April will fool us with more snow and more cold, but after the Ides of March, the sun climbs high in the blue sky and the warmer south winds come. Depending on the proximity to the big lake, maple syrup season may still have nearly insurmountable depths of impossible snow – crusted, slushy, or fresh – or the snow may be receding, ceding to bare ground.
At my place on North Road the snow melts all day, and, going down, reveals neat woodstacks scattered throughout the woods. These are from logs bucked a year or two before, from trees felled or fallen over the five years before that: newer birch, medium-sized spruce and fir (which I hate to limb but love to burn), the occasional black ash pole, and true and tall young adult and mature poplar.
This begins splitting time for me. I use the toboggan to drag the chopping block (too early for wheelbarrows, too massive for carrying) from stack to stack, split by hand, then drag the firewood out by toboggan. Repeat.
Birch and others are split or quartered. But poplar I shave. I whittle it down.
Stand the round up on the chopping block. A felling axe will do (I use my double-bit). Shave off one plank from the side, then another plank off the other side, then plank adjacent, and plank final. You’re left with a square-ended core piece good for overnight burns and four slabs for stoking.
I suppose I don’t need to split by hand. But it’s only five cords a year. Sometimes I enjoy the work. Mostly I insist on doing it. Demand it of myself. To stay strong. To stay active. At one time I’d’ve said, to “stay gold.”
My great uncle still ran the syrup camp up on Pike Lake into his 90s. All day he tended the great evaporator, the long furnace, in cold and flu weather above and below freezing. Digging out firewood piles in the snow, feeding the fire ten hours a day. Buckets of sap in, gallons of syrup out.
My old man worked the syrup line into his 70s. Trudging along on Green Mountain snowshoes, digging out the snowmobile. Jugs of sap carried and poured into buckets. Buckets lifted and slopped into the evaporator.
My great uncle would sit very still by the furnace and think of the cold and snow during the Battle of the Bulge. He was a scout, and at nights in the foxhole he could hear the Germans conversing. He was wounded, but recovered to cross the Bridge at Remagen. He marched under Patton during that triumphant spring.
I stand behind my old man on the skids of the sled and think of Vietnam, that terrible winter of ‘69-’70. He was a grunt. Air Cavalry. Along the Cambodian border when I was born, which was a very cold St. Paul midnight in February.
I swing my axe and it sticks in a spruce chunk. There’s nothing I can do in comparison in order to stay so strong for so long. I swing my axe and a black ash pole pops apart. I am grateful that I am still chopping wood. I whittle down a poplar round. We are still stardust. We are still golden.
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