Everyone needs a woodpile in their life.
The original title was, every boy needs a woodpile, but this is a universal principle that applies not only to a boy, but to everyone.
When we moved to Lander and moved into our house on Capitol Hill we had a very unusual house. In the back part of the structure there was a storage room, which was a log cabin of one room with sawdust around the outside of the logs and then a framed wood exterior wall to make it match the rest of the house. We used this as a storage area. It was ideally suited for the storage of potatoes and carrots and bottled fruit, because of the insulating properties of the sawdust layer around the logs. No matter how cold it got outside, it never froze in the storage room. The ceiling was low and the log roof was also covered with sawdust, at least two feet.
We used this storage room off the back porch, which was my bedroom for about two years, until my father decided to make it into another bedroom. My bedroom was on the back porch and was about 5 feet wide and 10 feet long. It admitted an army bunk bed and not much more. There were three doors into my back porch bedroom. One door from the kitchen, the next door led to the storage room mentioned above. The remaining door opened to the back yard. There was no lock on that door, but there was a two-inch diameter hole in the door, which admitted a chain. When we went away we locked the door using a padlock and chain.
There was no heat in my bedroom. I slept there summer and winter. Sometimes it got below zero at night in the winter. I just piled on more blankets. The cold air would come through the hole in the door.
Thus, it was decided that the new bedroom would be mine. During the summer we went into the storage room from above through a window high in the gable of the frame shell that housed the log cabin and removed the roof and all the sawdust and then dismantled the log cabin by throwing the logs out the window in the gable. We stacked the logs in a pile in the back yard. There were a lot of logs.
Once we got the logs out we had to make a bigger doorway into the room. We plumbed the room for gas so that there would be heat in the room. We then poured concrete for a floor and I put tile on the floor.
We next put insulation in the walls, installed two windows and made a small closet in the southeast corner of the room. We then put sheet rock up and then knotty pine paneling on the walls and the closet. I painted the ceiling robins-egg blue. We installed a light fixture in the center of the ceiling and moved the bunk bed into my room. It was done.
Now we had a large pile of logs in the back yard. We spread the sawdust on the garden and tilled it into the soil. We had a sawhorse that was left with the house as well as a one- man and a two-man cross cut saws. I would place the log on the sawhorse and cut the logs in 14-inch lengths.
After the log was cut into stove length pieces, I took a double-bitted axe and spit the log into pieces for firewood. The cross cut saws were long and one could not really move them at a rapid pace through the log. It worked well if there was someone on the other end. Then we could saw through the log very quickly, but if I was the only one sawing, the saw would whip and bind if I sawed to rapidly and so I had to approach the task slowly and methodically. This made the task most distasteful.
Every afternoon after school, I would walk home and spend an hour or two sawing wood and chopping firewood. I got some help from my brothers, but I was assigned as the main worker. I did not enjoy this activity. I found no pleasure in this type of woodwork. It was my assignment and dragging my feet only prolonged the agony. I finally was able to accomplish making firewood of the whole stack of logs.
One day my father came home and asked me to help him move the firewood. I do not remember whether we loaded it into a trailer or on a pickup truck. There was a widow who lived across the street from the grade school. We took all the wood down to her house and made a large stacked woodpile. All of my hard work, which was done, was to be given away. I did not know that we were not going to be burning that wood in our stoves. We were going to be installing gas heaters in our home, so we would not need the wood any more.
The point of all this is that every one at some time in their lives will have to do something that they do not like to do and after they are finished may not be rewarded as they think they ought to be or see their work that they did not enjoy come to naught.
Much later in my life I had the opportunity to experience a similar situation. We owned a house at 175 Wyoming Street. There was a dilapidated garage on the property. It needed to be torn down. I asked my son to tear down the garage and then stack the boards and cut them into fireplace lengths, to be hauled down to our house to be burned in our fireplace.
There was a member in the little house on the back of the property. She was anxious to get the woodpile moved. She talked to me on a number of occasions. She was impatient. I replied that I was not in a hurry; I was raising a son not tearing down a garage. My son learned the lesson that I learned. Everyone needs a woodpile in their life, it teaches one lessons that are invaluable later on.
