by Gene Logsdon
Over centuries, the trees continue to grow. When the large ones finally topple, letting a shaft of light to the forest floor, seedlings spring up, and eventually, the one with most access to sun and to soil nutrients takes the old one's place. Forest fires and tornadoes open up large acreages to the sun, and then nature's theater enacts again its play of reforestation.
Return now to Act One, and become director and choreographer of the play. In Act One, all plants start out with the same amount of sunshine: there is no tall growth to shade new growth. Although eventually the field will become a hardwood forest on its own, you can often speed up that eventuality significantly by planting seeds of the species you wish to end up with, without going through the whole wave of thorny trees and brush. This seeding will of course be necessary if no mother trees are within two thousand feet of the new woods-to-be. Select the trees that are native to your area. Black walnut and white oak, currently our two most valuable hardwoods, are two species especially important to get started at once, along with hickory if you want good nuts to eat, since they must get above the brush right away and receive full sun. Plant the black walnut seed and hickory (or pecan in southern climates) in the low, black ground and the white oak acorns on the higher ground. Choose seed from old trees that have good-tasting, easy-cracking nuts in the case of walnut and hickory, the sweetest acorns in case of white oak, the least bitter cherries in case of wild cherry, and the sweetest sap in case of sugar maple. Choose a late fall day when the ground is soft. Carry a bucket of seeds. Drop one and sock your heel on it, driving it partially into the sod or dirt. And so proceed. Just getting the seed firmly in contact with the dirt is enough, although if it makes you feel better, you can cover the seeds completely with dirt. Actually, just scattering the seeds on top of the ground is sufficient to get some of them sprouted. Walnuts can be planted unhulled with a potato planter. One cottage nurseryman makes a furrow with a plow, drops the nuts or acorns in, and then plows the furrow shut. Rodents, especially chipmunks, will eat some of the acorns sometimes, so planting heavily and three to four inches deep deters them. If I were starting out with a bare field, I'd broadcast a bushel per acre and disk them in as if I were planting oats. That would discourage chipmunk predation, as well. If you want to get really professional or need to plant a fairly large area, the Truax Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota sells a regular acorn and nut planter.
Windblown and bird-scattered tree seeds will take care of themselves if any mother trees are around. Otherwise, you can gather the wind- blowns and scatter them over the field yourself.
Conifers are not native to our area, and I am not sure if my general rules of forest care apply to them. If we want evergreen trees, we must plant nursery stock from some other area. If left unattended, conifers here will be overwhelmed by the hardwoods that volunteer around them. Where we wish to have a grove of evergreens, we manage them as we would Christmas trees until they are twenty feet tall. Even so, the hardwoods will eventually grow up and shade the evergreens out. Given a few centuries and a few forest fires, oak, our climax tree in this part of Ohio, will dominate all.
The Art and Joy of Woodcutting
Cutting down a large tree should be an act charged with ritual: Candles burning, incense smoking, plump bishops in high hats holding forth in stentorian prayer. A tree that has experienced two centuries or more of life on earth deserves that kind of respect. I speak not so much of the godly spirit in it that humans of all times have sensed in great trees; I mean its wonderful accomplishment. I stand before my two-hundredyear-old white oak worshipping its feat of survival. Hundreds of other trees have competed against it for the sun and lost. Hundreds more around it succumbed to wind, disease, lightning, fire. This is the white oak to save acorns from, and I do. I justify my felling it only because it is dying and by thinking how its wood will now become furniture at my son's hands, burnished and beloved by generations of humans. In ending the tree's green life, I release its woody soul to a sort of life everlasting.
But in cutting down trees, be not too enraptured with the spirits of the woods. Tend as well to re-examining your insurance policy. Tree cut ting is not just a confrontation with the trees death. The woodcutter's life is in jeopardy, too. Cutting trees is a risky adventure. When ignorant people speak so foolishly of the boredom of the countryside, I tell them to go cut a tree down.
I try, as I've said, to wait for the wind to blow my big trees down, but I can't always delay that long. In which case, a few suggestions.
The most dangerous tree to cut in my experience is the hollow tree. There is no way to predict how it will react when you try to notch it on one side and then cut from the other in the usual way. The solution is easy. A hollow tree isn't worth cutting down. Leave it for the animals and birds and the bees. How do you tell if its hollow? Strike it with a sledge hammer. A hollow tree resonates like a drum. Strike a solid tree for comparison. A hollow tree will usually also have bird and squirrel holes in it.
Also dangerous is the tree with a forked trunk. The lower the fork, the greater the danger. A contrary farmer friend of mine is paralyzed from the waist down because of such a tree. As he cut through the main trunk, one of the forks split off without warning and crushed his spine. If you must cut such a tree, stay as far away from the fork with your cut as possible and cut parallel to the fork, not perpendicular to it -a drawing is necessary to show this clearly. And hind the forked trunks together with a heavy log chain. But these cautions are not fool-proof.
