chainsaw – David Kotz

Firewood time

Huge branches = lots of firewood.

Earlier this year, a large branch snapped off one of our silver maple trees. We sawed, split, and stacked it – firewood for a future winter! Yesterday, I climbed a ladder and sawed off the rest of the branch, which was 10-15′ long. It took an hour or more just to saw it into stove lengths, in part because this branch – just a branch, mind you – was thicker than our chainsaw bar. At one point I decided my Greenworks Pro electric saw (which is awesome, by the way) was just not cutting it. (Sorry, bad pun.) So I pulled out my trusty Stihl 026, our only remaining gas-powered tool. It is more than thirty years old, but still going strong!

Chainsaw therapy

Life skills.

One of the most useful skills I learned while a student at Dartmouth had nothing to do with academics, or computer science. It was how to use a chainsaw (safely) to fell trees and turn them into firewood – or a water bar, a bridge, or a cabin. To this day, I still find it satisfying to pull out my aging Stihl for an afternoon of hard work. This weekend we removed a few small crabapple and black locust trees from our property, where they had outgrown their location, and turned them into firewood. Many kudos to Andy and Mara, now able to wield the saw themselves, and to Pam for the instigation and for a lot of the hard work to move all the debris. We’ll all be that much toastier when winter arrives.