For three seasons of the year, the air here in the Mid-South is saturated with water—we’re talking humidity that beads even the rocks with sweat. If you’ve never seen a rock sweat, you simply can’t comprehend. But come winter, arid north winds seal off the flow from the Gulf of Mexico for days or sometimes weeks at a time. During those stretches, my hands, acclimated to the subtropical vapor, take on the texture of white oak bark—scaly, flaking, and cracked.
Christine is always concerned, asking if they hurt, usually while tossing a bottle of Corn Huskers lotion at me as her words hang between us. She pines for my hands of thirty years ago, smooth as warm butter because they were always gloved while driving a forklift all night in a giant freezer full of chicken meat. When that job ended, partly because of her, I wore gloves all day while building alternators on an assembly line. But then came the hog farm, and the gloves came off for good when it came to my vocations, and my hands transformed into something closer to those of my forebears.
I never notice how my hands look, barely notice how they feel, and always have an “aha” moment when she mentions their phellem complexion.
So that’s why they were stingin’ in the shower.
But once I’m aware, I can even hear the rawness—a peculiar hollowness as water and soap lather into the sometimes bloody crevices, the soft, rasping sigh as I slide my dehydrated knuckles inside a Jersey glove. Those are the only gloves I wear nowadays, and only for splitting and hauling firewood. Typical of my thick-headed ways, it took a while to figure out I needed them.
Just a few winters ago, slivers of oak would stay embedded in my paws for weeks at a time. Those little needles of cellulose would burrow beyond the tweezers, beyond where nerve endings allowed a knife blade. And every time I bumped my hands against anything I felt them probing deeper into my tender pink flesh. It was kind of like that hidden rib in a piece of fried catfish, the thin bone piercing the soft back of your mouth. Or like cracking a molar on #6 shot while chomping down on a juicy squirrel thigh—the last act of defiance delivered with ingenious irony.
Eventually, the splinters worked themselves out as most problems do, and I would forget about the experience. But, eventually, I wisened up. Or maybe I’m just softer. Whatever the reason, going through winter with dried-out hands is one thing; suffering through hands as pin cushions is something else.
So as I head to the woodshed for final processing of the fuel that heats our home, the gloves go on again.
The chunks of tree carcasses piled at the base of an elm near our woodshed were collateral damage left by loggers cutting pines. In my experience, loggers leave a lot of collateral damage. It’s ugly, but this damage is to the benefit of termites along with a host of other forest occupants and enterprising woodstove owners.
I’m never sure how much felled hardwood my chainsaw chews through nowadays. My old F-150 pickup could haul a full rick in the bed, but the now-old Tacoma’s capacity with a camper shell is a mystery. What I do know is that one Tacoma load will fill one compartment in the woodshed, the woodshed has eight of those compartments, and we burn through four compartments each winter. Whatever the official measurement, I was plumb tuckered after unloading. But it was that “good” flavor of tired—the kind that makes an icy beer bubbling down your throat even more refreshing, and later the cool sheets of a fresh-made bed feel better than almost anything else in the world. Almost.
The cut pieces range from about the size of my forearm up to bigger around than my waist—too big to safely hoist into the truck bed by myself, but that’s exactly what I did. Christine says I do this stupid kind of stuff because I’m “Johnny F****in’ Sain.”
It’s a long-running joke that started early in our marriage when a tornado warning sent her and our daughter to the bathtub with an armful of pillows while I stood in the backyard hoping to catch a glimpse of the twister. The moniker comes up less frequently in recent years, but I still regularly overestimate my durability.
The academic definition of my misplaced sense of invulnerability is a logical fallacy aptly named The Appeal to Ignorance. Common folk version: “It ain’t killed me yet,” with the implication that because whatever activity hasn’t ended me so far, it never will.
So yeah, loading some of those bigger pieces was poor judgment on my part, but it didn’t hurt me this time. And this is the norm for me. One winter afternoon on that hog farm we owned long ago found me splitting hunks of hickory while running a 103°F temperature because stubborn pride would not let me turn on the electric heat. This particular subset of the sadistic mindset was likely ingrained on another winter afternoon way back in 1988 when Dad arrived home unexpectedly early and smelled the burning dust of our long-dormant electric furnace. It was because I did not want to be bothered with hauling wood, splitting kindling, and summoning a flame in the woodstove. Somehow, I thought he’d be none the wiser.
