How you do your wood says a lot about you up here. It separates the “weekenders” from the residents and those with more money than brains from the rest of us. I can say that now, because we have just joined the “rest of us.” Finally, this year, we have more or less cut our own wood.

Not that we had planned to. Ever since we moved here, we have ordered our wood, three bush cords for the cabin, and four bush cords for my husband’s shop. It was supplied by a local fellow, who also supplies a large number of cottagers with the wood that they burn when they come up for their periodic snowmobiling weekends during the winter.

Nobody around here understood why we ordered wood. We’ve got plenty of trees on our land, and they’re typical Haliburton quality, i.e. mainly good for firewood and not much else. The problem with them is they’re all standing up, and Don and I aren’t particularly good at getting standing trees to lie down in an orderly fashion. We own an expensive chainsaw, all people who come here from the city own expensive chainsaws. We even tried to use it once or twice, until a tree that we were dropping changed directions mid fall, and landed on Don. He escaped with bruises, but his enthusiasm for woodcutting was seriously reduced, and with standard masculine logic, he decreed that since he had been hurt while using the chainsaw, I should not use it.

So, when the fellow we order our wood from encountered some troubles, and told us that he would not be able to supply us this year, we were stuck.

Enter Alf. Alf lives down the road by the highway. He is a tall, slim, calm and gentle man in his late 60s. He has logged and worked in mills all his life, and sees no reason to quit any time soon. He knows trees like a good farmer knows his crops. All his movements are smooth and deliberate, although he rarely stops moving. He is a wizard with a chainsaw.

Alf came and logged with us for a week. We decided we would cut deer/walking trails into the property. Cutting trails makes more work, but if Don and I moved as fast as we could, loading the bush trailer and dragging it back to the shop with the tractor and stacking, we could almost keep up with Alf as he cut and limbed. Every so often we called a tea break. Then Don and I got our breath back, and Alf relaxed and told us logging stories, about single men manhandling eight-foot logs off skidders into trucks with pick handled axes, and logging in steep hills and sudden bogs with horses.

Accidents happen. Last winter his partner took sick, and Alf had to work alone in the bush. A rogue tree gave him a limb in the face as it came down. But men who do this dangerous work are not fussers. He didn’t panic. He walked the mile or two out of the bush, got in his truck and drove to the nearest house. The women who live in the houses up here aren’t fussers either. If a man drives up to their door bleeding from head wounds, they drive him to the hospital and phone his wife.

But we had no accidents, and the weather was good to us. The stacked wood looked and smelled like fresh bread. Alf taught me how to tell an ironwood from an elm, and why I would want to know the difference. He taught Don some things about taking care of chainsaws, expensive ones or not, and he did our splitting for us by hand, because he said it wasn’t worth bothering with the log splitter.

We ate cookies and cake and drank sugary tea, and I didn’t gain an ounce. All the wood we needed was cut and stacked in four days. The last day Alf and I walked the property to blaze the path we’ll cut this spring when he comes back to do next year’s wood with us.

Why would anybody order their wood? I can’t imagine.