In the mail recently arrived the Fall catalog for Storey, a firm described as “a community of doers who love to grow, build, create, and explore the world around us.”
A glance at the catalog of books published there sent me on a memory trip of things I have done, seen done, or want to do someday.
There are books about gardening and herbs, raising chickens and pigs, building rock walls, curing meat with smoke, understanding herbs, growing epic tomatoes or mushrooms, creating a sustained compost pile, understanding horses, raising a backyard goat, and blacksmithing.
What sent my mind flying, though, was a book titled Fences for Pastures & Gardens.
Of all the chores I tackled as a young man, that with the most long-lasting impact was probably the task of putting in fence posts and installing barbed wire fencing.
My cousin and I both were given ponies when we were about 11 years old, and the ownership of ponies meant the need to provide pasture for them.
There was a barn above my grandmother’s house, and a couple of acres had been fenced once upon a time. With the arrival of two ponies, those fence lines needed to be re-established and new pasture penned.
While that work fell on others—mostly my Uncle Billy—I grew to inherit the job of helping him, just in time for the opportunity to put the ponies—Pokey and Misty—on several acres owned by a distant cousin.
Before the ponies could be released, however, we needed to reclaim and repair several fences, and install one new fence line across the middle of the property.
Fencing meant using a post-hole digger; the old variety with two smooth wooden handles and facing shovels used to create consistent holes in which to plant fence posts.
If I recall, we dug two-foot-deep holes to sink seven-foot posts, so when all was said and done, the fence post stuck up five feet and could be used to anchor up to four strands of barbed wire.
Digging fence post holes was easier in soft pasture land, but less accommodating in rocky terrain. Usually, rocks could be dug or pried out with the post hole digger and a heavy, long pry bar, but if you hit something too big to move you had to relocate your hole so the post could be anchored in the ground.
I spent many summer days digging fence post holes, and often blistered the palms of my hands until I had built up calluses. In fact, for several years I recall occasionally judging my worth by the softness of my hands, because many in my community judged a man by his willingness to do hard work, which was often defined by how weathered and tough his palms were.
I preferred doing the least amount of really hard work, but I also appreciated the calluses on my palms, for their non-verbal message was, ‘he is relied on to do hard work.’
You built up the calluses wielding an ax splitting firewood, which for many of us in the mountains became mandatory when members of OPEC imposed an oil embargo on the United States after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.
As I write this, I realize that my generation of country kids have their own stories of doing without—or doing something hard in the face of change—possibly similar to what our parents experienced during World War II. The price of gas had skyrocketed, so many of us learned to cut and split firewood to burn in our new—or new to us—wood stoves.
Both Nana and my mother installed wood burning heaters; Mom had a family friend install a flue-lined chimney in the kitchen to accommodate a Fisher wood stove, while Nana used a flue that had served her before she got an oil-burning stove.
Those stoves needed wood to burn, and that is where my siblings and I got into the act. Mom bought a chain saw, a maul, a better axe and steel wedges for cutting and splitting firewood.
I learned that wood must season before burning, and most is easier to cut immediately after the tree has been felled. I learned locust is among the best of firewoods.
I have heated with wood as recently as the winter of 2014-15, and took pride in the number of stacks of split, dried wood I had under the car port.
On a hunch I dove back into that catalog. Were there books about cutting firewood?
Yes, two of them.
But you know, I don’t need either of those books, for I learned how, and had the calluses to show for it.
—Jonathan Austin