road looked rough and raw, but we have walked along logging roads in all stages and could picture what it will look like one day seeded with grass. Our woods will be thinned and healthier, and the slash the loggers will leave behind in piles will become habitat for birds. And deer like a good path. The day after Eric was done we saw fresh prints in the soft earth of the new road, and a fox had left scat on a rock to mark new territory.
At the reunion, I felt no pressure to articulate what I’ve done with my life since graduation because there were always better things to talk about, our children and grandchildren, and the books we were reading. We had submitted pictures and essays for a 50th yearbook, and I’m sure my classmates will return to these pages over and over as I will to read more thoughtfully the words we all have written. I submitted two photographs of me and my wife, one of us at the rim of the Grand Canyon, the other at an outdoor table celebrating her birthday. They say a lot about us, but the editor in me would like to add a picture of me at work with my chainsaw, a scene so vivid it would evoke the sweet smell of sawdust, the roar of a chainsaw, and the heat of a June morning.
Jonathan Stableford lives in Strafford. He can be reached at jon.stableford@gmail.com.