Cutting Firewood

Cutting up a great big tree with a little bitty chainsaw.

 

In November, 1985, we bought 30 acres of land in North Georgia's McLemore Cove. (Read about how we found it here.)

We put a camper on the property and began spending weekends there. Donny was a teen-ager then, and one Friday evening in the spring of 1986 several of his friends came out to camp overnight. We built a fire in front of the old house, near an enormous maple tree that must have been three feet thick at the base. About eight or ten feet above the ground it divided into two trunks, each at least two feet in diameter.

A little after dark we were all sitting around the campfire when a sudden hard wind came from the west, blowing embers from the fire toward the old house. As we all jumped up to put out the fire, one of those enormous limbs split off the maple tree and fell toward us. We all ran in different directions, and miraculously, no one was hurt.

Except me.

The tree knocked me down and fell all around me. It's hard to believe I wasn't killed, but all I got were some broken ribs.

We were still living in a subdivision near Chattanooga at the time, in a tri-level house. At the lowest level, in the den, we had a wood-burning stove that kept the whole house warm. That fall, I cut up that trunk with a 16-inch Remington chainsaw, split it with a mallet and wedges, hauled it home a load at a time in our compact Ford Courier pickup, and burned that sucker! 

That was the first tree that tried to kill me. Read about the other one here and here. (I got my revenge on that one, too.)

For fans of film photography: you're seeing something unusual, in fact, something you may never have seen before -- a Kodachrome 64 transparency in 120 size. Kodak made it in the 1980s and possibly into the '90s in an effort to stem the tide of photographers switching to Fujichrome. The quality was unparalleled, but it never sold well and ultimately Fuji prevailed. Kodak stopped making the 120 size and eventually stopped making Kodachrome altogether. A sad day, but by that time 'most everyone had switched to digital imaging, so it mattered to only a very few. I shot a few rolls in my Pentax 6x7 and loved the film, but stuck to Fujichrome because I could process it myself.

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

My book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, is now out of print, although copies are apparently still available from Amazon, and possibly other sources. The second edition is now in the editing stage and is scheduled to be published on December 6th.