Pitchy, green and heavy

It's become a common sight across the Flathead — property owners are actively thinning their forest lands, cutting out the dead wood, hoping to make their homes safe from wild fires.

The fires of 2003 scared a lot of them. Once people got over the idea that their privacy fence was gone, and that neighbors will be able to see them while they putter around the yard, the chainsaws were fired up and the slash began to pile up.

About a month ago, I found myself walking around a friend's wooded lake shore property, yellow tape in hand, marking trees for an amateur thinning operation. It looked like a lot of work — especially since my friend wanted the wood separated into firewood, tepee poles, slash for burning and lumber.

That's right — lumber. This was more than just thinning. It was a real logging operation, even if the logs were going to be moved by rolling them down the hill by hand. No skidders. No Cats. No feller-bunchers or yarders. Just me and my chainsaw.

Logs destined for lumber would go to a small sawmill less than a mile away. The operator told us earlier if we needed some rough-cut lumber, we had to bring him the logs, and he made sure we understood that he didn't want any nails. Use a metal detector, he told us.

The rough-cut lumber was destined for a dock-rebuild. No telling when the dock was first built. Like many lake shore docks in the Flathead, it consisted of log cribs filled with boulders. The joists, stringers and decking was done with rough-cut lumber — true two-by-fours, not planed, not smooth, and really beefy.

Once the small stuff was cleared out of the woods — including pickup loads of vines that had strangled and killed dozens of trees — we brought in a professional logger. A friend of the family, actually, but a man with decades of experience logging across the West.

Things got off to a different start, however. He got dressed in his corks and chaps, plunked an antique aluminum hard hat on his head, slung his chainsaw bar over his rubber-padded shoulder and headed up to the work site. But 50 feet from his pickup, he suddenly stopped with a funny look on his face.

"Forgot to put the oil cap on," he said. "Happens all the time."

We soon forgot about the pint of chain oil that had run down his back and into his pants and boots and went to work felling trees — the big ones. I watched from a respectful distance as he cut notched hinges at the base of the trunk, inserted a plastic wedge and then, with a few strokes of the sledge, directed a left-leaning tree right.

I'd run up to the felled giant with gusto and start sawing off branches. The old pro, he'd walk on top of the trunk, his corks gripping the wet bark, and his long bar zipping off the branches as fast as he could walk.

A week later, another family friend showed up with a flatbed truck equipped with a small hoist to haul our timber to the mill. Then, this past weekend, the mill operator called us up — the lumber was ready to go. Another family friend showed up with an extra-full-size pickup and helped us haul the sawn boards back to the dock.

That's where the lumber sits now. Pitchy, not always square, very green and really heavy. About 800 board feet of the stuff. My friend who owns the dock is very excited about the whole thing — fixing a dock with wood that grew on land the family has owned for 50 years. It's kind of like eating vegetables you grew in your own garden, or slaughtering your own pigs.