Annual wood-splitting detail a pleasure to the senses

When the March days began to get warmer as I was growing up Adirondack, my father would drop a truckload of butt logs onto our driveway for splitting.

The mostly Beech, Maple and Yellow Birch logs were found in his daily travels and sawed into 16-inch rounds.

The pile seemed to grow daily. It covered the melting snow bank and overflowed into the area where we parked our car.

In 1978, the tradition of helping my father with woodsplitting began.

My job was to sort through the pile and roll one log after another out to a small available space to split with a maul.

I was 12 at the time and the maul was almost as heavy as I was.

But this was the right time of year for splitting as the cold nights froze the rounds up a bit.

When I pulled the heavy maul over my head I felt as if I was the toughest person on earth.

I swung it with all my might to bring its chiseled edge down on the surface of the butt round to make a sound that I called thumping.

I worked my way around the butt, slicing off shards of wood ready for stacking.

I usually pulled four or five butts out at a time from the mound of wood and placed them where I could easily move from one to another.

Then I would thump them into firewood ready for stacking. 

It was a rather large amount of wood to put up for the following winter. It took me until mid-June to make my way through the huge pile.

Wood splitting was my task for the next six springs until I went away to college.

Year after year I ushered in spring and the warmer weather by thumping my way through woodpiles, peeling away layers of clothing in the process.

I continued the task through April, into the May hatch of Black flies, and the sweaty first couple weeks of June.

By mid-June I found myself raking up the last bits of bark and shoveling them into a wheelbarrow to dump in the woods behind the garage.

I considered my technique of wood stacking to be somewhat of an art form.

I positioned each fresh slice of wood just right so that the pile ran straight up and down and tight enough to stand on its own with towered end caps.

There was so much about the wood splitting and stacking that appealed to my senses.

The strenuous task helped to form muscle on my tall, lanky frame.

I loved the look of a nice pile of wood. The negative spaces that were made by the area around every individual piece looked like a puzzle to me.

And then there was the aroma emitted from the wood rounds when the maul split them open.

I reveled in the sound of the ripping sinewy strands of wood that would not pull apart so easily.

But to me, the best sound was the hollow knocking of each individual piece being tossed or stacked against another, ringing like a naturally orchestrated musical arrangement.

Mitch Lee is an Adirondack illustrator & storyteller,

living in his boyhood town of Inlet. ltmitch3rdny@aol.com