The original title was, every boy needs a woodpile, but this is a universal principle that applies not only to a boy, but to everyone.
When we moved to Lander and moved into our house on Capitol Hill we had a very unusual house. In the back part of the structure there was a storage room, which was a log cabin of one room with sawdust around the outside of the logs and then a framed wood exterior wall to make it match the rest of the house. We used this as a storage area. It was ideally suited for the storage of potatoes and carrots and bottled fruit, because of the insulating properties of the sawdust layer around the logs. No matter how cold it got outside, it never froze in the storage room. The ceiling was low and the log roof was also covered with sawdust, at least two feet.
We used this storage room off the back porch, which was my bedroom for about two years, until my father decided to make it into another bedroom. My bedroom was on the back porch and was about 5 feet wide and 10 feet long. It admitted an army bunk bed and not much more. There were three doors into my back porch bedroom. One door from the kitchen, the next door led to the storage room mentioned above. The remaining door opened to the back yard. There was no lock on that door, but there was a two-inch diameter hole in the door, which admitted a chain. When we went away we locked the door using a padlock and chain.
There was no heat in my bedroom. I slept there summer and winter. Sometimes it got below zero at night in the winter. I just piled on more blankets. The cold air would come through the hole in the door.
Thus, it was decided that the new bedroom would be mine. During the summer we went into the storage room from above through a window high in the gable of the frame shell that housed the log cabin and removed the roof and all the sawdust and then dismantled the log cabin by throwing the logs out the window in the gable. We stacked the logs in a pile in the back yard. There were a lot of logs.
Once we got the logs out we had to make a bigger doorway into the room. We plumbed the room for gas so that there would be heat in the room. We then poured concrete for a floor and I put tile on the floor.
We next put insulation in the walls, installed two windows and made a small closet in the southeast corner of the room. We then put sheet rock up and then knotty pine paneling on the walls and the closet. I painted the ceiling robins-egg blue. We installed a light fixture in the center of the ceiling and moved the bunk bed into my room. It was done.
Now we had a large pile of logs in the back yard. We spread the sawdust on the garden and tilled it into the soil. We had a sawhorse that was left with the house as well as a one- man and a two-man cross cut saws. I would place the log on the sawhorse and cut the logs in 14-inch lengths.
After the log was cut into stove length pieces, I took a double-bitted axe and spit the log into pieces for firewood. The cross cut saws were long and one could not really move them at a rapid pace through the log. It worked well if there was someone on the other end. Then we could saw through the log very quickly, but if I was the only one sawing, the saw would whip and bind if I sawed to rapidly and so I had to approach the task slowly and methodically. This made the task most distasteful.
Every afternoon after school, I would walk home and spend an hour or two sawing wood and chopping firewood. I got some help from my brothers, but I was assigned as the main worker. I did not enjoy this activity. I found no pleasure in this type of woodwork. It was my assignment and dragging my feet only prolonged the agony. I finally was able to accomplish making firewood of the whole stack of logs.
One day my father came home and asked me to help him move the firewood. I do not remember whether we loaded it into a trailer or on a pickup truck. There was a widow who lived across the street from the grade school. We took all the wood down to her house and made a large stacked woodpile. All of my hard work, which was done, was to be given away. I did not know that we were not going to be burning that wood in our stoves. We were going to be installing gas heaters in our home, so we would not need the wood any more.
The point of all this is that every one at some time in their lives will have to do something that they do not like to do and after they are finished may not be rewarded as they think they ought to be or see their work that they did not enjoy come to naught.
Much later in my life I had the opportunity to experience a similar situation. We owned a house at 175 Wyoming Street. There was a dilapidated garage on the property. It needed to be torn down. I asked my son to tear down the garage and then stack the boards and cut them into fireplace lengths, to be hauled down to our house to be burned in our fireplace.
There was a member in the little house on the back of the property. She was anxious to get the woodpile moved. She talked to me on a number of occasions. She was impatient. I replied that I was not in a hurry; I was raising a son not tearing down a garage. My son learned the lesson that I learned. Everyone needs a woodpile in their life, it teaches one lessons that are invaluable later on.
