There’s a thickly growing strip of white pine and spruce between us and our neighbors immediately to the west. The property line runs down through the strip, and on our side, at least, there are quite a few blowdowns and standing dead snags. Until quite recently I haven’t felt up to plowing through there with the chain saw, axe, and comealong, and dragging everything to central spots for torching.

But when an excavator flattened a platform for our barn, he managed to cut one side of the roots of several trees just behind it. I wasn’t worried that they’d fall on the building; he cut the roots on the side toward it, and they were bound to fall away from it. Which they did, in a storm last fall. The tops were over on the neighbors’ side. It was time to get out my old tools and go at it. The thickest chunks of trunk I’d split for late-fall firewood; softwood in a furnace is worth about as much as rolled newspaper. But it’d do for football season, anyway.

Years ago, whenever my guys and I were demolishing parts of houses in preparation for a remodeling job, I constantly admonished them to take it easy: to use their heads more than their brute strength, and to pretend they were seventy years old. They’d accomplish more, I told them. make less of a mess, and were less likely to hurt themselves or anyone around them. I have to smile at how that age onceseemed so far off, because it’s getting farther off from me every day, now that I’ve passed it by half a decade. I no longer have to pretend. My feet don’t pick up as high as they used to, and clambering through slash in the woods has gotten a little exciting. Looking straight up – a prudent thing to do when cutting down leaning trees – has become impossible without bending way over backwards. And if a tree should fall the wrong way or jump in an unexpected direction when it hits the ground, I can no longer afford to be anywhere nearby. In short, I have to take my own advice, and use my head more and my strength less.

I’m not sure if any loggers ever think in these terms, but consider how much energy is stored in a standing tree. For years it’s been drawing nutrients from the soil and air and converting them into a solid mass of hundreds, even thousands, of pounds. When we cut one down, we release all that potential standing energy in one fell swoop (see the first meaning of the adjective, “fell”), and it’s best to be out of the way. After we work our will with axe, saw, and splitting maul, the energy is released in a different mode during the ensuing winters. New trees spring up in the openings, and we can harvest wood every year in perpetuity. All very civilized and neat.

None of these ruminations was doing anything to sort the tangled mess out back of the barn. So I donned my Stage Four work clothes (I have four stages, from go-to-meeting, to work in the shop, to disreputable with paint splashes, to burning brush) and trudged out to the barn. The first time out each year something is always left behind. This year it was the Bic lighter.

Over thirty-five years of contracting I built relationships with particular subcontractors – one in each specialty – and came to be as comfortable with each as with an old pair of slippers. The same was true of my tools. In time I found what I liked, usually by trial and error, and now that I don’t use many of them much anymore, I have exactly what I want. So it goes...

My little 16-inch Husqvarna chainsaw must be at least thirty years old. Its only safety feature, as far as I can tell, is that it stops dead when it runs out of gas. It leaks oil like a maniac when it’s at rest on the shelf. But it starts with exactly five yanks after a night’s rest or a full winter in the barn, and putts happily beside me between cuts. It’s bitten me a couple of times, but that was long ago. We’ve grown old together, and I couldn’t think of trading it.

The axe is Swedish – a Gränsfors – and the best I’ve ever used in my life. I wish I’d known about the brand decades ago. At the forge where it was made, each smith stamps his initials into the head, so I know that Lennart Petterson made mine. I can even Google Lennart’s photograph at work. He also forged my splitting maul, again then the best I’ve ever had – so good that I’d rather use it than a hydraulic splitter any day.

I collected a few dry spruce branches and started the fire. Then, as I trimmed the downed logs, I dragged the brush and built it hot enough to keep up with me. I stacked the 16-inch-long chunks of trunk between a couple of hemlocks in a six-foot-high wall. In a few weeks, I reflected, I’ll walk past that pile and hear the squeaking of pine borer larvae inside. I moved deliberately; tripping with an axe or saw is not a great thing to do. There was a big leaning spruce that had to come down somehow, so I started cutting chunks carefully off the bottom. Each piece taken off reduced its lean. Suddenly I saw a moving shadow on the ground, like a descending gilloutine blade. I ducked, and a dead black cherry about six inches thick that had been leaning against the spruce came sliding down, whacked me in the side of the head, an knocked me flat.

I used to jump right up. Now I first ask my extremities to check in. There was no harm done to anything but my illusion of competence. Wiser than I’d been a few moments before, I went after my old comealong, and began to employ the contents of my skull, rather than its exterior.