I never touched that particular thermostat again.
Also, and somewhat related, I do not ask for help. I’m not sure where the roots for this mindset trace to. Likely they were cultivated in me as part of my culture. Rugged individualism—a code of masculinity (always it’s a man who lauds the philosophy) is chiseled into the rock-hard hickory foundation of who we are here in rural America. And I am rendered nearly helpless in defying this command of my cultivation. Asking for help is an almost impossible task, undertaken only as a dead-last resort. In those few times it happened, asking for help has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
Funny thing is that I don’t have a problem paying someone to do something for me. Perverse pride does play a part, more than that, though, is an intense aversion to being beholden. I don’t want to owe anyone anything.
For all of these reasons, if I’ve got to choose between the ask or further wrecking my knees and back—even now at a graying age when injuries are more debilitating and I should know better—I’ll take the physical pain every time.
Understand I’m not bragging. It’s not a virtue. It’s an ailment, a mental and cultural illness, and I have no idea how to cure it.
I like splitting wood, look forward to it. Bradley, my nephew, says that splitting firewood is a lot of fun, too, but only when you don’t have to do it. When you know you can be warm and cozy with just a flick of the thermostat, cutting and splitting firewood becomes a hobby. Bradley speaks from rare experience in this day and age. For a few winters, he kept his wife and kids warm with only firewood in a drafty old house. No doubt the experience forged an enhanced appreciation for just a smidgen of the grit required to live closer to how our poor bloodlines used to live. But for a lot of woodstove folks nowadays, the stove is an amenity, a choice, a “shabby chic” lifestyle statement like chickens in the backyard and homegrown tomatoes have become.
Hell, there are entire social media pages dedicated to watching these once-poor folk-only activities. It is surreal that we live in a time when surviving like our cold and hungry ancestors from not many generations ago had to do is now a spectator sport. In the ultimate sign that abject voyeurism is the new media cash cow, some folks are making money from other folks watching them split wood—not for know-how, but for entertainment. Even as I’m pummeled with it, I am still gobsmacked about how those old hard ways—chores I spent considerable energy trying to get out of—have somehow mutated into bourgeois identities and outright commodities. It’s like that nefarious and ambiguous “They” have somehow extracted, packaged, and sold back to us our heritage.
Seems like we’ve been here before, and more than a few times.
My wood splitting is a private affair between me, my eight-pound maul, and the hardwood I’ve cut into semi-manageable pieces. I’ll never split wood for an audience, paying or not. And I don’t share Bradley’s thoughts on the joy of splitting wood as an inverse value of the need to split wood. While I cling to a lot of dumbass principles, I don’t think my motivation to heat our home only with sticks I’ve personally processed qualifies as one of them. My feelings are partly rooted in that cultural self-reliance I’ll need for when—not if—SHTF and close to the “paying your dues” mindset I was raised with and still hold in high regard. But it’s closer still to an African proverb I read some years ago: Once you carry your own water, you will learn the value of every drop.
Maybe those two mantras mean the same thing.
Maybe I’m just posing, too.
But let’s be done with the philosophizing. I already waste way too much time overthinking everything. Besides, there are visceral pleasures aplenty found in splitting wood, sensual satisfactions in and of the act that flood my system with gallons of warm, gooey, human gratification.
You might not can tell by looking, what with its unassuming appearance, but the woodshed, areas immediately adjacent, the activities that work to fill it, and the final product in the stove offer a veritable bouquet of sensations—sounds, scents, sights. And most of all, the tactile.
Despite what you’ve seen in the movies or on social media, splitting firewood isn’t about strength. If you can swing the maul, you’re strong enough to split most types of wood. Splitting wood is about conjuring that oldest of human magic—the electric connection between body and tool. You impart your will on eight pounds of metal at the end of a fulcrum, and it responds with measured violence.
Just swinging the maul overhead feels incredible—bones rotating in oily joints, tendons stretching, muscles contracting, muscles releasing, all in concert. It’s magnificent.
But the down stroke.
My god.
Shoulder, forearms, and triceps along with the complement of core musculature harmonize with gravity acting on the maul. At impact, the initial shock tremors through your hand, radiating tight vibrations of pleasure to wrists, shoulders, through every bone in your body as the sharp blade makes initial contact with wood. There’s a split-second of resistance, a whisper of drama, as the wood fibers hold. And finally the glorious moment of sweet release as the wood yields, parting with itself along the grain.
