Heads & Tails or the Wood Cutting Story©

Heads & Tails or the Wood Cutting Story©

By Arlene Wright-Correll

I love these writing assignments especially when they are as challenging as writing about something called, “Heads & Tails”.

Not only do these assignments take time to do, but it causes me to think about something that might be an interesting read and that at times is a great puzzlement.

I remember when we lived in Northern New York up on the Canadian border where the winters were so long that for 10 months we had snow sledding and 2 months we had rough sledding.

We had just built a new house up on the area’s highest mountain and in order to get the electric put into the house without paying an exorbitant fee we had to tell the utility company we were installing electric heat which we did.  However, at the same time we took that exorbitant fee and invested a small part of it into the purchase of some Jøtul wood stoves and fire places. One of our good friends, the Kings had also built a new home within the same year and another; the LeBeau family had just completely remodeled an older home.  Both had experienced the same utility company problem and both had solved it the same way.

This meant cutting wood every fall.  Fortunately for us Dick King was a Lieutenant in the Conservation department and was able to get wood for 50 cents a full cord provided you cut only the marked trees the Forestry service wanted culled.  So the King’s with their 5 kids, the LeBeau’s with their 3 kids and the Correll’s with their 5 kids would go into the woods each autumn for 4 or 5 weekends and create an efficient assembly wood cutting production line that included cutting, felling, trimming the trees we cut and stacking the trimmings (great small kid jobs), cutting the trees into burnable sizes, hauling to the 3 pickup trucks and then driving home with the wood.  

We burned 32 cords a year since we had the largest home and the Kings would probably burn about 25 cords and the LeBeau family probably did about 20 cords.  That came to $38.50 cents a year to heat 3 homes or $12.85 per home, plus the cost of chain saw gas, truck gas and our time.  Occasionally each of these homes would run the electric heat whenever anyone of us left for a few days during the winter. After about 3 or 4 years Dick came with the bad news that the cost was going up to $1.00 a full cord!

Yet our time was something that was communal, irreplaceable, priceless and memorable as we looked forward to it each autumn as it strengthened our lifetime friendships plus the wood warmed us twice, once when we cut it and hauled it and once when we burned it and I think this is a pretty interesting anecdote.

Yes, I love these writing assignments especially when they are as challenging as writing about something called, “Heads &Tails”.