Cleaving
In which we consider splitting, or something along those lines
There are many ways for the axe to fall.
Many ways for wood to split, for the pieces to separate.
We have two weights of splitting axes. I don’t know the number values because we refer to them simply as the big axe and the little axe. They’re both the same plastic yellow handle (shank?), the same brand — just, one is longer and heavier.
There was a time when we thought going bigger would make shorter shrift of the work. Consensus has shifted. What the small axe lacks in weight, it makes up for in ease of lifting, which somehow, not having brushed up on my physics, seems to translate into a swifter downward speed. The heavier axe is more work to lift, and somehow slower, more thuddy, on the downswing.
The three of us (four when Son visited) prefer the small axe, and this poses a logistics problem on those rare occasions when we decide to tackle the mound of wood together, at the same time.1 Thankfully, that does not happen terribly often. (Though, honestly, I was very happy to have them all here with me at the same time, so I would take more of that and gladly deal with the axe shortage.)
Mostly, splitting the firewood is my job.2 And that’s just fine by me. I’m not complaining.
There’s still room for improvement, but my technique and efficacy have greatly improved over the last year, as have my already considerably advanced stacking skills.
When it comes to executing inconsequential fiddly tasks to perfection, I’m your gal. Packing the car? Making the bed? Folding linens or towels? Organizing the fridge? Putting lights on the Christmas tree? (No, scratch that last one. I’d be glad to never have to put lights on a tree again.)
Stacking wood is no different. There’s doing it well, and then there’s doing it the way everyone else does.
Lately, I’ve been splitting a lot of wood. There’s a large pile of it to feed the three four stoves that keep us warm3. As a matter of principle (and because I’d rather do something useful than not), I try to spend an hour or so chopping wood every morning. In miserable weather, I’ll give it a pass. But I do enjoy the activity, I get a bit of a work out, and someone needs to do it. And of course, I stack what I chop — which I don’t mind doing either.
It’s time to think, time to formulate an approach, time to analyze the results. Which logs split easiest? What is the best way to approach knots? What is the meaning of life, and why am I here?
Here are some loose guidelines:
Stop to pet the cats. Cats like to sit on top of the chopping block. You can brush them off, shoo them away, but they always return. You won’t split wood effectively with a cat rubbing around your ankles or angling to jump up onto the chopping block. The best advice I have is to indulge their need for cuddles. Pick them up, sit yourself down on the stump, and enjoy a few minutes of purring. They’ll leave you alone afterwards. And you’ll benefit from the vibrations and resonance.
Change hands. I am becoming lopsided. Don’t make the same mistake. Try — it feels weird and clumsy — to switch your grip and swing. Don’t stop there. When you have to bend over to pick up the piece that flew off the chopping block (I swear, splitting firewood is more about bending over than swinging the axe), try doing it with the other hand. Find different ways down and up, and change it up every time. Squat, bend, reach. Your back will thank you.
Raise yourself up tall and then sit back, hard. Yes, if the pieces are small and your axe is sharp, you don’t need to put that much effort into it. But the really exhilarating effects come from splitting a large log in a single go. This takes determination. Feel the stretch in your lats as you reach upwards. Sit your butt back and down and exhale as the axe makes contact with the log. You’ll be amazed at the force you gain.
Exhale on the down strike. This is worth repeating. Breathe in as you raise the axe. You are readying yourself for battle, committing to the act. Feel yourself filled with the intention and the potential for action. Bring it down with the release of breath. First, because you won’t clench your teeth and rattle your brain. Second, you’ll add power to the swing with a tight core, and it will feel so, so much easier. A release, and crack!
Clean up as you go. There’s a lot of bending, I know. And it strains your back. But you really should create a clear space for yourself to step around without tripping. You’re making life easier for your future self. With all the split wood in a tidy pile, you can stack or load it into the wheelbarrow easily. (Or, next level is to chop beside the spot where you will stack and avoid the wheelbarrow all together.) And don’t neglect the bark. Get that out of the way and into a tidy pile on the side as well!
Build a solid foundation. It’s worth paying extra attention to how you build the base of your wood pile. It needs to be stable to support the stacked height. Consider how to fit the pieces together, how to fortify the sides, and how to fit in as much as you can without sacrificing structural integrity. The cats will test your efforts.
Have a management plan. Like people, firewood needs to mature to produce a good burn. And you need somewhere off to the side to stack it in the meantime. It should be out of the rain or covered, and you should have a clear hierarchy and distinct piles to draw on from oldest to newest so your fires catch well.
When we came here, to this small village in southwestern Hungary, we knew nothing about anything of life here. We were fleeing the state of things back home and taking refuge. We were friendly, we wanted to fit in. And we did as best we could, name days4 notwithstanding.
