When I was boy on the farm, holding Old Man Winter at bay was a daily battle – hand-to-limb combat waged with axes, bow saws and elbow grease.
I’m not exaggerating or making up a word of what I write. The first few winters on the farm at Elkland, Mo., we cut firewood every day – just enough to keep a fire in the stove until the next day. Of course, we would like to have piled up enough to last several days, or even a week; but in the winter of 1957 and several thereafter, just getting through one day at a time was about all we could do.
Other folks went into winter with firewood piled head-high on their porches, in woodsheds or outside their houses – most of it well-cured oak split from large logs. How I envied them. We had neither the time nor the tools to pile in wood for weeks or months. That would come later. We moved from a rented farm at Republic to a brushy 39 acres on the Dallas and Webster counties line in August, not quite five months before my 10th birthday. I had never before had to clear brush or cut firewood. After the move it became an almost daily routine, as we reclaimed pastures from years of persimmon, sumac, buckbrush and rose bushes.
That first winter – before Dad quit his day job as a cow breeder – we worked mostly at night, going out after milking and supper to work persimmon, elm and other small trees into stove-length firewood. We went into fall with a coal oil heater that barely heated one room. Dad soon replaced it with a second-hand wood stove.
Weeks before winter set in I learned to use a double-bitted axe and a 30-inch blue bow saw to clear brush and begin taking out the abundant persimmon groves. Even before we needed wood for our own stove, we were working up trunk loads of “cookwood” for Grandma’s wood-burning range – short lengths, mostly of split persimmon she could easily feed into the small firebox.
Dad insisted we cut the small trees off at ground level, so he could later mow over the stumps, and that we leave no sharp stobs that might puncture a tire. The small, straight persimmons cut up quickly and easily – but it takes a bunch of them make a load of wood.
As we needed larger chunks of wood for the house, we worked up elm, ash, oak, hickory and sassafras – depending on where Dad had decided to work – and we carried or trucked armloads to the house.
Most of it we cut with blue bow saws. Dad had a larger one. I had the 30-inch bow. At about the same time he also came up with an old buck saw, which proved best for cross-cutting larger logs, as well as a two-man cross cut for felling and cutting up larger trees.
I was probably 11 or 12 when I began using the crosscut with Dad or my younger brother, Russell. We didn’t drop many big trees, but I loved it when we did. They made a lot more wood at lot faster. Plus, there was something intoxicating in the heady aroma of sawdust and rhythm and swoosh of a crosscut blade tearing though a green oak log. It was man’s work.
As I grew older, woodcutting became less of a daily chore. On the farm full time, Dad was able to have loads of wood ready to haul to the house after we got home from school. Sometimes we had a pickup reliable enough to bring it up. Not always.
After Dad bought his first chain saw – a terrifying old Mono he wouldn’t even let us boys near – we were able to hang up the crosscut and bow saws for many chores. But, a chain saw didn’t really replace them until I was out of high school and Dad bought his first Homelite.
Still, staving off winter was almost a daily battle for many years – or at least Dad made it so.
At times he had little more than a few days’ of wood at the house, though he often had piles in several locations around the farm. He just liked to cut wood and burn brush piles. At other times his frequent little loads resulted in larger woodpiles off the corner of the porch.
Well I recall – and miss – going down to the farm in Dad’s later years to help him “cut up a jag of wood,” toss it in the truck and head back to the house for a cup of coffee by the old wood stove.
A cup of instant Maxwell House never tasted better.
Old Man Winter was no longer the formidable foe of years ago. In retrospect I can see clearly now, as hard as he was to get along with, Winter and Dad were the best of friends.
That peace would have never come to pass though, but for our early seasons of skirmishing with axes and blue bow saws. Maybe we never truly tamed Winter, but he never beat us, either.
A former feature writer for Ozarks Farm and Neighbor, Jim Hamilton is a retired editor/publisher of the Buffalo Reflex and continues to write a weekly column he began in the fall of 1978. Following retirement, he was inducted into the Missouri Press Association Hall of Fame. An alumnus of the Fair Grove FFA, Hamilton was reared on a small dairy farm in Dallas County, Mo. Contact Jim at [email protected]. Read more of his works in Ozarks RFD 2010-2015, available online from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or from the author.
