Seeing what we've got

Archie Mackenzie handles 14 foot spruce logs with the forks of a tractor with more grace than my fork approaches a bowl of spaghetti.

“Yes Archie, yup,” I spoke into the phone.

Sawyer’s head jerked up from the campaign he’d been waging with his younger brother Gus over a toy fire truck.

“No, that sounds good, yeah,” I spoke into the phone.

Sawyer’s eyes locked on mine and narrowed.

“Right on, see you at 1,” and I hung up.

“Don’t mill it all,” my soon to be five year old said with the air of a threat.

“You’ll be there when we get the bugs sorted out,” I promised.

On Sunday afternoon Archie MacKenzie began milling the black spruce I cut behind the bunky house.

Those 14 trees I liked watching swing in the wind yielded 26 logs ranging in length from 10 to 15 feet.

While my rough calculations estimated there’d be enough in them to plank a 24 foot boat and get me partway to framing up the floor I’ll build her on, they weren’t worth much until we began opening up the logs.

“A plank is much like a man, none of them are perfect,” the old skipper Ray Elliot said years ago when he found me sorting through black spruce plank with too fine a comb in a northern Newfoundland shed.

In a boat the thin skin of wood you are counting to keep yourself and likely those of a few people you care about above the cold depths is itself the cross section of many lives.

Quiet lives of struggle and desire.

Maybe these black spruce savored some of their days on that south facing slope.

I hope so.

Archie’s bandsaw began opening up their stories on Sunday.

Wide rings told of long summers with plenty of rain.

Black knots of failed attempts to reach for light that pained them right up to their end.

Red is the precursor to the softening of age and then rot.

A brown staining near the surface tells of where sunlight consistently reached through the canopy to shine directly on their bark. Lovely and warm as that sounds as a metaphor, the wood there will be hard and prone to cracking along the grain.

But what’s a life without its scars?

Working with wood is little different than working with people.

You plot a course around rankling wounds, decide which compromises you can live with and seek its strength.
Archie got about a third of my sticks milled on Sunday.

After, I had the privilege of sitting with him and Frances in their kitchen and hearing the stories of the generation who preceded theirs.

Cross sections of lives that may have ended before mine began but are still cherished in the community.

The spruce looks better than I’d hoped.

Sawyer will be there next time because promises made to children matter.