The Firewood Pile

Junior runs the log-yard where I buy my wood. He brokers logs, buying mixed loads from local loggers and tree services, then selling them by species and grade to mills and foreign shippers. It’s a family affair:  Junior’s brother runs one of the huge knuckle-boom trucks, his cousin runs the scales, and his son runs a small sawmill back home. Junior’s grandfather was a logger and sawyer, and his great-grandfather was logging trees at the time of the Civil War.

I went to the log yard last week to get a red oak log for a pair of Democratic Side Chairs.  Junior knows what I want, often better than I do: he looks at hundreds of logs a day. “We don’t have much red oak.  But there’s a red oak butt on the firewood pile the loggers slabbed…”  ‘Slabbed’, I discovered, means the loggers split the log in half when they felled it, turning a valuable log into firewood.

The log was a beauty:  30“ in diameter, perfectly straight, fast grown.  Junior sawed off a piece small enough that it wouldn’t crush my trailer and loaded it with the knuckle-boom.  

‘What do I owe you?’  I always ask, though I know the answer.  

‘I’ll catch you next time’  Junior never charges me for logs from the firewood pile.  In a world economy where many of his logs go overseas before even being sawn, I think he likes knowing this log will be turned into a chair within 10 miles of his home. And for my part, I like salvaging nice logs that would otherwise end up in someone’s woodstove.