“Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I love to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice—once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat.”
Henry David Thoreau wrote these words in “Walden.” There’s something poetic to me about chopping wood, by hand with an axe, facing off with a big log, cut from a massive red oak. Just lifting it onto the chopping block is often a challenge. But it’s up there now. I size it up. I look for cracks already starting to form: they all have them somewhere and that’s the best place to strike. I feel the weight of the maul hanging in my leather-gloved hands. I plant my feet, and focus on the exact spot I intend to strike. I swing the axe behind me, and over my head as my hands slide together at the knob on the handle, and drive the axe head forward, then down into the wood, as deep as I can manage.
The first split of a big log almost never comes on the first blow. If the log is straight and clear, I usually persuade it to split by the third or fourth blow; if it is knotty and mean it might take a dozen attempts. But eventually, it will give. Subsequent splits are easier, often with a single strike. The axe barks as it slices cleanly through the wood. It is satisfyingly lovely. The halves fly away in opposite directions, and I gather them up. I toss them into the growing pile, where they land with a clink, and I imagine the brilliance of the woodstove on the inevitable winter evening.