A chainsaw is not the first symbol people would use to describe the age-old turning of the seasons in New Hampshire, but it touches all the essential themes: transience and mortality, the struggle to find independence, the resurrection of spring. For those who might not have considered this, here are some seasoned thoughts on chainsaws.
Anyone who has handled, or been near, a chainsaw knows that it's alive. 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. It's a fearsome reminder of how brutal transience can be, how the delicate concentricity of life can be cross-sectioned and stove-length'd without epitaph or compassion, in a blinding whirr that spits out dust.
But it is, after all, a machine, something made to be a servant, even if a dangerous one. Properly handled, it can make us feel, and actually give us, a Yankee independence. What lifts the spirit after a long day cutting is not just the scattered abundance of sixteen-inch logs or a certain chemical pleasure aroused by fatigue. It's what those logs and fatigue signify: a bounty earned, not simply received by accident or routine, something wrestled from the earth, molded to a purpose, and used to make life comfortable. Very little in our usual lives gives us this sense of arrival. But a palisade of cut, split, and stacked wood tells us that we have the power to protect ourselves, to keep warm what it is important to keep alive.
It may be, as e.e. cummings once said, that "progress is a comfortable disease," and that technology is the bane of humankind's existence. It may be, on the large scale at least. But when I think of the alternative to the chainsaw, this local instance of technology, then I have my doubts. To cut what I have cut in an afternoon would take men with axes and crosscut saws long numbing days. And where I feel a comfortable burn in my muscles at night (and still have energy to read or write), they would feel bone-weary tiredness. This technology allows me to risk subsistence without destruction being the price of miscalculating. This may not be "true" or "appropriate" independence, but it's a compromise I can live with.
The dwindling woodpile is the hourglass of the season. As the final wood runs through the narrow waist of the woodstove, I take out my chainsaw which, along with planted peas and crocus, is a sure sign of spring. As I sharpen its teeth and set the timing, its very weight and readiness erases any winter lethargy, and I move out into the world again, ready to eat and calculate.
Squirrel
Where I Live: Manchester NH