We each grieved our departure in our own way. And it was a grieving. We’d left parts of ourselves behind, and loved ones, and we’d steeled ourselves to the unknown future we were attempting to embrace, albeit awkwardly, reluctantly. We knew not what lay ahead but we knew nothing would ever be the same again. And we grieved.
In so many ways, we did not fit in. And we knew it. We were strangers. Even Husband, who is from this country, is not of this place. In stores, clerks immediately switched to German when speaking to me. Everything about me was, or perhaps still is, visibly foreign.
So many of the logs have knots, some hidden, some not.
When the log is nice and plain, it is an easy thing to split it into tidy little straight pieces. The Hungarian word “sima” is a good one for that. It sounds just exactly right: sheemah — something smooth and soft5. But knots are another story. The axe bounces off the surface, or it gets stuck. The grain is a sinewy wave that defies the rules like an child’s unruly and defiant locks, and it grips tight to its twisted core, refusing to let go of the axe.
Splitting knotted wood is painful and slow. Typically, I go with three strikes and you’re out. Well, it usually turns into more than three because I’m stubborn and I like a challenge, but if the axe bounces off the surface repeatedly and shows no sign of finding purchase, I toss the log aside for the splitter. That’s Husband’s job. The grinding whining crunching of the motorized wedge pushing its way through the resistant knot is a job for a fearless man dressed in a face shield and protective eyewear. The pieces the splitter produces are aberrant ragged and twisted tortured things with jagged edges that refuse to be stacked into tidy piles.
My hand-split wood is far from perfect, but it tends towards the straight and square. It is easy to stack, and when I chuck the pieces into the pile, they make a pleasing and reassuring clatter.
Leaving Canada was — I think I can use this word now — a traumatic experience. Not in the sense that it was out of our control or wholly, devastatingly awful. But it was traumatic. Each in our own way, we struggled with shell shock and a much deeper, more existential wound. Not to be overly dramatic, but it felt like a forced separation from self.
I had been part of a place, and it a part of me. Having left, I was no longer the same person. It is a shape-shifting trick to leave a chunk of your life behind. Edges that were previously well-smoothed by experience and the easy friction of regular interactions became jagged and raw, veins exposed. The dark coloring of deeply felt emotions risen to the surface in pinkish humidity. Wet wood doesn’t burn well. And it’s heavy as hell.
Once exposed, the tight heart-core of the wood’s grain reveals and destroys in one fell swoop6 the upright strength of the tree. The more knotted, the more intertwined and difficult to split. It doesn’t give up easily, if at all. The straighter, the less fight it has.
No solid base to build on, not fitting in, no friends, no support, no comfort to retreat to — we were all we had. That, and our tenuous belief that we were doing what we could to move our little family out of harm’s way. Even that belief was not on solid ground. Each of us taking turns doubting our decisions, doubting our next move, second guessing everything, every minute of the day. We were only the three of us, with our fears and our grief, making the best of it, the best way we knew how, with great apprehension, holding tightly to each other.
Sure, other people did things differently. Was there a right and a wrong? No. If you could experience the thoughts and fears and deep motivation to protect against what we believed was coming, you might have done the same. Did our fears come to pass? No, not really. Not fully. Although in part, they did, they are. The unseen plans we feared are still, surely, in the works. And yet, somehow a sense of calm and the lull of normalcy have settled in. The edges have smoothed.
Did we escape and find a better way? No, only a temporary reprieve. It is not better, only different. And that possibly makes things worse. Why go through all of this heartache and stress to land in the same place?
Could we have managed by another route? Hunkered down and waited it out? Stood our ground and fought? Perhaps. Many others did. We made what we considered were the best choices for us in that moment.
We split.
I’ve written about it in many ways, but the persistent anxious feeling I’ve had of being dislodged, removed, of having not only lost home but of no longer knowing what or where home was — well, I’ve grappled with it for precisely 2 years and 8 months.
The hand wavers, and the axe falls to the side or contacts the wood face at an angle, or too far into the middle, or too close to the edge. It’s the work of a moment’s hesitation. The axe glances off, bounces back, gets stuck — and you keep swinging. There’s no other way. The pieces will fall off.
Sometimes the axe strikes swiftly and effectively with a resounding crack. Adjust your grip with a shrug of satisfaction. There. Good. That’s done. Next.
And you pick up the pieces and keep swinging. Chuck the small pieces into the kindling pile, and the larger ones to where they’ll be stacked. You mull over the right size. Too big to catch and burn well? Too small to create any sustainable heat? No matter. That’s a decision for another day, another season. For now, you only have to break things down into smaller pieces and stack them in a pile.
We’ll pick and choose when the time comes. Right now, the job at hand is to reassemble them and recompile them into tidy aligned rows and sturdy wood houses where the air will move through the spaces between those raw ragged edges, drawing out the moisture, hollowing out any resistance and readying the split pieces, big and small, for the blazing fire.
Who knows how things would have turned out otherwise, what the future will hold.