A tree that leans pronouncedly is dangerous to cut down, if over about six inches in diameter. The larger the diameter, the more danger. Novices believe this sort of tree is easy to fell because it already leans so far over. Not so. If you saw in from the back side of the lean, which seems logical, the trunk may without warning split straight up the bole after you have cut in four or more inches, and on a large tree, the cut end of the split can kick out and kill you. Needless to say, this ruins the log, too. Leaning trees need to be cut not with the lean or against it, but sideways to it, starting a little on the inside of the lean and coming around slowly, first on one side and then the other. I recommend paying an expert to cut it for you. I have seen real pros cut a tree leaning over a fence so that at the last second, the tree swivels around and falls parallel to the fence.
I have not mastered that trick, so on smaller trees that lean too much toward the fence to fell them the other way, I cut into the tree from the side opposite the way the tree leans at a height above the top of the fence. I do not notch the other side. I let the chain saw cut into the tree only slowly and stop immediately when the tree begins to sway. It slowly sags over, and the uncut part of the trunk acts as a hinge. The top of the tree hits the ground across the fence, but the log stays above the fence, still fastened slightly to the lower trunk. Then I cut up the tree into firewood from the downed top and work back towards the fence. This method works well only on green trees. An elm, standing dead for several years, will sometimes snap off from its high stump when it falls, and drop on the fence. But even so, if you are cutting high (that is, above the top of the fence) the tree will usually hit the ground first on the upper branches so its full weight will not smash down the fence too badly.
My best solution, in the problem cases mentioned above, is to make use of an expert timber cutter when you are selling a few trees. "I'm afraid to cut down that tree over there," I say in my most woebegone voice. "While you're here, would you mind showing me how it's done." That sort of approach. The expert will invariably do it for you for nothing.
Another gambit we try is taking advantage of the telephone company or electric utility. If the utilities have lines along your woodlot, they practically demand that you call them when a tree is to be cut that could fall on their wires. They have learned that too often we amateurs drop trees the wrong way. So again, we play the old "while you're here" game. Often the utility man will oblige and cur another problem tree down for us if it isn't too far away from the utility line.
Once a big tree is on the ground, it can be more dangerous than ever, believe it or not. The reason is that the huge trunk now rests not on the ground but usually ten feet or so off the ground, held up there by the branches. You must study those "legs" well before you start sawing. Twice I have seen a huge log twist wickedly when a supporting leg was cut off on one side of the log, and a widow-maker branch on the other side flip over with killing speed to where the woodcutter was standing. What I do to avoid danger is first cut off all free branches, that is branches not holding up the trunk, to get them out of the way. Then I start cutting up the wood from the branch end of the tree, always keeping my body ahead of the trunk as I work down it. That way if the trunk does fall or flip over without warning, I am out of harm's way.
Or after you have cut away all free parts of the tree, you can pull the trunk over and off its leg braces and to the ground with a tractor-making sure the log chain is long enough so the tree falls clear of the tractor.
If you get very, very clever, you can actually keep the log suspended on legs (where it is easier to cut up into stove lengths) until you have only a small section of log left. But no one can tell you how to do that because each tree is different and each situation after each cut is different.
I seldom see in books directions on what to do when the tree one is felling gets hung up on another tree. I think that's because there are no such directions. You can hitch a chain to the trunk, and try to drag it far enough with tractor, winch, or horses to pull it off the tree it is leaning against. With nothing powerful enough to do that, I have disentangled a tree by sawing off portions of the truck until it comes off the other tree of its own accord. It is very important to saw upwards from the underside of the log; if you try to saw downwards, the log will pinch your chain saw so solidly that you will have to get another saw to free it. Also when you saw from the underside be careful that the tree, cut loose, does not slide or swing down and hit you. Trees are very heavy things. They don't just hit you; they kill you.
The veteran treecutter seldom has to face the problem of hung-up trees, because he can drop them where he wants to, so they fall clear of other trees. The tree is notched in the direction the cutter wants the tree to fall. Then he cuts from the other side toward and a little above the notch. He never really knows if the falling tree is going to follow the notch exactly-often the weight of the tree will want to pull it a little to the right or left. To overcome that, the tree can, sort of, be guided down by the way you approach the notch with your saw kerf, cutting from the other side. The trick and principle is this: if you cut closer to the notch on the left side, freeing the trunk more on that side, the tree will tend to tip and fall a little toward the right side of the notch. If you cut farther toward the notch on the right side, the tree will tend to tip toward the left.
