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Cutting Wood

Gus Waschke, my grandpa, included a state-of-the-art wood furnace in the house he built in 1916. I have not found any records of the original installation, but the firebox door casting bears the inscription “Mt. Baker”, which suggests that the furnace was a Whatcom County product. The furnace consists of a cast iron firebox surrounded by a sheet metal housing that conducted heat emanating from the firebox upward to a heat register immediately above the firebox and a heat duct that directed heat to the old master bedroom and bathroom.

In the old days, a fire in the furnace marked a special occasion. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, birthdays, and anniversaries warranted starting up the furnace, but an ordinary day was heated by the wood kitchen range. The only warm room in the house was the kitchen; the bedrooms, bathroom, dining room, living room, and library were all unheated. When the northeaster howled and threatened frozen pipes, Grandpa might fire up the furnace for a few hours, but for its first forty or so years, the furnace was only for special occasions.

When my parents, Ted and Thelma, took over the house in the mid-50s, the furnace began to be used daily in the cold months. My mother was not content to live in the kitchen from October to May. The television, which materialized in 1955, was in the living room, located so it could be watched from the dining room table. Instead of a cozy family gathering snugged into the kitchen breakfast nook, the evening meal became an event dominated my Walter Cronkite and the evening news. That lifestyle required a fire in the wood furnace.

Writing about these events causes me to think about my family in ways that I have never considered. My mother and father often bickered, but never argued. My father was more sentimental than my mother and she often called him on improbable sentimental stories. My mother was quick to judgement and Dad did not hesitate to point out her errors. But I did not notice how they decided to change the pattern of heating the house. Both Mom and Dad must have agreed that more of the house had to be warm.

Changing the heating pattern was significant. My dad had to cut more wood for the furnace. Stove wood for the kitchen range was cut sixteen inches long. Dad and Grandpa cut furnace wood to three feet. The furnace was large enough to burn traditional four-foot cord wood, but Dad said three-foot lengths were easier to handle and burned more completely.

Dad and Grandpa cut stove wood with the buzz saw powered by a flat belt from the tractor. Through the spring and summer, they would gradually build a pile of ten to fifteen foot poles cut from branches and small trees. The poles were usually crooked and not more than five inches thick. The buzz saw had a three-foot circular blade and a sliding table. One man would place the poles on the sliding table, usually several at a time, and push the sliding table into the spinning blade, cutting the poles into sixteen-inch stove wood. A second man would catch the stove wood and toss the sticks onto a flatbed hay wagon for transport to the woodshed. Two men and a buzz saw could cut several ricks (a stack of wood eight feet long and four feet high and one stick wide) in an hour. A full day on the buzz saw produced enough stove wood for the winter.

The buzz saw was the easiest and fastest way to cut stove wood, but not all wood could be cut with the buzz saw. When a bigger tree fell, or Dad and Grandpa decided it was time to drop a mature tree, the main trunk would be too thick and heavy to cut with the buzz saw. Limbs could be cut and trimmed for the buzz saw, but the main trunk had to be cut into usable lengths and split. Dad preferred to use the trunks for three-foot furnace wood, but when he had a surplus of furnace wood, he’d cut the trunks into stove wood lengths.

Wood from the trunks had to be split with an axe or maul and wedge. Cutting the wood was relatively quick and easy. Splitting wood was harder and took more skill. By the time I was in junior high (middle school), I was splitting wood regularly. Smaller pieces with straight grain and few knots can be split with an axe, which is quicker and easier than using a maul and wedge. With some practice—not more than two or three years—you can learn to judge which fletches can be split with an axe. The trick is to make a few quick and light chops to start the split and then a hard final stroke that finishes the job. If a fourteen-year-old delivers a hard stroke that is not hard enough to split the block, the axe gets stuck. Unsticking an axe takes a lot of energy and the splitter soon gets tired, which is bad because judgement sags and the axe sticks more often in a descending spiral.

A maul and wedge takes less skill and more energy. My Dad’s technique was to use both axe and maul. First a few strokes with the axe to direct the split, then drive a wedge with the maul until the wood splits. If you plan the first strokes right, taking into account the twists in the grain and knots, his technique works well. I haven’t used a hydraulic splitter much, but from my experience, my dad or grandpa could split more wood per hour than the machine. Fifty years ago, I could too, but not today after spending most of my life sitting in an office.

My grandpa didn’t like chain saws. My dad loved chain saws and used them as much as could for falling trees, limbing, and cutting up trunks. When my grandpa retired and moved into the place across the road from the farm, he owned a chain saw, but he bought a Swedish bow saw and a one-man five-foot crosscut saw, both of which are mounted on the wall in my office. He built a saw buck. His new house had electric heat, but he planned to heat it with hand cut stove wood.

My grandpa’s plan failed. My tobacco chewing grandpa was wracked with colon cancer and never filled his woodshed with enough wood to heat his new house. He tried, but in the three years between moving to his new house and dying, he never heated his house with hand cut wood.

