Branching out
Journal Pioneer reporter goes to the woods
Editor’s note: The Journal Pioneer sent reporter and woodcutting novice Alison Jenkins to a recent chainsaw safety course in Wellington. This is her story:
When I was a kid in Hazelbrook, P.E.I., the best treat in the house was a marshmallow toasted in the wood stove.
When my sister and I got home from figure skating, Dad would have the coals just right for toasting.
We would all sit around the open stove door, nursing the little tubes of sweetness to golden perfection.
It was a quiet family time. My sister and I sometimes bickered over the best roasting spot - but any energy we had for a fight was sapped quickly by the exercise and the heat of the coals.
Dad would cut about four cord of firewood each year. We used it to heat the house – and toast marshmallows.
He’s now been harvesting lumber and firewood for nearly 50 years, since his late teens.
“Chainsaws were kind of a new thing then,” he told me when I told him about the course I was about to take.
It was a steep learning curve; figuring out how stay alive, he added – perhaps as a fatherly warning.
He did eventually take a forestry course when he was in his 20s, where he learned how to notch the tree and how to back cut, proper chain sharpening and proper use of safety equipment.
With trial and error, he learned how the trees fell and how to “limb them up.”
Many years ago, it was just part of the annual farm cycle.
“Subsistence farmers living on the land, you got most of your dimensional lumber from your existing farm and the by-product would have been firewood,” he explained.
HELPING OUT
I remember being involved where I could be of help from a young age. Dad and I would “throw some wood in” from the cart outside into the basement hatch. Once I was older, I would sit atop the tractor and work the wood splitter back and forth while Dad lifted the logs up to balance on the metal frame.
But I never went with him to the woods.
So when my editor asked if I’d ever used a chainsaw, I could honestly say no.
That’s how I came to be in Wellington early last Saturday morning for the chainsaw safety course.
Joe P. Hughes and Clarence Brown (or Joe P. and C.W. as they called each other) prepared the 10 students to safely get started with a chainsaw.
The province courses for free around the Island. This course was in the Wellington forestry station. I knew I was in the right place because there was an orange chainsaw next to a laptop and projector on the table.
A makeshift tree was standing to one side and two sawhorses held a second tree trunk.
The one-day session was a basic course for beginners and weekend users.
“Always look up,” said Hughes, and carry a pressure bandage.
(Note to self: Dad will be getting a box full of bandages for his next birthday, one for each time Hughes or Brown mentioned them.)
The session was a combination of videos and demonstrations.
The students were a mix of me, absolute beginner, to several people who had years of experience after volunteering with the Island Trails organization and the Emergency Animal Response Team. The remaining folks fell into the “used a chainsaw once or twice” category.
Hughes carried the chainsaw to the trunk on the sawhorses to go through the motions of safely limbing a tree.
Then he set it on the table to take it a part and perform a daily maintenance routine.
The tone of the session was to empower the class to use the powerful tool safely, but Hughes encouraged people not to become too timid.
“Experiment,” he’d say. “It’s not computerized.”
The key is to operate the chainsaw safely.
INTO THE WOODS
After lunch, we went to the woods.
Hughes, wearing his “good” chainsaw clothes for the camera, expertly cut the branches from a spruce tree using the techniques from the class.
I asked Brown what Hughes’ usual outfit looked like.
“Full of holes,” he said, gesturing across the front of his coveralls in a slicing motion, before the roar of the motor interrupted us.
Once the tree was free of branches, Hughes looked for a tree to cut down.
I suggested the one with a fluffy collar of dead branches, but it was rejected because it was a balsam fir and would be full of sticky sap this time of year.
We settled on a spruce next to it. Hughes cleared two escape routes at 45-degree angles behind the direction he wanted the tree to fall. The class gathered into these safe areas as the expert woodsman trimmed back the branches on the trunk, holding the saw at 90 degrees to himself.
Then, he notched the tree near the base on the side he wanted to fall, next he made the back cut, using a special cut shown in class.
With a carefully considered final push, the tree fell on the hinge, exactly as planned.
Course complete.
BACK HOME
While the session didn’t prepare me to go cut lumber to build my home, as my father once did, I did feel capable to go home and take apart my partner’s chainsaw to practice the basic maintenance I learned.
After he tested my work, trusting boyfriend that he is, he left the saw and a stick of firewood for me to work with, I balked. Guess I’m not ready yet.