Seven Times Twenty Makes One Hundred Forty

The girls came along for yesterday's firewood run. I told them to wait in the truck while I felled a couple of trees. The first, a 12-inch blue spruce, went as planned. The second, a 12-inch cottonwood, was hollow in the middle and broke off while I cut it, falling directly into the middle of the creek. So, instead of two nice trees to buck and load, I had just one, . . ., and an old top that someone had left, and a dead oak stem, and a broken juniper, and on and on. The girls started loading the truck, but it was one of those days where we were picking and plucking, one six inch stick at a time. It was going to take us all day to fill the truck.

About that time, I decided to take a whack at the butt end of an old Douglas fir that someone had felled and left laying on the hillside above the truck. It was 21 inches in diameter, nine or ten feet long, and wedged between some boulders. I could see why they had left it. Because my saw has a 16 inch bar, I had to cut half of it from one side, and then go around and cut the other half from the other side. I got one round off without hitting a rock, and Valerie rolled it down to the truck. I almost quit there, but decided to try the other end. Fortunately, it broke off before I got to the bottom, so I didn't have to risk hitting a rock on that one. At that point, the log was small enough—six or seven feet—that I could pick up one end and flip it over. I only strained three muscles doing it, and it put the log out into the open, away from the boulders. I was able to make four more cuts, rolling the log to avoid cutting all the way to the ground, and voila, we had seven rounds to put on the truck. It was all I could do to lift each one, but when I was done the truck was FULL. It had turned out to be a good morning after all.

When we got home, I put one of those rounds on my chopping block. I split the whole thing just to see what it would yield. I got 20 pieces of firewood out of one round. I didn't split all seven rounds, but, by my math, that would make 140 chunks of firewood. Each morning when I get up, I burn four or five chunks of wood to warm the house before the girls get out of bed. Without complicating this post by including too many lengthy calculations, I would say that our seven disks of 21 inch Doug fir will give us about one month of warm mornings.