Last week I was holed up in the shed waiting for a big rainstorm to stop. I began putting all my tools away as soon as it started. It was the end of the day anyway and I was ready to go. For a while I enjoyed standing in the shed videoing the rain on the clear plexiglass part of the roof. But then I was over it. If I didn’t go now I might be there another half hour.
I don’t like the idea of walking through these woods in a strong storm. From the shed to the proposed cabin spot to the newly made driveway there are multiple widow-makers—big, dead trees hung up with other trees just waiting for the elements to bring them down. At least three of them cross over my main path.
I’d forgotten to bring my rain jacket and pants. Instead I grabbed the blue plastic sled I sometimes use to haul rocks. I put the chain through the cut out hole in the door, locked it and held the sled over my head. I slow-jogged under the canopy of trees that were no longer acting as an umbrella but releasing a torrent of drops.
When I was halfway to the flat spot, I heard cracking timber. I had just passed under the hung up tree in this section— a pine, leaning over the path about twenty feet up. I didn’t stop to turn around and inspect.
The next morning when I came back that tree had dropped to five feet above the path and collected a few sapling gums that made a bendy-limbed, leafy barrier impossible to duck under. The dead tree was wedged between two standing trees next to the path and ten feet past this it was broken in a backward-leaning right angle still connected by a thick hinge of stretched wood.
This fifty foot upper half was now also over the path making it the newer, more dangerous widow-maker and the firmly wedged lower half was mostly just an obstacle to moving along the trail. I went to get my chainsaws and came back to study how to chop it down.
Chainsawing is all about compression and tension and how to read the position of logs and trees. I’m not very good at it and my brain starts to hurt sometimes when I’m trying to figure it out. Anything to do with cause and effect tends to confuse me. Cause: The child hit the baseball. Effect: It broke the window. But now breaking the window becomes the cause. A parent is going to get mad or maybe a secret is kept. A child will learn an invaluable lesson about being honest or possibly a demoralizing one. It’s sort of an endless chain of events that starts with that butterfly flapping its wings.
In the case of chainsawing there are often multiple dynamics going on with the same log and then the dynamics can change as you take pieces away.
In the case of the tree that fell across the trail my picture below depicts the scenario.
The red line shows where the compression is on the log. Here the wood fibers are being pushed together. This is the part of the log that is doing most of the weight-bearing. On the opposite side of the log is the tension side. Here the wood fibers are being pulled apart.
The most common problem in chainsawing is getting your bar pinched. The chain stops moving and then you are stuck. Sometimes you can use a tire iron or a skinny log to relieve the squeeze and pull the saw out. More often you have to use another chainsaw or an ax to cut it out.
I’ve gotten my chainsaw stuck a dozen times or more. It’s usually because I haven’t read the the laws of mechanics the right way. That happened with removing the tree in my drawing. I took out a wedge on the tension side and then tried to finish by sawing up to the wedge on the compresion side. It was the opposite of what I should have done. You finish on the side that wants to open, not the side that wants to close!
This video shows the moment when the saw got stuck.
This would have been a routine removal of my stuck chainsaw but for the fact I was sawing eight feet up in the air.
I tied the chainsaw to a rope attached to the tree so when it was cut loose it wouldn’t hit the ground. I tried to finish the cut with my small saw which needed to have the idle adjusted. Revving it very high was the only way to keep it going and then it would cut out after a few seconds. This video shows it doing that just as I was about to finish the job.
The next video shows what happened when I was about to climb the ladder to check how close I was to being through the wood. Wait for it!
This last video is an example of me cutting a log the right way with the correct physics in mind. This is the big fallen white pine near the shed that I’m cutting into pieces for milling. This is another wait-for-it experience.
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This was once a proper outhouse. Now it is just the out without the house. It was built in the 1970s by neighbors who bought the old farmhouse that was across the road. I’m proud to say I’ve now reinitiated it. The subject of defecating in the outdoors has come up in my blogs before. Well it turns out that defecating into a rectangular concrete mold is very easy. No smooth oval seat bolted into plywood needed! Positioned over a corner, the sides make great handrails. This double-seater was made to accommodate an adult or child.
I’m now considering never building the house for this out. It is surrounded by thick woods and on the road side a steep incline makes the woods even thicker. The shed is blocking a view from the trail. Besides, I’m rarely here with anyone other than an occasional friend who I can just tell, “I’m going to use the out so don’t come down that way.”
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I’ve had moments of missing Sasha terribly. Here we are in a conference call. She’s barely listening to me. She’d really rather I just let her do her job keeping watch out the front window.
Okay, that’s all I’ve got from the land in the slow geologic wake of Clinch Mountain. I hope you are well.