Making wood.

I’d say it was twenty years or more when I was fishing off the big rock across the way when the old man hollered a hello over the water. He introduced himself, and as usual the name didn’t stick in my brain long enough to get filed, but I remember his accent. I’ll remember him as the man of Austrian decent who planted the term, “making wood” into my vocabulary. Annie, who is of German-Hungarian stock, explains it as “machein waldt” Good, what he meant was he was busy cutting up all the winter dead falls. He was making wood. He wondered how the fishing was; I wondered at such a lovely way of describing the act of chopping up dead wood delivered free by last winters wind to stoke the old Odessa air tight steel stove. Well, on that day the fish were not interested in my company, I explained, and he went on to describe the many big bass he’d taken over the years from the very spot I was working. I thanked him and moved along. but I never shook the idea of making wood. As if chopping up the errant branches found on the ground in Springtime was an act of creation. Is it? My new friend, Mark Paplinsky wouldn’t see it that way. Mark was born with a chain saw in each hand, and he can turn a big dead tree into two years of firewood faster than you can google how to use a chain saw. If you need a woodcutter Mark’s your man. He just finished off a sixty foot pine that had died from what they call a “witches broom” an out of control growth at the very top we’d been watching for thirty years. Last winter the top snapped off in some kind of howling wind and it was time to face the fact that it was now firewood. Enter Mark. Mark and Karen bought the cottage of the man across the way from his widow two years ago. The old man had gone to glory in a way that all of us cottagers would want, he collapsed and died on a corner of his land not far from shore. I want to go that way. No extended hospital stay, just go in a place you love. I don’t know about his wife, I hope she’s doing well. She sold the place to another person who understands what “making wood” is all about. So, is making wood an act of creation? You’re gathering limbs that were meant to stay on the ground and decompose, turn into soil. Cutting them into foot long bits makes them useful for heating the cabin. But is that creating or destroying? When the autumn chills come to cottage country and it’s time to stoke the stove, all of a sudden I don’t care. I have turned deadfalls into comfort. I think the old guy was right, he was making wood to make it warm inside on those chilly nights when we stay too long because it’s so hard to leave our cottages for the comfort and warmth of our city homes. Hey, if that comfort and warmth is so great how come we put off closing up for so long?