wood stack
clearing up after the storm put me in mind of earlier wood stacks, when we moved to five acres in Tasmania and I was young, lithe and brunette
Yesterday we were out in our bush block clearing up after the storm. Three tall gums are now propped up by other trees and will have to be cleared by our neighbour with his heavy-duty logging machines. Yesterday we were clearing the ground nearby of trees which fell in previous storms and which have lain there since. Removing their limbs and chain-sawing them into log-length pieces for firewood and then splitting them is a long process in which its easy to lose heart, and energy.
But it’s easy to make a dent in what needs doing. When we first began tending these trees, felling one occasionally when it endangered the house or workshop or came down in a storm, and sawing and stack wood for the fire, our children were small and we worked without them. As they grew and developed a liking for driving any sort of vehicle around the paddocks, we gave them that job and four pairs of hands made for much lighter, faster work.
Yesterday I worked with my husband and my son who is now seventeen and on his way to a building apprenticeship. He’s competent with a chainsaw and I let him wheel the barrow and save my own back. Bending to pick up logs, lumbering around with a barrow-load, this is not for me anymore. Seventeen years after moving here and loving our life on five acres, we are ready for our next chapter in a smaller house with a smaller, tidier garden.
And yet, as we worked to tidy the bush debris and stack logs, with the early spring sun filtering through the trees and warming us, the familiar sounds of the wood thunking onto the stack, the breeze ruffling the treetops and kookaburras cackling overhead, it was inevitable that all the woodstack adventures of the past would come back to us. I thought of all the sticks collected for kindling, the firewood supplies stacked in the shed, and the wood stacks of the past. I thought of learning how to stack wood and the satisfaction in building a structural wall of wood to sit and dry in the sun.
This was one of the many new skills we learned when we moved here, and I wrote about it in Apple Island Wife. Here for old times’ sake are a few passages and some photos of early log-stacking ventures.
Once wood has been split, it has to be stacked, and here I came into my own. Eventually. Stacking wood into a neat and orderly pile is little more than tidying up, except it’s done outside.
The tools of the trade have a pleasing hard yakka quality about them: a wheelbarrow and some gardening gloves. There was much else to like too. Venturing out to prepare for the winter each year connected us to the seasons. As the cooler air of the autumn hung between the trees and we worked on our store of winter warmth, it gave me a sense of readying myself and my family for what was to come. It was enjoyable to be outside doing a physical job too.
Unexpectedly, I discovered an architectural aspect to the task. A wood-stack can be built anywhere, and quickly. It’s simply a case of putting one log on top of another. It’s easy to create an attractive wall of cut logs along a fence line in one afternoon, adding a feature to the property. There was a sense of satisfaction in that. Stacking, sorting and preparing wood collectively came to be my favourite task on our small property.
When the edges of the tumbling pile of wood had diminished and formed the base of the neat new stack, I climbed up onto the pile to tackle it from the top. From my lofty position, I lobbed each log into the wheelbarrow where it landed with a gratifying clunk. Every so often a gravel truck from the local quarry passed and I gave the driver a gruff wave with my gloved hand. How impressed they must be with my reversing the gender roles and taking on this physical chore, I congratulated myself. Then I got to thinking that they probably had wives who’d been doing such jobs since childhood, and splitting the logs too. Country life definitely required more of a woman than sitting in an office all day.
I’d stacked the wood in neat rows between two tree stumps and built it up to chest height when Oliver and Damo came over to take a look. They’d been doing some essential chore together, wrestling alpacas to the ground in order to cut their toenails, or mapping out a re-dig of the septic tank seep-away.
When Oliver takes a look at something I’ve done it often seems to involve telling me where I’ve gone wrong, or suggesting a completely different way of doing things. I braced myself and prepared to defend my work. ‘How’s it going?’ he enquired nonchalantly. Damo and he took up manly stances with a foot up on the log pile, the tough cotton of their workman’s shorts bearing the scuff marks of hard graft and dirty labour. Oliver put his hand on top of the wood-stack. Gently he rocked it back and forth as if it were some great animal in need of a back rub. Suddenly the whole stack began to weave about like an ice cream truck in a high wind on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Damo’s face creased into a smile.
‘My word, she’s got some movement in her!’ Everything was female in Damo’s world. Trees, bulldozers and, apparently, wood-stacks.
Oliver glanced over at me with a slight smirk.
‘Did you know it moved about like that?’ he asked. What a redundant question.
‘Give me a break!’ I muttered. ‘It’s my first go! And stop rocking it before it falls over.’
Taking a chunk of wood from the wheelbarrow, Oliver shoved it between the end of the wood-stack and the tree stump it was almost up against.
‘Wedge ’er, that’s the way.’ Damo nodded sagely.
I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about.
Excerpted from Apple Island Wife - Slow Living in Tasmania, published by Unbound in 2018, second edition 2023. Written after we moved from the city onto five acres in Tasmania and learned a whole new raft of skills we never knew we needed.