And I’m OK. Oh, no, I’m not kidding – off to the forest we went this morning, chainsaws in hand, and I’ve returned with all of my fingers, no missing skin anywhere, and a nice little collection of photos.
Our objectives were twofold: the clearing of a portion of the forest for a goat pasture, and the separation of felled trees into firewood and those bound for the sawmill. The juvenile goats’ normal quarters collapsed last year with ninety one of them inside it and providing the second set of hands required to rebuild this is a big part of why I’m here.
Farmerchuck owns a hundred and twenty acres in Massachusetts’ Hill Town region. The locals refer to this as Appalachia North. The land is mostly wooded hills with a little bit of farming in the valleys and it’s almost a perfect inversion of Iowa, where the only rough terrain and trees are clustered around our rivers. You city kids might not know the units: forty acres is a piece of land a quarter mile on a side, so a hundred and twenty is a patch a quarter of a mile by three quarters of a mile.
As I write this I’m sitting in the Revolutionary War era farmhouse on the property, fifty feet above the one small tillable field, and perhaps three or four hundred feet below the crest of the ridge to the south. This land is not rough, but it does have impressive vertical over short distances. This shot of farmerchuck leading the way up one of the logging roads doesn’t really show this all that well, but it captures him perfectly.
The one at the rear is Chuck’s mighty 32" tree feller, while the little guy in front is a brand new Poulan 18" that had never been out of the box. I’d bought this with an eye on a couple of dead standing pines on my mother’s farm and brought it along on this trip, thinking I might make myself useful while I was here. This has turned out to be a very good thing, as both of Chuck’s smaller saws are down for repair; one occasionally goofs and a second saw is required to cut the first free.
All saws are not created equal. Chuck’s has a guide bar large enough to take any tree in this forest with a single cut, a professional grade chain, and if you look closely you can see four large steel spikes where the bar meets the chassis. These are called pawls and they allow the operator to set the saw in the wood and provide pressure on the blade by lifting as opposed to my saw, which requires a mixture of patience, muscle, and body mass depending on the type of cut being done. The only advantage my saw has, which is hard to see from the photo, is that the hand holds are shock mounted. Mine is much more pleasant to operate than Chuck’s saw.
My previous woodcutting was entirely fencerow clearing for the sake of stove wood in Iowa’s flatlands. The largest tree I’d ever felled was maybe thirty feet and not more than a foot in diameter. Chuck’s woodlot is dramatically different, with seventy to ninety foot evergreens up to two feet in diameter spaced fifteen to thirty feet apart with some deciduous trees sprinkled in the mix. There is the judgment necessary to operate a saw without injuring yourself, which I have, but this is maybe 10% of the total knowledge required to operate safely and successfully in an environment like this.
Chuck knows which trees he wants for which purposes and he has the saw and skills to drop them safely so felling duty is his. He has experience in lumber production, which I’ve never done, so this means the final cut duties are his, too. My abilities and saw size mean that dressing downed trees is all I’m good for – a task known as "limbing".
My first task was a pair of white pines that had been dropped one atop the other and almost in parallel. I picked my way between them, taking all of the limbs that had no load on them and some of the smaller ones that were loaded. I got whipped a bit with things coming undone but that is to be expected. I finished the task with the trees standing on "legs", or loaded branches. Once they’re done this far they get drug a bit with the tractor, they naturally roll over, and then you can finish the job.
I wasn’t paying attention but Chuck must have been watching me. What I’d done was a fairly delicate task requiring a bit of judgment and I was suitably rewarded after my first tank of gas. We scooted down to the chainsaw store and my "lawyer’s chain" was replaced with one that would cut roughly twice as fast. They don’t make professional grade chains in such short lengths but the one I had out of the box was designed to limit Poulan’s liability first and then perhaps cut a little wood as an afterthought.
Stuff got a lot harder after we got back.
This is a very large sugar maple with a white pine entangled. We had three farm dogs, two saws, and a John Deere 4500 series tractor and we still couldn’t tease the pine free from the maple. You can see where the white pine passes through the maple’s branches in the upper right corner of the last shot.
And this is what we left in place. The word is we’ll leave the pine entangled and take the dying maple – the fall path can be determined now with the pine cut off and pulled back like this. Doing the large maple with the smaller standing pine entangled would have been very, very dangerous for the saw operator.
I watched Chuck fell a few trees ...
And then I thought I’d be up to the task. I was given a position of honor – this eighty foot white pine was thought to have enough of a fat, straight trunk to serve as the center beam for the juvenile goats’ quarters.
This one turned out to be as much of a muddle as the entangled maple/pine. I tried to bring this large tree down in the same fashion I’d take an eight inch mulberry out of a fencerow, with a flush cut into the wedge I’d made to direct its fall. I got a lesson on large trees after the fact – come in from above the wedge to encourage the tree to move in that direction. I’m not sure if it would have made a difference in this case; a breeze came up when I had about 2" of wood left, and instead of falling the planned direction the tree leaned the other way, neatly entrapping my saw. We don’t have any photos of this, mostly because Chuck and I were scrambling back out of the fall zone, uncertain of which way the tree might go. We watched it for a couple of minutes, then Chuck decided to push it with the tractor. Here is a shot of the little John Deere later in the day, stacking the dressed logs until we have enough to warrant a run to the sawmill.
This is an important task to complete and what we thought would make a forty eight foot beam is only good for about forty two, I'm finishing editing on this the next day, and as soon as I click "publish" we’re going hunting, saws in hand, for the piece we need to repair the juvenile goats’ quarters.