The Tree Is Still Down

I stopped under an oak out at Pheasant Branch the other morning. Big one. A hundred and twenty feet, maybe four feet through. The kind of tree that makes you feel temporary.

Pheasant Branch is one of my regular walks. I go for the shade as much as anything. I’m fair-skinned enough that the sun and I have never gotten along, and the woods out there are cool and damp and smell like wet leaves. I like that the whole place runs itself without anybody minding it.

Standing under that oak I had the thought I keep having on these walks. Trees like this one are my raw material. I love them and I cut them up. Forty years in, that still bothers me.

Not constantly. I’m not walking around the shop in a state about it. But every so often the question surfaces. Is the thing I love doing part of the problem? Yeah, probably, in some small way. Then I hold it against the rest of my life. The warm shower this morning. The house that was cooled while I slept. All of it is burning something, and I’m not sure the wood is any worse. Maybe a little better, because at the end of mine there’s a thing that lasts. That’s the part I’d like to believe.

I do try to use it well. Most of my wood comes from managed forest, the kind that gets thinned whether I buy a board or not. Leave a stand alone and it crowds itself sick. Some of it comes down by design, and I’d rather it become a table than a wood chip. When the project allows I work in veneer, where one log covers ground that would take a whole stack of solid boards. A fair amount of what comes through the shop is ash, and most of the ash around here is already dead or dying from the borer, bound for a burn pile if nobody makes anything of it.

That might be enough. A chair somebody sits in for fifty years. A table their kids do homework at and then inherit.

But I know what I’m doing when I say that. I’m building a case. The tree is still down, and the best table in the world doesn’t stand it back up. That’s the part I don’t get to argue my way out of.

So I do the work, I use the wood as well as I know how, and I keep walking out at Pheasant Branch. Same path, same oak, same thought.