On The Subject Of Splitting Wood

Today, I did something I haven’t done in a long while.  I split wood with a wood splitting maul.  I’m tired.

Our primary heat source when I was a kid growing up was wood.  I have vivid memories of my brother and I going with my Dad to gather wood during the summer months.  He would drop dead trees, or cut up deadfalls, and we would load the large logs up into the truck and take them home for splitting into smaller, manageable pieces.  When I was a teenager, I used a 5-pound sledgehammer and wedges to split the logs.  Let me tell you something.  Oak is just plain hard.  Doing that taught me a lot of respect for my father.  It was hard work.

My parents are now on natural gas, so no more wood splitting for them.  That’s a good thing.  Our house has a heat pump, so in theory I shouldn’t have to worry about splitting wood.  However, I have two little boys.  One thing I have observed about little boys is that they love bonfires.  My kids would have me build a bonfire every night of the year if I’d do it.  They will dance around the flames, whooping and hollering like little heathens!  It’s cute to watch, and they’re only little once, so a few times a month, we build a bonfire.  They go out and tell stories, dance around, and roast marshmallows.  This means I collect firewood when its available.

Over the course of the last few years, different people I know have had smaller deadfalls on their property they have been more than willing to allow me to haul off.  Small logs, relatively easy work.  No problem.  About 9-months ago, my boss had a large poplar tree beside his house that died and started dropping branches on the roof.  He got several guys together and we cut it down.  I loaded up the smaller logs, but the large ones from the trunk of the tree we left to dry out, or “season.”  Today, I took an 8-lb splitting maul, a 5-lb sledgehammer, and a 2-pound hammer, and worked on those pieces for about an hour.  I know a lot of guys who say they would split those with an axe, but to be honest, I haven’t found a traditional axe (bladed on both sides) to be of much use in splitting logs that size.  While not huge, these were a few feet in diameter, and the wood was quite hard.  I got about half of what was lying there split down and was able to load it into my truck to bring home.

When you think about it, this is yet another example of why people were less likely to be overweight 50-years ago.  Everyone had to work like this, and for a lot longer than an hour at a time.  Their exercise was built into their daily lives.  We have to go to a special place filled with concrete plates to get our exercise.

Well, I’m curious to discover how I feel in the morning.  Why?  Mainly because I have to go back and get the rest later.  I’ll say this though — when I pulled in and the boys saw that huge load of firewood, their smiling faces made it worth the effort.  I expect I’ll be building a bonfire tomorrow night.

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