The Hitch

When we first moved out to the country I bought a chainsaw to take advantage of the "free" firewood growing on our property.
Well actually, I bought a chainsaw, an extra chain, a scabbard to protect the chain on the saw, an electric saw sharpener, heavy gloves, orange hardhat, safety goggles, ear plugs, fuel and a fuel can, two kinds of oil, and this heavy apron/chaps thing to protect my legs. My squire helped me up onto my sawhorse and I was ready to joust with the trees in my quest for the lost cord.
As a novice lumberperson, I only picked on fallen trees. I figured it was pretty hard to get squashed by something that is already laying on the ground. Soon I was surrounded by stack after stack of neatly sawn 16-inch logs.
At the end of the day, when my saw and I were both out of gas, one of my neighbors came over to see what all the noise was about. When he saw my woodpile, he smirked.
"That's no way to stack wood," he laughed, and gave the nearest pile a nudge with his boot. It was a domino effect. Logs toppled, hitting the second pile, which toppled into the third. Logs were rolling everywhere. I suddenly realized that I own very little level land.
"You need criss-cross cribbing on the ends for stability," he said. "Take a look at one of my piles next time you drive by."
As I rounded up my stray logs I thought about kicking his pile over, but quickly reconsidered. Who knew where a rural log-kicking feud might lead these days. So I inspected his arrow-straight rows of precisely stacked oak. When I nudged the pile, it felt like it was nailed together.
Criss-cross cribbing is hard to stack without splitting the logs, they keep rolling away. So I bought a maul, which is like an axe, but it has a heavy wedge-shaped head that makes log splitting easier. A vicious circle swirled in my brain: I wanted dry firewood. I had green, wet logs. Split wood dries faster than whole logs. But green wood is harder to split than bone-dry wood, which if I had, I wouldn't need to split.
My wrists and lower back gave out about the time the blisters on my palms broke, which was right after I split my last cribbing log. Three days later, when I regained some use of my back and hands, I dialed up my neighborhood expert to keep him current on the firewood situation.
"Get yourself a hydraulic splitter, sport," he drawled. "I'd lend you mine, but you know how it is with lending tools to neighbors."
I had ten times more wood left to split and no energetic teenaged son to send out there to do it. So I went shopping for a log splitter.
I found that for the cost of a dozen cords of seasoned oak, delivered, split, and stacked at my door step, I could purchase a light-weight log splitter. It came with a lifetime guarantee, which gave me or the splitter at least a ten year life span just to break even at the rate we burn firewood.
He wanted me to consider a small tractor to haul the splitter to job sites on my property, and a trailer to haul the finished product back to the house. I would need to pay extra for warranties, insurance on everything, and maintenance agreements since I'm not mechanically inclined. Oh, and I'd need a new $50 trailer hitch assembly for my truck to haul all my new toys home, where I knew I'd need a new storage shed to house all this labor-saving stuff. Suddenly firewood preparation was going to cost me more than an Ivy League education. Dazed and babbling, I begged the salesman for moment alone with my checkbook.
Well, following much soul-searching and gnashing of teeth, I finally did it. I wrote him a check . . . for a whopping $50.
Then I swung by the local rental yard, and towed home a rented log splitter on my brand new trailer hitch.