The Trees from the Forest

Memories of cutting firewood

Growing up we heated our house with wood which meant we cut firewood. When summer waned into fall we would truck out to camp, my dad with his powersaw, me and my twin sister trailing along, annoyed at this chore, sometimes followed by my little sister and our dog. A trailer was hooked up to a four-wheeler and off we drove into the woods. Back then the woods seemed to swallow us up. I don’t recall sky, just trees, limbs, leaves and work.

My dad wielded the powersaw (yes, we called it a powersaw, not a chainsaw, no clue why) and we would haul and stack the wood, our squishy little kid joints easily moving over the uneven ground, bouncing over beds of broken sticks. The scent of sawdust and powersaw exhaust mingled with dying leaves and dirt. Sometimes frost hardened the ground and sent a thin sheet of ice over the creeks. Othertimes the ground was soft with rain or melting snow. We would startle deer, their white tails a surrender, leaving us to hunt the dead and dying trees. Unless the tree was bare needled or on the ground I never knew how my dad could pick out the dead among all the other trees playing dead in the fall and winter.

I probably, in my dark little brain, imagined all kinds of things coming out of those woods. Bear, wolf, cougars, big foot, sprites, dragons, anything to drag me away from the chore I hated. My sister and I, we hauled and we stacked. We hauled and we stacked. Nothing but squirrels came to watch.

Years laters, when my son was a baby, I would stare out at this patch of greenery in the back yard and imagine walking out to it and letting it grab me, wrap me up, absorbing me into the green. It was depression. Postpartum depression, probably. I was losing pieces of myself and I saw that lump of green as whole. I could be apart of something else.

“Put a hat on so no one thinks you’re a deer,” the blaze orange hat was thrown in my direction and I put it on over my brown hair. It’s such a ubiquitous color I could be mistaken for something of the woods. Maybe I am halfway there, between the brown hair and eyes, part of the dirt already. Part of something.

When we cut the tree up we leave the branches behind to become a meal for something else. I would stand on the stump, so stubbornly stuck into the ground and not as wide as one would expect. This forest isn’t as old as it’s thick foliage likes you to think. We still come across burned stumps from a fire years ago. There are depressions and open spaces left from long ago loggers. Little piles of junk metal, half sunk into the ground, half covered by moss become our treasure troves in games of make believe. The forest is reclaiming all of it. A slow creep.

Weirdly, or maybe not so weirdly, I never learned how to use a powersaw. It was my father’s domain. We hauled and stacked - this more a skill than one would think (anytime I see my husband stack wood I side eye him and tell him, “you did not do this when you were a kid”). We kicked pinecones, standing far away from the chainsaw until Dad had cut enough pieces of wood for us to start hauling. When he fell a tree we stood even farther away, prepared to run if the tree decided to fall in the wrong direction. Only once did I see a tree not follow my dad’s directons. It landed right on the 4-wheeler. I stared open mouthed, our little dog in my arms, well away from the disaster of the tree lying broken over the handle bars of the 4-wheeler, its suspension still bouncing from the force of the fall.

Once the back of my dad’s truck was full of firewood we drove home, dumped the wood and stacked it again, neatly behind the garage in grabbing distance of the furnace. By the end the stacks were so tall my dad is hefting the wood into the air for it to land on top of the pile. My dad loads the woodstove. It’s overly massive; I could step into this thing were I wanting to cremate myself. I don’t, of course. I stand back and feel the intense heat rolling out, a mothering burn that reddens our cheeks, licking across the dryer wood until it consumes everything inside. Dad shuts the door which groans, a mouth satiated. For now. We head back out for another load.

This work, necessary to keep ourselves warm in the winter, was supposed to build “character,” whatever that was. It just made me dirty and tired and like most situations, wishing I was reading. I could always be reading a book. I could be some character wielding a sword, fighting dragons, falling in love, pursuing the bad guy, instead I am here, sawdust in my hair, sap and dirt stuck to my hands, boots in mud, feeling like I was melting into the woods.

Now, today, my hands are an amalgamation of everything I once was and still am - tattered from wood hauling, manicured and smooth, the versions a blur in my memory as I stand in front of my thermostat, I wonder how will I teach my son character if we don’t cut firewood?

Back then I would pick at the sap stuck to my palms, black with dirt - it wouldn’t come off until I shower or scrub really hard or use paint thinner. But I was a kid and didn’t care enough to do all that. My hands smelled like spruce, like Christmas, like manual labor.

I’ve dropped wood on my toes, slammed into the edge of the pile of wood with my hip, smashed my fingers between logs. I’ve tripped and fallen on piles of sticks, my hands scraped. Scratches up my arms because we were cutting spruce and spruce is pickey, not like balsam whose needles are softer. I lifted with my back, got saw dust in my eye. No pain lingers; there are no scars but memories, feelings embedded into my limbs, skin, bones, and ligaments. What did I leave behind? What, who is still in those woods? Years later I will stare out my kitchen window at the patch of green in the back yard. What calls to me still?

One day, while driving, I strongly smell tree. Not the fake little green tree that hangs from rear view mirrors but fresh cut trees. A memory? A ghost of me? I look in the backseat for a dirty, cold girl with sawdust in her pockets. Instead soon I see a logging truck up ahead. I don’t know if I have ever smelled so strongly the logs on a truck off to be pulped into paper. There is nothing in the back seat.

It is that time again, I’m following my dad, my sister into the woods. This time I look for the sky between trees. I look in a way I didn’t as a kid, look in a way I couldn’t when standing in my kitchen looking at that patch of green. I still wait for the imaginary to emerge. For the green to rearrange itself and reveal its secrets, but then I go home, turn on a thermostat which will tell the boiler, which uses natural gas , to turn on. My fingers are not sticky with sap nor are my nails caked with dirt. Instead they are clean and manicured - blue today.