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"That's a lot of lumber. What are you going to do with it?" asked Mr. Mike, eyeing the piles of newly-sawn boards, beams and bridging that he was helping to stack.
"I don't know," I said. "Sell it. Build something."
Mr. Mike was among family and friends donating their labor Thursday evening for a finishing-up session, cutting up the logs we couldn't get to in a work project with a portable sawmill on a day in mid-June.
This project was a 180 degree turn from one of a few years ago, when I had 75-year-old pines grown on our farm cut into planks to re-side the old barn.
In that case, I started with a definite goal in mind and cut the lumber for that purpose.
This time I was starting with cutting lumber for end uses unknown or vague at best.
This lack of purpose made it difficult to give the sawmiller direction in how I wanted my logs cut up.
Son Seed was honcho for our family crew as they lugged away the slabs and lumber coming off the mill. I was on the tractor, trailering off the lumber for stacking.
My wife yelled to get my attention, her voice raised to be heard above the sawmill. (Even with only one good ear, I can always find Honey in a crowd. Her voice carries.)
"He wants to know how you want this next log!" she shouted.
I had to stop and look at the next log. It was a white oak of middling length and girth.
"Two-by!" I shouted back.
"Two-by what?!"
"Two-by whatever!" I said, meaning two inches thick by whatever width the sawmiller could get out of it. The "whatever" drew a laugh from our crew but made perfect sense to the sawmiller.
The reason I had these logs to cut up was fear and guilt: fear that the beautiful oak and cherry trees behind our house, trees we have loved dearly, but which had grown so tall and massive in the 40 years since we built our house, might fall on us in a windstorm. I I hired a tree service drop them safely, telling myself that it was the responsible thing to do, but I felt awful about it. Their limbs I chainsawed for firewood, but I couldn't do that to the trunks. They at least should be cut into lumber and perhaps would make something beautiful and useful.
For two of the logs, my instructions were more specific.
I told Josh (Josh Butler of Clinton, Pa., our family sawmiller) to cut the first log into one-by-twelves, that is, boards one inch thick by a foot wide. This log was a behemoth, a red oak so heavy and difficult that Josh probably shouldn't have put on his trailer-mounted rig. It may have damaged the suspension. I think he took it as a challenge,
Josh cautioned me that cutting it into planks would take an hour. In fact, it took almost two, which was half the daylight we had, but it turned out to be worth it.
"This is beautiful quality oak," he said, and it was.
The boards he cut were quite red in color and almost dripping wet, a year after the tree was cut down. (Oak takes forever to dry.) When he was done cutting off the barked slabs, Josh had a long block of wood two feet square. He cut it down the middle, then flipped the two halves upright, so that each pass of the horizontal bandsaw produced two twelve-inch boards. Most were clear of defects, with showy swirls and loops of grain because the log was quarter-sawn. It was a masterful display of sawmilling.
I had extracted that particular giant of a log from the woods with chains and our 50-horse Kubota tractor, and it took all 50 horses on a downhill pull. I had the valuable assistance of a grandson, Lamppost Head, age 12. I told him my plan for getting it down the hill through the trees, and asked for his advice each time the log had other ideas and we had to amend the plan. It was a long, difficult, dangerous pull, but working together we did it. When he and I later pulled out the next trunk section of the same tree, almost as big as the first one, our experience made it a slick half-hour job. I had Shark take a picture of us with our log.
My other instance of actually giving clear directions concerned a white oak log that I had Josh cut into bridging dimensions: long beams three inches thick and six inches wide. I never heard the term until a few years ago when my late brother-in-law, Doc Bahnsen, told me that I was using bridging to build new ramps for the barn.
I don't know whether Doc knew he was getting bridging when he won the bid at auction for a pile of miscellaneous old lumber. It came from the farm of a neighbor, Raymond L. Allison, who died in 2006. I used up that bridging, so I thought it wise to replenish our supply for the next time I have to rebuild the ramps, 30 or so years hence.
White oak, exceptionally strong and resistant to rot, is ideally suited for such jobs. The oak hull of the wooden sailing ship U.S.S. Constitution was dubbed "Old Ironsides" because cannon balls bounced off it during sea battles in which it defeated half a dozen British frigates during the War of 1812.
Using our oak lumber to build a barn ramp really doesn't compare to that.
But it's all I've got at the moment.