Alf

We felt guilty this year, so we ordered a double trailer of logs.When the truck arrived, the young driver swung the logs with an enormous claw off of the trailers and into a pile 30 feet long by five feet high, just down from the house. They’re already limbed. So that’s two things we didn’t have to ask Alf to do.

Alf, our neighbour, has done our firewood for years. He appeared, magically, the year we frugally installed a wood furnace in our workshop but had no plan, by October, for finding wood to feed said furnace. Hearing that we were in a “tizzy,” Alf came over for a cup of tea and proposed, for a very modest sum, to transform some of the ragtaggle trees on our 45 acres of bush into tidy cords of firewood. As neither my husband nor I can be trusted with a running chainsaw, we gladly agreed. So Alf organized us, felling, limbing, and running the splitter while my husband and I stacked. We got it done before the snow fell. Every year since, Alf has done our wood.

We know Alf is in his 70s, but it’s easy to forget. He’s worked in the bush all his life, logging, trapping, on saws in woodlots and mills. He likes to work with horses, but on our place he uses our 50-year-old Massey Ferguson tractor, Gertrude. Gertrude drives more like an ornery mule than a horse, but Alf can jolly her along. He arrives at 8 a.m. sharp, hitches the splitter and the bush trailer to Gertrude, and chugs off over the ridge to find us some decent hardwood. He says he likes to do the felling alone, because a lifetime of slinging a chainsaw has left him a little deaf, so it’s best if he doesn’t have anybody else to keep track of.

Which makes it worrying in terms of keeping track of him. Other years, when Alf has been out back dropping trees, I have made a habit of taking a thermos of tea and biscuits out to him a couple of times a day. It was a comfort to us, because we figured that then at least if he ended up pinned under a maple, he’d know refreshment was on the way. I dodged a few trees in the beginning, but he got to expect me, and we would sit on stumps with our tea while he told me about logging in the winter up at Lake Abitibi, making up booms on the ice, then towing them to the mills in the spring with little tugboats, fishing along the way.

But for God’s sake, the man is in his 70s ... So this year, when he arrived there was that neat pile of limbed logs waiting for him, in view of the house. He didn’t say a word, just parked the splitter and went to work. Since the work went quicker this year, we asked him to build a woodshed, which he did, squaring timbers for it with his chainsaw. To finish up the shed, he and I drove over to our neighbours to pick up some barn board, and when we got there, we noticed that someone has thinned out their pine trees for them this year. Alf slowed down to have a look, and said quietly: “I wonder who did this. I took a good bit of wood out of there for them three years ago. Guess they thought I was too old.”

The day Alf finished, we went down to the water, as he’d offered to help me bring the canoe up the bank. The bank down to the river is about 50 feet high, steep, and slippery with pine needles. We use a switchback trail to get down to the dock. When we got there, I picked up one end of the canoe, and waited. Alf said, gently, “Just step back a minute,” then picked up the canoe, put it on his head and walked straight up the bank.

Okay, Alf. Next year, maybe we drop some trees around the edge of the garden and clear off that big dead maple beside the shop, eh?

Joan Barton is a former family law lawyer and current rural entrepreneur. She can be reached via the Women’s Portal.