The experience with different types of wood will be different accordingly.
Hickory—every species of hickory that I’ve burned anyway—is hard and dense. It’ll dull the teeth on your chainsaw and you’ll wear your ass out splitting it up. Upper body strength sometimes factors into hacking up hickory. Surprisingly, split hickory offers little to the nose until you put it in the stove (to your neighbor’s delight) and leaves behind a lot of ash. But hickory burns hot and long. Load a stove with hickory at bedtime and close the dampers. You’ll stay cozy all night with hungry orange coals greeting you come morning.
Black cherry splits easy, smells like cherries when laid open and on the fire, and its insides are colored like wine from rosé to merlot. It burns fairly hot but also fast. Cherry is a good partner to settle in with the slower-burning woods when you need to warm the house quicker.
White oak cleaves with some effort, though not as much as hickory, and when fresh split releases a mouthwatering aroma (to my nose) of distilled 90-proof. American whiskey is aged in white oak barrels, and my favorite, George Dickel 12, is a particularly oaky drink. With my palate primed, I will inevitably need a sip afterward. White oak also burns exceptionally well and long.
But maybe my favorite is the northern red oak. It usually grows straight. Its structure at the cellular level makes it less dense than hickory and white oak and, therefore, an easier split. Green red oak is packed with more moisture than all the others, and that water content makes for the most satisfying wet “shnick” that’s ever tickled my ear as it splits open. Red oak is so relatively tender and eager to fissure that with measured swings, I can quarter a stick and never knock it off the splitting stump. Its insides run from tangerine to pink to burgundy, and curiously its smell reminds me of Dad. Red oak burns hot, burns long, and because the bark is thin, leaves less mess behind.
Today it’s only white and red oak. I work through the pile in a loose rhythm, pausing to sniff a split stick every now and then. Sometimes I get caught up in the subtle colors and textures, too. It’s taken way longer than it should have. But who says how long it should take?
I have to wail away with considerable effort on one of the last pieces, a stubborn knotted red oak. It finally gives, cracking around the knot and revealing a dark maroon heart that’s damp to my touch.
I’m damp, too, and wipe beads from my forehead with a Jersey glove.
I’ve never been a gym rat. Never much cared for running unless some sort of ball was involved, and those days are long gone. Exercise for its own sake doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I need a tangible and near-immediate end goal for motivation to break a sweat—a gobbling turkey on yonder ridge, a deep pool full of bass just around the next creek bend, a lonely river bottom blazed with buck rubs big as my arm.
Or a woodshed that needs filling.
Mason jar in hand, I sit on the sweetgum stump, the altar for my chopping rituals. I think about how the woodshed is a crypt made of softwoods—cedar posts and pine 2x4s—for their hardwood kin. The oak pieces will season here for a year or more, dismembered but dying like the trees lived with a slow, stoic dignity. Their sap will vaporize imperceptibly on dry winter winds and in hot summer sun as they wait for their time in our stove.
Gloveless, I trace the rings of a red oak with my rough, raw hands. I ponder on the thin spaces between some. Were these years of droughts they endured? How many floods did they withstand? What were the impossible odds they overcame to reach maturity?
They’re beings of another kingdom who survive in ways we still don’t truly understand. But these stacked here in our woodshed died in the most trivial of ways—wrong place wrong time. Even though they stood rooted in that place for thirty years or more.
There is no way for me to grasp their dilated sense of time, to comprehend roots probing and plunging deep into the dark hillside where they spend the entirety of their lives. Millions of raindrops siphoned from soil, quadrillions of photons drunk up through green leaves—the life energy of a once grand living thing will be released in the flames that warm my home. Their last gray carbon bits scattered in our garden, feeding even more distant kin of theirs who will feed us come summer.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
Some of the seasoned are smoldering in our woodstove right now. I watch curls of gray smoke float over our roof, twining through living oak limbs with branches full of hard buds slumbering in these last weeks of winter. I wonder if the trees still alive can somehow smell the incense of their burning dead. Can they sense the souls rising hot from our flue? I hope they somehow feel their kindred in this ethereal state folding and unfolding in their bare arms, a final caress before floating into the clouds.
Stunning essay, bud.
Oh lord, am I thankful for this!