A chainsaw might not leap to most people's minds as a symbol of life, right up there with Thoreau's Walden or Bryant's waterfowl. But for those who might not have considered this, here are some seasoned thoughts on chainsaws and the four-handed New England play of birth, living, contraction, and sleep.
Anyone who has handled, or been near, a chainsaw knows that it's not just a hunk of calibrated metal and fluids: it lives. Like a shark or a bullet, a chainsaw's purpose in life is to eat. And it eats with streamlined efficiency. Its 9000 r.p.m. carbon steel fangs will easily reduce a century's growth to one month's fodder for a stove, a fearsome reminder of how brutal transience can be: how the long-accreted concentric circles of life can be cross sectioned and stove length'd without epitaph or compassion, in a blinding whir that spits out dust and fumes that rise like burnt offerings to an empty sky.
I remember my first bout with a chainsaw, a huge Homelite representing my determination to go the natural route and heat my house with wood. So there I stood, in the middle of the woods, alone (stupidity is ever the constant companion of novices), with my saw, screwdriver, wrench, maul, oil, gas can, wedges-- and my unsupported confidence in myself. I pulled the cord and the engine coughed. Another pull, another cough. I reduced the choke and pulled again. Not only did the engine catch but it nosed into the dirt (I hadn't stepped on its neck heavily enough), spewing up a rooster tail of twigs, small stones, and loam. I grabbed the handle and lifted it free of the ground, hanging it at arm's length as if it were an over-sized piranha. Taking hold of the pistol grip, I swung it toward the first tree, a six-inch maple, and started to cut the beginning wedge. I didn't apply enough pressure and the saw bucked, the chain kicking it back and down toward my shin. I shut it off, smelling the oily steam of its breath hanging in the air, and sat down. Waited until my own breathing came back to perch. I finally did cut the tree, and shaved it into sixteen inch lengths. One tree. For one day's work. That night, as I cleaned it, brushing out its fangs and scouring its filter, I felt an atavistic urge to sacrifice something to it.
I took my lessons more slowly from then on, and I became a fair cutter. And I learned that it was not a savage god but a machine, something made to act as a servant, even if a dangerous one. Properly handled, it made me feel independent. What lifted the spirit after a long day cutting was not just the scattered abundance of sixteen-inch logs or a certain chemical pleasure aroused by fatigue. It was what those logs and fatigue signified: a bounty earned, not simply received by accident or routine or the easy swap of money, something wrestled from the earth, molded to a purpose, and used to make my life comfortable. Very little in my usual life gave me this sense of accomplishment. But ricks of cut, split, and stacked wood told me that I had the power to protect myself, to keep warm what it was important to keep alive.
But like most things in New England, no pleasure comes without a price. A chainsaw represents an uneasy alliance between necessity ("Gotta get the wood cut") and technology ("with a machine that stinks up the air, crazes the silence, and makes a mess"). It sits at a cross-road, with one avenue named "Self-Reliance" and the other avenue, bristling with the debris of an over-mechanized society choking on its own success, named "Technological Surrender." Before I bought the chainsaw but after I had made the decision to heat my house with wood, I ran this debate in my head, arguing first the side of the cross-cut saw, then the case of the Homelite. I even went so far as to do an experiment to enrich the argument. A friend of mine, who ran a farm operation, had some old saws and axes hanging in his barn. We pulled them down, got out the files and whetstone, and ground that metal to the sharpest point its atoms could hold. When we dropped the tools off at my house, he didn't hold back that he thought I was a perfect fool for even worrying about the problem. "Look," he said, "I can cut in one day what it'll take you a month to chop down and section. End of argument. Unless you're some kind of perfectionist, like those musicians who only play original music on original instruments, then get on with it. The point is to get wood in the woodshed." Off he went.
One Saturday I hauled my axe, cross-cut saw, maul, and wedges into a small patch of oaks not far from the house. (Not easy walking through the woods with so much clanking, heavy, sharp metal near my body parts.) I selected a six-inch pin oak, straight and plumb, calculated where I wanted it to fall, and started in on the wedge with the axe. The solid thwack! of the blade biting into the wood punctuated the otherwise quiet setting, and before long I had a ragged wedge cut. (Not unmindful of the fact that my friend's chainsaw would have already had this tree down, limbed, and partially lopped into stove lengths -- and not unmindful of the fact that swinging an axe for any great length of time made Jane Fonda's "burn" feel like a simple blush.)
Moving to the backside of the divot, I proceeded to take the tree down. (By now my friend would have had.....) After that, with the sharpest cross-cut saw within a ten-mile radius, I started in on the sections, enthusiastic despite feeling my right arm hanging in its socket by a thread after one or two cuts. (I tried using my left arm, but as with most right-handed people, the left side is usually there just for decoration.) By the end of the twenty-foot tree, I had made two conclusions: the old saw about wood warming you twice had undercounted by at least a factor of ten, and that later that day I would acquire twentieth-century wood cutting technology.
I didn't make the decision flippantly. I knew that over time I would build up the endurance to non-chainsaw my wood, and I also knew that I would be doing something that honored a tradition of walking easy on the earth and kept alive skills that had once, for better or for worse, transformed the countryside.
But dot, dot, dot. Cutting wood this way introduced me to a level of work that I, clothed in my late twentieth-century middle-class ways, simply found deadening. Whatever ethical benefits I could harvest from doing it the "old-fashioned way" simply didn't outweigh the disadvantage, both spiritually and physically, of acquiring my woodpile through sheer drudgery and mulishness. I just couldn't do it. I still remember my friend's finger wagging in my face: "I told you. I told you what it would feel like to be a slave."
(An aside: months later, when I related my experiment to a group of older men who had farmed the land in the area many years ago, they laughed at me as if I hadn't had half a brain cell to share among my body parts: "When chainsaws became affordable, we all got them as quick as bees to flowers. Why would anybody want to wear themselves out cutting wood that way?" They didn't see any conflict at all: if a technology allowed you to do it easier and still get the same results or better, then what, exactly, was the problem? It made me understand that what I had wanted to take on as a "rural lifestyle," a kind of cultural slumming, these guys had wanted to get rid of as soon as possible because they knew, to the final jot, how much of their souls were lost to a kind of labor that could grind the body into dust.)
So I got the Homelite and made the compromise. My friend let me keep the tools, which I hung in my own woodshed. If anything, they reminded me of just how tough the first settlers here must have been as they cleared these woods for fields, levering stumps out of the ground by the grace of horses and pry-bars, constantly chopping, cutting, splitting, hauling. I also realized that if they had had chainsaws available to them, the bow saws would have rusted in the woodshed and the axe handles been eaten by insects. There is no romance in being indentured.
I have not cut wood for a long time now, having moved on to other things. But I do remember the weight of everything, the satisfying rip of a maul splitting a block of oak, the finessed and balanced architecture of a well-engineered woodpile. And not a spring goes by that I don't see in my mind's eye the dwindling woodpile running through the narrow waist of the woodstove, and the emergence of the chainsaw, along with planted peas and crocus, as a sure sign of spring. As I sharpened its teeth and set the timing, its very density and readiness erased any winter lethargy, and I moved out into the world again, ready to eat and calculate.
(April 1996)