The safety shoes I wear are two sizes too big for my feet. They feel like clown shoes, but with thick socks they fit well enough to be serviceable. I got them from a neighbour down the road when we first arrived here. They were offered to Husband, but fit him slightly too small, and so I accepted them with gratitude. At the time, I had no notion I would be spending my free time splitting firewood, but I expected to be helping with renovations, and so practical footwear seemed a welcome gift.
The soles have utterly gone out of them, which is a whole other metaphor. What I mean is the rubber treads are peeling off and great cracks have appeared between their “rugged” grip. It’s gotten that the ground feels uneven when I walk that short distance from the terrace to the wood pile, and every day, I pick off another dangling bit of rubber. I know I need to shop for a new pair, and that’s OK. I’m hopeful that I will find a good fit.
Even after Son and Daughter and I completed the first large “wood house” I kept going — well, someone has to, you see — with piles stacked here and there for immediate use and then, when I ran out of wall space in covered areas, I hauled out an old palette and filled that up as high as I could, working against Karoly’s attempts to be the Queen of the Castle.
Then I hauled out another palette for a smaller wood house, and finished that in the span of a week. On this, I added a well curated bark-shingle roof and for an hour forgot everything about all my troubles. And then, another palette for another straight-up high-rise build. The pile of log slices under the apple tree dwindles with every structure I erect.
There’s another thing I wanted to say about technique. I was rehearsing the thought and sentence additions to this post this morning while putting the final bark shingles on the roof of the second house. But I’ve forgotten now what it was. And that’s annoying because I had many good thoughts out there under the supervision of Picike and Karoly, many good meditations on the meaning of life, the universe and everything. (I assure you, the answer is not 42. It’s closer to a 40 with a thick sock.)
There’s a thing about balance. A thing about the way just one point of tension/friction/contact holds two pieces together, sometimes at impossible angles. There’s the way the bark, when still wrapped around a round disc of oak, holds it together, making it harder to split. Once that ring breaks and falls away, the core is much easier to rend.
And this was one of my early morning thoughts: I find myself putting effort into controlling my swing, even intentionally weakening it, in an effort to not cause the split pieces to fly off the chopping block in all directions.
Bending over and picking up the pieces is back breaking work, no matter how you slice it. And so, the technique is to hit the round as if dividing it in pizza slices, each one cracking from the top face of the log through almost to the bottom. Usually, the piece splits in two first, or a smaller wedge flies out, and that’s just fine, because then I change my angle of attack, and bring the axe down perpendicular to those first cuts.7
Pop, pop, pop, pop! They fly off like matchsticks. And you didn’t have to keep bending over to pick up the larger log. No, you prepare the ground, you create the crevices, the deep fault lines, and then you chip them off one after the other. Easy peasy. Like taking candy from a baby.
And can we talk about those fault lines? If you can align8 the axe with a thin crack radiating out (or in?) from the core of the wood, you’ll find it easier to succeed. Aim for the rim, and then progressively move your way into the heartwood.9 Bring down the sharp edge precisely within or parallel to the hair-thin crack, and the whole thing will cleave, and the pieces will bounce off in opposite directions. You’ll feel like Hercules, albeit briefly.
Because after that, you will have to bend over and pick up the pieces, again and again. They will land in different places each time, often annoyingly just out of reach. Although your job is to split the wood, you will spend more time and energy attempting to reassemble it into a more useful structure (not without satisfaction, mind).
How you do that is, of course, up to you.
For us, it will be a return, albeit slightly askew, to a different province. We are still three. But none of us is the same as we were three years ago. Let us see what we can make of what we’ve done, what we have built — on and in spite of that cleaving.
Let us find out where we have landed and where we can go from here.
In a similar vein, although Daughter and I now have the same size feet, we have only one pair of steel-toed boots. So we share those, too. And it helps to mitigate the problem of sharing the small axe. No splitting without the boots.
I’m not complaining. I really do love it.
No, not in the same room. One in the living room, it’s the workhorse + one in Daughter’s room that rarely gets used + one in my office outside + one in Husbands office outside. Oh wait, that’s four.
Name days: a celebration day for everyone named Janos, for example. One is expected to remember whose day is which and wish them “boldog névnapot” sometimes with chocolate or wine.
Also used to mean “plain” as in “Is this the plain ciabatta or the one with olives?”
Or “one swell foop,” as dad would say
“The first cut is the deepest, baby I know…”
Horrible corporate-ese! But in this case, I do mean it literally.
Yes, Heart of Darkness references are appropriate here. Mistah Kutz, he dead.
Fabulous Fun here! I love it. And I can easily imagine that the strong body I saw in September is even stronger now.
I'm so very proud of who you have become through your 50 short years. You are a powerful woman in so many senses of the word.
I send wheelbarrows full of love to you.
Awesome, both visually and verbally.