Who’d have thought there was such skill in building a wood pile? Such science, such art, such planning and precision? Not to mention the aesthetic pleasure involved and the deep, almost spiritual satisfaction of physical work for a pen-pusher like me
Last weekend saw me at the remote outdoor education centre in Gippsland where my younger son is working this year – maintaining a pioneer-style homestead and mini-farm where there is no electricity, let alone mobile phone coverage; hosting groups of teenagers, attempting to instil in them a taste for a technology-free life and a love of the mountains. To get there, you have to park your car, walk a couple of ks and cross the river on a flying fox.
Each of our kids has been involved there. Over the years we have said repeatedly that bringing them up in church and taking them to Wollangarra were the two best things we did for them. At ‘Woll’ they battled fire and flood, at Woll they learnt bush and leadership skills, they experienced solitude and community. They came back to the city walking taller – it seemed to turn them from girls and boys into women and men.
The January working bee weekend involves turning crates of fruit into hundreds of jars of stewed fruit and jam that feeds the place until next summer. In winter, it’s ‘Woodchop’. Apart from gas for the few lights there are and the two fridges, wood is the sole fuel source, and they need tonnes of the stuff.
At woodchop weekend dozens of volunteers descend on Wollangarra and divide into teams that cook for the multitudes, chop the timber, cut it into manageable lengths, cart it to the wood shed in wheelbarrows and stack it therein.
I was on the stacking team – partly because I hadn’t done that before but mainly because I wanted to work alongside my strong and capable older daughter whose woodpile at home is a work of art.
I hadn’t really thought much about stacking wood. You heaved it undercover, into some sort of order and that was it. Ha!
The first thing to get right is the construction of the ends of the pile. This involves ‘cross-hatching’ which sounded like some sort of poultry breeding program to me, but consists of building a column of squarish lengths of wood, one layer one way, the next perpendicular to it, and so on, up and up, as stable and sturdy as you can.
Between the cross-hatched ends, you pile the wood as carefully as if you were completing a jigsaw. The tighter the individual pieces of wood fit, the more stable the pile will be.
You also need to be careful to avoid the walls of wood bulging out in an unsightly and dangerous herniation. The walls need to be kept as close to 90 degrees as is possible, and each stand of wood needs a bit of space between it and the next, so that there is room for the slightly longer logs to lie without pushing out the next solid column.
Then there is keeping the different timbers separate. The manna gum, which is straw yellow and burns fast, was stacked on one side of the shed. The red box, a deep, silvery pink, burns longer, and was segregated on the other side.
There were times when our little team hung around, squatting on logs and waiting for the next batch of barrow loads to arrive. Other times, we were swamped with freshly hewn wood and stacked steadily, watching it pile up, barely able to keep up the pace.
We bent to the ground to pick up our three or four logs and stretched up to the top of the pile to place each one reverently in the right space, or down to the bottom, or conveniently in the middle. I could feel the labour doing me good, but it wasn’t tough work. As the senior member of the team, possessor of a dodgy back and recent knee injury, I was told it was fine for me to have a siesta. I curled into my bunk and woke two full hours later, rolled out and got back into the stacking, working until there was no light left in the sky and we had to get our head torches, picking up again next morning and doing it all over again.
By the time my carload had to leave on Sunday afternoon, the wood shed was almost full – tier upon tier of perfectly aligned logs rising two-thirds of the way to the corrugated iron roof. I thought of the hundreds of fires it would provide – camp fires for warmth and comfort and cooking fires in the big old iron stove with its massive pots and kettles producing food for dozens of groups of hungry kids, and I thought it was probably the most worthwhile two days work I’d done in a long time.