Logging is noisy
work, so when the logger brought his whining chainsaw and his team of horses to
thin my small woodlot, I worried that
the noise would bother my neighbor,
who gets up in the middle of the night to go to work, then returns in early afternoon to nap before spending the evening with her family.
who gets up in the middle of the night to go to work, then returns in early afternoon to nap before spending the evening with her family.
Before horses can
pull—or twitch—logs out of the woods,
pathways must be cut and temporary bridges built. Then selected trees must be dropped, limbed,
and cut to manageable lengths. Leftover
brush must be sawn into pieces and laid out to decompose on the ground, feeding the forest. This intimate work cannot be done safely
without chainsaws. With a 60-foot spruce
swaying above him, a woodsman needs not only a perfect sense of time and space
but a big, sharp, reliable saw. My
woodlot contains tangled second-growth trees of uneven size and age, and it is
carpeted with underbrush. The
chainsawing continued for days. I hoped
my neighbor was getting enough sleep.
When most of the
saw-work was done, the logger hitched up his horses. I had always thought that
horses work for their drivers, but this driver works for his horses, two
females matched for size and temperament.
Outfitted with elaborate hardware, more than half the time each of them
relaxed at the trailer, quietly munching the fragrant hay he carried them or
drinking the fresh water he lugged them in five-gallon containers. He generally rested one while the other
twitched prepared tree trunks through the woods on snow-covered paths to the roadside,
where a logging truck could pick them up.
In low, throaty tones—gee, haw, back, whoa—he directed the horses one
step at a time through the maze of standing trees, back to the hay and water
waiting at the end of each run. After
two weeks, the woods were finally silent again.
When I saw my neighbor at her mailbox the day after, I
thanked her for her patience with the noise. “I didn’t even notice it,” she
said, “except for the singing.”
“The singing?”
“He was singing to
the horses,” she said, “ and it put me right to sleep.”
In the Great North
Woods, some loggers have gotten rich rapidly stripping land of timber, then
selling it for development. With huge,
impersonal armies of clanking machines they bare acres a day, so there aren’t
many jobs left for one man, his saw, and his horses. There should be.