No favors

The wood is put up, a full four cords stacked. I figure it took a good eight hours or so over the course of three days.

Yeah, that's a lot of wood. I knew this going in, so I thought I'd recruit some artist friends to come down from the city to help. Much younger than I and perhaps unfamiliar with such chores, I thought to ply them with beer while hinting at the adventure of a new experience. Silence. Then I tried to shame them. "Candy asses!" I cried. No luck.

The first day I felt like I made it halfway through the pile. Thing was, the change was almost imperceptible, at least as far as others who passed by were concerned. I though I might have worked through another cord on day two; and then with 3/4 of the wood gone, folks noticed and commented. And they did so again today. Of course. Now for the kindling. It's not done until the kindling is put in bins.

Oh, someone might be wondering what kind of wood. White Oak, well-seasoned with over three years on the ground. Hardly any bark left on it. Not a bit of it mooky, either. At $240 a cord, it better burn like Madrone.

Whoa! $240 a cord? That's a bit steep, no? As a matter of fact, it is. Last year I got oak from the same guy for $200, and the year before, $180. To adjust, I didn't help unload this year.

Why so much of an increase? Seems that the larger picture has something to do with a bio fuel plant snapping up all the dead they can find. Less construction equals less lumber scrap so they have to look elsewhere. Closer to home, my wood guy had to buy his logs from his father-in-law who is also selling firewood this year from the felled trees on his property. Usually, our wood guy just knocks on the doors of places with trees uprooted from the winter storms. Or, as I happened to see the other day, he steals it.

The little railroad that runs by here services the lumber mills further up the canyon. Over the last two years the company has been clearing trees and brush along the tracks and hauling it back on cars to a place they bulldozed especially for a place to dump it. It's a lot of wood, mostly branches and stumps with the roots attached. There's also a good amount of dirt in that pile. I'd guess the pile grew to be about thirty feet wide and tall, and around two hundred feet long. It's been an eyesore.

Now, with that much wood, there's going to be some sizable logs, and they have been placed in a separate pile. Let's say there are about fifty logs about twenty feet long and two feet in diameter. And not all of it is fir. Every once in a while, especially on weekends, I'll see a pick up truck pull into the area, maybe with a small trailer hitched up, and in the course of an hour or two, a log will go missing. This last weekend I saw my wood guy there with his wife and six kids and their three-cord trailer. Until this last Monday, the area wasn't posted.

If I were to guess (which I seem to be doing a lot lately), I'd say those logs are worth about four grand, which I mention only because I imagine they have plans for them other than chipping. The rest they have been chipping for two weeks now, and they're about three-fifths of the way through it. Maybe three tractor trailers have gone out so far, and another two loads are waiting.

The day before they started, I asked a guy who knows everything what he knew of the pile's future. He said the bark dust (for that's what they call it out here) was being donated to a local high school and somewhere else that I can't remember.

Dirt and all.