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Silo Filling Drama

We filled the silo in the spring with grass and in the fall with corn. My grandpa, (Gus Waschke) was big on corn silage. He and my grandmother were photographed by Northwest Farm News in 1946 standing in front of a stand of Minnesota 13 field corn. Judging from the photo, the corn was over twelve feet tall. Dad (Ted Waschke) less inclined toward corn. Dad did not like to spray with pesticides and herbicides and raising a good crop of corn in those days without spraying meant many passes with a cultivator and some hand hoeing that took time away from tending the pasture, haying and the grain crops. Not long after Grandpa died, Dad quit growing corn silage and increased his small grain acreage.

I was enthralled with silo filling and remember much more about spring grass silage. Probably because the fall corn silage filling was after school had started and I didn’t participate as much.

Silo filling was a community event, but it was a different community than most of the other events on Waschke Road. Unlike hog butchering or chicken catching, silo filling was more business and equipment rather than a gathering of friends and neighbors. And had an element of danger.

In the early 50s, my dad went together with three other dairy farmers in the North Bellingham-Laurel area to buy silo-filling equipment: a field cutter and a blower. The machines were expensive and only used for a short time each year. Each farmer supplied their own wagon for hauling fresh-cut silage. Now days, silage is usually hauled on trucks and self-unloading wagons, but in the 50s and 60s, farmers used hay wagons outfitted with wooden sides and a sliding partition that was drawn by cables to the back of the wagon where the silage was unloaded. Men with forks pulled the silage from the wagon to a conveyer attached to the blower. The silage was blown straight up forty or more feet to the top of the silo where the heavy chopped grass or corn made a hairpin turn and was blown forcefully into a flexible distributor pipe that dangled down to the level of the silage already in the silo.

The blower was powered by a big tractor with a thirty-foot drive belt. The tractor was run with the throttle wide open. Log chains held the tractor to keep the belt tight and stable. The roar of the blower and tractor could be heard a mile away. The ground thumped and shook with raw energy when a wad of silage weighing fifty or more pounds hit the blower blades and was thrown up and over the high wall of the silo.

In the silo, a half dozen men and boys directed the distributor pipe and walked in a circle around the perimeter of the silo, leveling and packing the chopped fodder to prevent air pockets that caused spoilage. Wisdom was that the center would take care of itself, but the edges, especially around the unloading doors, needed attention. Tramping silage was work, perhaps not as hard as pulling silage off the wagons, but fresh silage is spongy. Every direction is up hill. Leveling the silage required some heavy fork work, especially when the silage was wet. Filling never stopped for the soaking rain storms that come in off the Pacific in June in Whatcom County, because the silos had to be filled quickly while the fodder was at its prime.

As the silo filled, the work in the silo got harder and more dramatic. As the level of silage rose, sections of distributor pipe were removed and lowered to the ground. As each section was removed, the silage became more difficult to direct and more silage had to be forked from the center as fast as the ground crew pulled it off the wagon. The men on the forks began to sweat.

About twelve feet from the top, the pace of the men on the forks became feverish. The distributor pipe was so short it was nearly useless. If the silage was not moved fast enough, the flow from the blower pipe might be restricted for an instant and the pipe would back up and clog. If the crew feeding the blower did not kill the tractor quickly, the energy of the roaring tractor would pack the pipe solid with tons of silage. If the crew was quick and lucky and the silage was dry, the pipe could sometimes be cleared by disconnecting it at the blower and shaking the clog loose. But in pouring rain, the wet silage packed tight and the blower pipe would have to be lowered on a cable and taken apart to clear it.

Raising the pipe with a cable and tractor when setting up was a tense and tricky job. But when the pipe was crammed with heavy silage and the yard around the silo was churned into a mud bowl by the wagon traffic, lowering the blower pipe was risky.

One year, the tractor on the cable lowering a jammed pipe lost traction in the mud and pipe came crashing down and the pipe was damaged. No one was badly injured, but it was close. When the pipe hit the ground, it jacked around out of control and could have broken limbs, cracked skulls, and crushed chests. The man guiding the end of the pipe got a nasty gash in his hand and my mother had to take him in a car to the emergency room at the county hospital at the corner of Northwest and Smith where they sewed his wound up so he could return to work. One of the other owners rushed off in a truck to the Allis-Chalmers dealer on the Guide Meridian for a replacement section of blower pipe while my Dad and the rest of the crew disassembled the mess in pouring rain and cleared out the packed silage.

The clog occurred shortly after noon dinner and the pipe was back up and operating in time to get in a few more loads before quitting time at five.

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Catching Chickens

We raised chickens for eggs until the early 1970s on the Waschke Homestead. About this time of year—around Halloween—family and neighbors on Waschke Road would gather one night with flashlights to sneak up on sleeping chickens. For the kids, it was exciting, for the adults, necessary work.