Experience, as ever, is the only real teacher. And sometimes experience doesn't help. I cut a tree down recently that in falling brushed against a dead sapling, bending it over and then releasing it. Somehow the top of the sapling snapped from its trunk and whizzed right over my head at about a zillion miles per hour. As I say, farming is not only not boring, but the most exciting profession of all (and statistically second only to mining in danger).
After a while, you learn that despite all its noise, a chain saw is a delicate instrument. The pressure you exert on it should be very light. Sawing a log, the blade should be lifted up and in, going down over the side of the log opposite to the woodcutter, so that when the log is half way sawn through, the blade is nearly vertical in the log, with the handle straight up into the air above the log. Only then bring the handle down gently while the blade cuts horizontally through the remainder of the log on the near side. Let the blade eat its own way along: apply only the slightest pressure. Remember that a chain saw likes best to be sawing with the tip end moving towards the wood, not the butt end. That's why those teeth are on the butt end: to anchor the butt so it can act as a fulcrum while the blade moves into the wood with the tip end leading and moving downward.
When dropping a tree, place some short lengths of small logs along the path where the tree trunk will land. These small cross logs keep the trunk off the ground enough so that sawing it up can be accomplished with no danger of running the blade into the ground and dulling it. There's nothing like dirt, or sawing through ice-encrusted logs, to dull a blade quickly. Also, with the trunk off the ground a bit, you can more easily foresee and avoid pinching.
Four to five cords of hardwood should be enough to keep the average, well-insulated home warm through an Ohio winter: a little more farther north, less farther south. For that much wood, I find a conventional eight-pound splitting maul ideal. No need for a mechanical splitter. Knotty pieces or crotch pieces that won't split by hand we save for our big fireplace or for boiling down maple sap and lard. Splitting wood is anti-stress therapy for me as well as exercise. I also think it keeps my batting eye and arm muscles in tune over winter. When I swing the maul, I always aim at a very particular spot on the chunk I'm splittingjust as a batter should do when swinging at the ball.
In other words, splitting wood is more sport to me than work. It is also a kind of art akin to that of the gem cutter. Most sticks of wood are hand-splittable if you know where to strike with the maul. With easysplitting wood like red oak, you can cut up a log piece like cutting up a pie. With harder-splitting wood, it is much easier to split off edge pieces, taking about three-inch splits as you go around the stick. Smaller crotch pieces will split if you strike with the crotch, not crossways to it. You can't split a crotch at the vortex of limb and trunk. Won't go, no way. Some woods, like red elm, will not split by hand. I've been assured, though never tried it, that if the elm is frozen, it will split. I assume, if that is true, that the wood would have to be green-still have considerable internal moisture content. My elm is always deadwood because the Dutch elm disease kills the trees as they reach a diameter of six to eight inches. At six inches or less, dead red elm can be burned without splitting. Larger pieces make great back logs for the fireplace. Because red elm is so tough, there must be better uses for it than burning (traditionally red elm was the choice for wagon holsters) but I'm not smart enough to discover what they are.
The Sacred Sanctuary of the Woods
I cut wood because wood heat is the only kind that makes me feel warm. To get the same comfort from other sources I would have to set the thermostat at 90 degrees which neither I nor the earth can afford.
But just as important, I like to cut wood. I like to be in the woods in late fall, winter, and early spring. When I first said that to friends, in answer to their question about what was odd behavior to them, they did not believe me-and to tell the truth, I was not sure of it myself. To enjoy a little woodcutting, an occasional walk in the woods, yes. But to do it persistently every winter, year in and year out? Would I continue to enjoy it?
Time has not changed me. If anything, I look forward even more to my days in the woods, splitting logs into stove wood. For one thing, winter is rarely harsh in the woods. If the wind blows cold from the west, I retreat to the east side; if from the east, I go to the west. I am reminded of the words of a very old gardener whose company I cultivated because he had haunted my woods and creek valley seventy years before I first set foot on it and so he lengthened my memory of it to over a century.
"Winters were warmer in the old days," he once said to me. I looked at him in surprise since most old people like to amuse younger generations with stories of how much colder it used to be.
"They were?" I responded, since he would not go on, I knew, unless I invited him to do so.
"The wind never blew like it does now," he said. "Damn fools cut all the tree groves down. Turned us into plains people. It was just a damn sight warmer when you lived in a clearing in the woods. Or had a grove stretching westward of you from north to south. We slept in unheated rooms then. By God I wouldn't do that today."
I never hurry in the woods. That is part of the joy of it. Working for money, we must forever hurry. The slavocracy of a wage economy, Scott Nearing called it. Sitting on a log, watching a downy woodpecker hop over the wood I have just stacked, looking for grubs in the opened log chunks, I realize I like woodcutting because I can split when I want to split, and sit when I want to sit. I forget all the world's bosses who hover over me when I leave the woods, reminding me that I must work fast enough for their profit as well as my wage, or what is the use of paying me.