Zook's sawmill

Not being in the mood to unload the trailer, I took the truck to the woodlot across the road. Last time I had the truck in there was last summer, when it mysteriously quit right at the back, at the edge of the marsh, after I'd fully loaded the box.

That was the time I had to recruit Junior to steer while I towed the truck, wood and all, out of there with the Ford 4000. Quite a scene, that, the poor kid with his under-developed forearms trying to turn the wheel of the truck this way and that with no power steering and me giving him the "are you retarded?" look the whole time.

The climax of that adventure occurred as we were pulling out onto the road. You have to traverse the ditch and then climb a steep incline, and it's really hard to see if there's traffic coming. The weight of the truck and the angle of attack resulted in our merging onto the road in a gigantic wheelie that would have made the old Little Red Wagon pilot proud.

Nothing that exciting today. The maple I dropped gave me a moment's pause just as she was starting to go over. These sixty or seventy footers can find stuff to get tangled up in on their way down, and then sometimes there's trouble.

That's what was about to happen; she leaned to about a 60 degree angle while I still had the saw in the trunk, and it looked for sure like the crown was going to be hung up on a couple of adjacent trees, but just as the saw broke through the trunk she did a slow roll and came crashing to earth.

What I'm aiming for in terms of woodlot management is sustainable firewood in perpetuity. Not that I'll be here that long, of course, but somebody's going to be. There's a lot of past-its-prime stuff both in this lot and the other one on the north side of the property, that by rights should be harvested while it's still worth something more than firewood, but it's not enough to interest the commercial loggers around here.

I think eventually, when I get around to it, I'll strike a deal with the Amish guy, Ebeneezer Zook or Zook Ebeneezer, one or the other, who has a sawmill over towards Keady. I'll borrow a haywagon from one of the neighbors and take a dozen or so 12 foot lengths down there to have sawn into planks. The Amish are pretty good about negotiating the kind of deal where he's got the sawmill and I've got the wood and everybody goes away happy with a few planks.

The first time I visited Zook's sawmill I thought I'd gone through some sort of time warp. I was with my buddy Jimmy Lippert and we dropped by with a couple dozen layed out laying hens at ten in the morning. By the time we came by on our way home at four in the afternoon all those old chickens were in jars and there was a stack of fresh pies awaiting us in payment.

We went around back to find Zook and that's where the time warp experience enveloped me. The guy has a serious sawmill going on, but his clan doesn't allow electricity of any sort, so he's got a big old draft horse going round and round driving the mechanicals of the millworks. There's other horses shuffling backwards and forwards as they lift logs onto the saw bed via a series of ropes and pullies.

In charge of all these horses ropes pulleys and giant saw blades is a kid who looks to be about 13, and he's got a couple of ten-year-old helpers. How these people get around the child labor laws is beyond me. 

Something to do with religious freedom, I guess.

Not that I have a problem with it. Those kids are getting an education in Zook's sawmill that Junior won't come close to at his high school.

And when the internet and the electrical grid and all the other necessities of life crash, these kids are going to be putting in a day's work and sitting down to chicken and pie like nothing happened.