Cutting Firewood for a Living
Published in The Christian Science Monitor

            I like cutting firewood. I like looking behind me, where I've taken out the beetle-killed lodgepole pines and piled and burned the left-over tops and limbs, and seeing what looks like a park. A few green trees that survived the pine-beetle attack, saplings, and lush grass grow where a year before, even getting through the area on foot was a job.

            I also like it because I can make a good wage cutting and selling firewood.

            I meet people who come up to buy wood, and we talk about how we live and what we think about and how the world looks to us. The same people come back the next year and the year after that, and I hear about changes time brings to their lives and their perspectives. It's an interesting way to keep in touch with some of what's happening in the world.

            There are adventures, challenges issued and met. Mike and Tammy brought a stock truck with a 16-foot bed and loaded five cords. They had a friend who wanted to bring up a Peterbilt diesel with a 28-foot bed. I said, "Bring it up. We'll go right up the fence line, and you can load it all in one place up there."

            Until I saw the truck on the narrow, rough dirt road alongside the fence, I wasn't aware of just how much bigger than a pickup or a stock truck it was. I had cut my turns wide all the way up the fence. I had been confident that anything that wasn't over eight feet wide could pass, but when I actually saw the huge truck beside the fence, I wasn't so sure. I didn't betray my state of sudden doubt. "Follow me," I said, and I climbed on the tractor and drove up the road, and the truck came rumbling along behind me.

            I couldn't quit turning around and looking at the truck. Wow. Right there, where it's coming through, I broke a mirror off the pickup last summer because it was too narrow then to squeeze through. And where it is now, a month ago, four dead trees hung up, criss-crossed above the fence, that a pickup couldn't pass under. And I hope I made this next turn wide enough.

            Scrape. Squealing wires. I got too close to the fence and scraped it with the tractor. It didn't break anything, but it stretched some wires and bent some steel posts. I have to watch where I'm going and quit looking at the truck so much.

            Boom. I run the front wheel of the tractor into a small tree and bounce back from it and almost throw myself off the tractor. It's a good thing I'm going slowly. I sit down and force myself to watch the road ahead of me. I hope nobody saw me hit that tree.

            The people backed the truck to the wood and loaded eight cords. I cut several stumps so they had room to turn around, and they turned around, drove back down the fenceline, across the meadow, forded the river, drove up onto the county road, and headed home. I don't think they were particularly impressed with getting that huge truck to the wood, but then, they didn't know the history of clearing that road the way I did.

            I also like the daily contacts I have with wildlife when I'm cutting firewood.

            I ford the river early on my way to cut timber. Two ravens take off from the gravel bar and fly up the river. A coyote sees the pickup emerge from the willows onto the meadow and lopes into the forest, out of sight. Frost crystals on the tallest grass along the edge of the timber separate the light of the rising sun into spheres of rainbow-colored light, each radiating rainbow colors.

            I drive onto the ridge as about fifteen elk leave my work area. They eat the dark green and black moss that grows on the dead trees. Sometime after I've gone for the day, they come down the ridge and browse the newly fallen trees.

            Two years ago, my sister, Cheryl, and I drove into our work area when the elk were still there. Newly-fallen trees, jack- strawed across each other, limited their passage, and they ran back toward us. Going by so close to us made them panicky as they galloped up the road parallel to the fence.

            One young bull tried to take a shorter route through the fence. He hit the four tightly-stretched barbed wires at a gallop almost parallel to the fence and bounced away from it, hit it again, harder, and bounced farther, still in a full gallop, hit it again, so hard, it threw him off his feet. He rolled all the way over and regained his feet, hardly slowing, and galloped away from the fence, up the hill. I missed any potential his battle with the fence might have had for humor, because I had some idea what pain and injury running into a barbed wire fence could cause.

            The herd hits barbed-wire at a head-on gallop when panicked and breaks all four strands. That must injure the leaders. So I move slowly and give them time to clear the area in a leisurely fashion. I'm not in any hurry to go to work. I'm still looking.

            I drive into my work area and unload my tools. I start the saw and drop several trees, limb them, and buck firewood lengths. Two black and white, red-headed woodpeckers fly in close, within a few feet of the working saw, and pick fat white grubs from the stumps and butts of trees I've just dropped.

            I wear ear protectors against the sound of the saw. I tell the woodpeckers about ear protectors, but they don't hear me over the saw, or they don't care. A bird that hammers its head against tree trunks might not be sensitive to some of what I'm sensitive to. In any case, I finally have to say, it's up to the birds. They could stay at a distance and make their meals when I shut the saw down to pile limbs and tops or to work on the saw.

            Carpenter ants build rooms and passageways and communities in some of the dead wood. They aren't usually aggressive, but if they do bite, those large, wood-chomping mandibles make a painful job of it. When I eat lunch, I watch them walk around on me, but I don't let any of them get where they might feel trapped.

            Some days, I start late and quit late, because what I see in the evening is different from what I see in the morning. My hours are my own. I need to make a living, but when I do the work is up to me. "A living" means more than just earning enough money to pay our way through this material world.

            Spending some time with my family is part of making a living. Sitting against a pine tree and thinking is part of making a living. Lying down in the sun on a cool day or in the shade on a hot day and sleeping for an hour so I'll feel like working more in the afternoon is part of making a living. These are the things I'll remember when I'm three score and ten, while a lot of what I've done that I did just to make money will fade from my memory.