The process started in the spring with the arrival of a batch of newly hatched baby chicks. I can’t remember where Grandpa (Gus) got them. There were several chicken hatcheries in the county and I assume they came from one of them. The hatchlings came in corrugated cardboard boxes and went immediately into the brooder house, which hasn’t been used for at least fifty years now and has fallen into decay.

The first few weeks of life, the chicks stayed under the brooder hood, a sheet metal canopy about six feet long and three feet wide, suspended by a block and tackle from the rafters so it could be raised and lowered easily. The hood was heated with electric light bulbs. As chicks get older, they need less heat. By raising the hood a little bit each day, the chicks were kept at the right temperature. Before the chicks arrived, Grandpa would go over the brooder house, patching with tin any holes a rat could through. Predatory rats could eat several chicks in a single night if they could get into the brooder house. As spring turned to summer, the chicks were allowed first to roam around the brooder house, then let into a roofed area enclosed in chicken wire, later they went into a fenced yard surrounding the brooder house. By fall, the chicks, now pullets, were allowed to roam freely and seldom entered the brooder house. Most roosted in the orchard at night.

The chickens roamed all around the farmyard during the summer. Those free roaming young birds got me in big trouble once. One day, I caught one. For some unknowable reason, I thought it would fit perfectly in the glove compartment of our navy blue 1952 Dodge pickup. I tested my theory and found it correct. Later, Dad heard a chicken cackle when he started the pickup. He found the chicken and several days droppings in the glove compartment. I don’t remember my punishment, but I have never put a chicken in a glove compartment again.

As the days grew cooler and the nights longer, we began to keep an eye open for newly laid eggs in the yard. These eggs were often small, misshapen, or double-yoked as the pullets got the hang of laying. When we had found enough eggs, the young birds were ready to go into the regular chicken house and start producing eggs for sale.

The fun began with a long-distance call to Wallace Poultry on Railroad Avenue in Bellingham, where The Bagelry is now. Wallace bought the old hens and butchered them. By the time the old flock was ready to be replaced, the hens were looking bedraggled and, I imagine, were quite tough.

Throughout the year, Mom or Grandma would occasionally butcher and pluck a nice-looking hen for dinner but we didn’t eat much poultry on the farm. Neither my mom or grandma liked butchering and plucking chickens. According to them, chicken dinners were not worth all the trouble.

When it was time to replace the flock, the tough old hens were not candidates for the kitchen. Although the baby chicks were supposed to be all female, a few roosters always made it past the chick sexers, and they supplied all the poultry Mom and Grandma wanted to deal with through the summer and fall.

I always hoped the Wallace Poultry truck would arrive after I came home from school. The truck driver had a folding wire fence that he set up inside the chicken house and we would chase chickens into a corner and corral them with the wire fence. The driver grabbed the corralled chickens by the legs and loaded them into crates on his truck. When all the chickens were crated, he drove off, the chickens never to be seen again. Wallace Poultry was still in existence after we quit raising chickens, but Mom would never buy poultry from them because she remembered those scrawny old birds that they used to get from us.

During the year, one of my jobs was to clean the chicken house and spread fresh straw litter on Saturday mornings, a job I hated, and, I suspect, I didn’t do very well. After the Wallace Poultry truck left and the chicken house was empty, Dad would take a couple days to give it a thorough cleaning, removing every bit of litter, taking apart the laying nests, hosing everything down, spraying with carbolineum to eradicate mites and other parasites, then brightening the place up with hastily applied slaked lime white wash.

Crating the old chickens was more fun than cleaning the chicken house but the real fun came after the chicken house was cleaned and it was time to introduce the new hens to the chicken house. The new chickens were wild by fall; even with bribes of wheat or oats, you couldn’t get closer than a few feet. Catching a few with a leg hook was possible, but with two hundred birds to catch, hooking them would take too long.

Instead, we would wait for night when the chickens were sleeping in the orchard.

The men would use flashlights to spot the roosting birds and reach up and grab them by the legs. The chickens roosted close together and it was easy to grab two or three at a time. The caught birds would cackle and screech, but the others ignored them and obligingly waited to be caught. When I was big enough, my job was to carry the chickens from the catchers to the chicken house feed room, where I deposited them into a wooden barrel with a lid to keep them captured.

My grandpa would reach into the barrel, grab a chicken, give it a worming pill and let it loose in the chicken house proper. Getting those pills down the outraged birds was harder than it looked. Grandpa did it in one smooth motion before the chicken knew what was happening. When I tried, the wriggling bird drew blood with its beak and claws and got loose before I could shove the pill down its throat. After one failure, I left it to Grandpa.

When Grandpa died, Dad quit raising chicks and bought birds that were dewormed and ready to start laying.

There were almost always a few stragglers that eluded capture for a few days. I remember one year, a hen stayed loose until Christmas when Dad asked a neighbor to come over and shot it with a shotgun in return for the meat. My mother was very clear that she was not interested in plucking and dressing a chicken brought down by a shotgun blast.