The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A lot of the newcomers to the fabled South End build their mega-mansions with their yards left menaced by 100 year old 2nd growth nettle forests. The first windstorm slamming them with 80 mph hurricane force winds triggers frantic calls to their insurance agent … when the power and phone service return.

It’s only a matter of time before they realize their woodland retreat is a potential deathtrap and, better safe than sorry, they decide to clearcut the property. Worst case, they can put in a 9 hole golf course with sand and water traps and never miss the forests that brought them here in the first place. The eagles and deer can migrate back inland a ways among us poorer residents, the ones with handicaps too high for golf.

Course now they need a tree expert. Or at least some logger bonded and insured with references a long resume in the woods industry. Trouble is, the logging era on the South End is pretty far back, mostly black and white photos down at the Historical Society and Tourist Information. So … after some futile internet searching, they invariably get to Jimmy the Gyppo.

Jimmy’s been topping trees for suburban worriers ever since the log market went to pot, medical and otherwise, and the price of a board foot of timber nettle plummeted to less than the cost of hauling it to the mill over in Arlington. He figured out the real money was in One-Offs, either before or after they were on a roof, didn’t matter to him either way. When clients asked if he was bonded and insured, he’d just laugh. That’s why you got the home insurance, he’d say, knowing full well their options were fairly constricted.

Jimmy the Gyppo didn’t come cheap and he even charged to haul the downed trees away. Then he sold the firewood off a flatbed down by Tyee Store, what he called a Two-fer. The rich folks didn’t mind. The whoppers Jimmy regaled them with, spitting tobacco plugs across a pansy garden, made them feel a little like pioneers, breaking soil for the next expansion of the American West, bringing civilization to the wild old South End before finally deciding to move on to the sunny southwest where the winters were dry and there were no forests left to threaten their vacation homes.

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‘Whatcha been up to this week?’ my old pard Guitar Bob used to ask about every weekly musical session and beer binge. ‘Logging,’ I told him most every spring, at which he would let out a mocking laugh. ‘Oh right, logging. Paul Bunyan, right?’

Guitar Bob burns wood just like me, but he buys his wood already split and delivered after one long year of manhandling a maul that mostly manhandled him. We have cut up logs together, one time sliding down a ten foot high pile of stacked and snotty logs, but Bob is no logger. And despite his sneering cynicism, I am. Year after year I cut alders, maples, firs and deadfall back in the woods, buck it up, stack the slash, split the sections with an 8 pound maul I’ve prized for decades, haul it by wheelbarrow or garden cart up to the woodsheds and let it age for two years before burning it. We’re talking 10 or 12 cord a year, a cord being, for you not familiar with dendritic measurements, a stack 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet.

In other words 10 cord is a helluva lot of wood. And a helluva lot of work. So when Guitar Bob mocks me, I don’t find it amusing coming from a man who buys his wood cut and split. Paul Bunyan? Trust me, there are years when I feel like that, just wish I had a Blue Ox Babe to drag the trees out of the back 40. I’m turning 70 in a couple months. Those 10 cord get bigger every year and sometimes I think I could learn to envy Guitar Bob, just order up some aged maple, stack it in the shed and use my time for something more useful and way less strenuous.

So just when I get to thinking this way, a storm comes along and topples trees back on my trails and yeah, I could just let them rot, home to pileated woodpeckers and raccoons, but a couple years in and the woods would be a debris field of branches and impassable trails. This year we lost two huge maples in the last storms, the biggest with a trunk easily 3 feet in diameter. I own 3 chainsaws but none big enough to cut through the barrel of that base. Some of it is going to sit and rot, it looks like to this old timer. The rest is enough to fill one year of woodsheds, what I’m working on now and will be working on for the next few weeks.

The truth is I didn’t move out to the island to live an easy life. Maybe I thought I was the son of pioneers or just liked the fantasy. Maybe I just didn’t want a suburban or urban lifestyle, turn up the thermostat and watch TV. Maybe I really didn’t give it much thought, which is probably closer to the truth. It’s been 50 years now, cutting trees, planting more, burning firewood to keep warm, both the house and the studio and the woodshop. It’s so much a part of my life I usually take it for granted. Well, at least until every spring….

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