Creative Writing
The Zen of Wood Splitting
In spite of the romantic, therapeutic, and generally wholesome virtues of wood splitting, does it get harder each year to rally to the call of an insatiable woodbox? Do you find that more and more of your waking thoughts are about wintering in Trinidad or Bali? In short, has labouring over a chopping block lost its lustre?
Well pilgrim, take heart! There is a way to rekindle your waning fire of enthusiasm…a way to shortcut the “Ten-Thousand-Cord Path” to splitting satori! As one who has chopped in the darkness and then found enlightenment, I humbly proclaim this single truth: Split with a Buddha grin!
For the greater part of my upbringing, I accepted wood splitting without question. In fact, I somehow believed that it was a necessary, if not defining, aspect of being human—something like, “Man is an erect biped who splits wood.” There was no reason to think otherwise since everyone in my limited rural universe participated in some way in wood splitting.
Grandma, whose contribution centred around the firebox of the cookstove, gave special sanctity to chopping, for she was possessed with the transcendental conviction that labouring in a “natural way” made you a better person, and wood splitting, in her Robert Frost-blurred vision, was l’essence du naturel!
Though normally not interested in the abstract, even Grandpa found philosophical grounds in chopping. His code was based on natural justice—give each block your best shot, and the good wood will offset the bad. And while it was hard to accept Grandma’s conviction about the natural worth of splitting, Grandpa’s belief in natural justice made sense to me, especially after Farney Stookes lost his right eye.
Farney was the valley’s rogue, and even dressed the part with a black hat and vest to match his black heart. Fortunately for the community, while Farney lacked scruples, he had even fewer ambitions, so the net result was harmlessness—that is, until the severe winter of ’48.
Karmic justice
I had gone with my grandparents to Tufundiac Springs, leaving Aunt Ellie to tend the fires and keep the water running. On our return, we were horrified to discover that half of the woodpile was gone, and since Aunt Ellie had trouble carrying two sticks of wood, let alone half the woodpile, theft seemed likely.
Aunt Ellie remembered seeing a truck, and though she wasn’t sure, it might have been Farney’s. Her testimony was good enough for me, and I was hot for Grandpa to go over and punch the guy in the nose. Grandpa, however, didn’t feel the evidence was convincing enough to warrant breaking a man’s nose, especially since Aunt Ellie couldn’t see anything three feet beyond her nose.
Farney’s defense was equally less than incriminating. “I didn’t steal no damn wood from ya!”
He was lying. I knew he was lying, and every time I saw him after that I’d give him the hard stare that said, “You’re a dirty liar, Farney Stookes” (I doubt that he ever noticed, probably thought I was just near-sighted.”
Karmic justice was slow in coming full circle, but finally in the winter of ’54 it visited Farney’s shack. As the story goes, Farney was splitting kindling (undoubtedly out of stolen wood) when suddenly a stick ricocheted around the woodshed, taking out Farney’s right eye in its course. My first thought when I learned of the tragedy was that he’d have been better off in the long run if he’d ’fessed up in ’48. The worst he’d have gotten was a broken nose. Farney was probably thinking, “this would never have happened if I’d stolen the Bassett’s kindling, instead.”
Ironically, Farney made the best of his punishment, and with his one eye he immediately became the hard-stare champion of the valley. Also, with the black patch to go with his hat, heart and vest, Farney soon had all the single nurses and schoolteachers “a-flutter.” But I felt vindicated, and the truth in Grandpa’s code of natural justice remained indelibly imprinted.
The hard realities
Actually, wood splitting is a catch phrase for a number of labours, and seeing this clearly marks the difference between the romantic and the realist. The romantic, for example, coins little Emersonisms like “Wood heat warms you twice, etc.,” while the realist knows full well that counting the felling, the bucking, the toting, untoting, splitting, toting, and finally burning, the true figure is closer to seven times. Possibly to avoid the euphemism, my folks called it “gathering.”
Wood gathering began in the summer as we skidded, carried and rolled logs to a central pile beside the crosscut saw named “Old Rugged.” Each had his job, and in keeping with the custom, the young and naïve began as ‘Bout Sums. “Hey, ‘bout sum of that water over here?” or “’bout some of those wedges from down in the shed?” Eventually, however, I rose through the ranks until the fall of my 16th year when I had my own chopping block, and was finally accepted as an equal and contributing member of The Gatherers.
Another reality of chopping wood which we tend to gloss over is that it’s often a social contract between the stacker and the stoker…the splitter and the cook. Many northern marriages have come to tragic ends because consideration was not given to a spouse’s ability with an axe or restraint before the hearth. In fact, it was just this point which was cited as the cause of Jeb Fritzer murdering Angus McTavish with a splitting axe.
It seems Jeb and Angus agreed to share a trapline and cabin over on what is now called Deadman’s Bar. In the agreement, it was decided that Angus would provide the winter’s water, and Jeb the wood. Dutifully Jeb brawned and blistered a woodshed full of dry pine, only to discover in mid-January that it was almost gone. Angus, instead of packing water from the creek, had been melting snow.
“Your Honour, Angus was an all tight sort, ’cept he liked his water hot and I likes the stove cold. Our differences were irreconcilable!” Naturally he was acquitted.
Perennial pains
If you think about it, there are only three things wrong with wood gathering, or splitting, if you prefer. First, it’s very repetitive, inasmuch as what you do to one block you do to them all. Secondly, even the romantic must admit to some sense of futility in watching the object of his creativity going up in smoke. Finally, splitting is a perennial event, and once the seeds of arthritis have been planted, they will flourish each fall thereafter.
In all fairness, there’s a lot of good to be said for wood heat. Ecologically speaking, we are just cremating the earth’s corpses before they’re buried in rot. Also, chopping is a lusty endeavor full of self-glorifying heroics and violent release. It demands a robust attitude because the only thing you’ll get out of pampering firewood is slivers.
The greatest reward is the intimacy you have with the source of your survival. Fulfilling the need to stay alive is in itself fulfilling. It isn’t an easy job, however, as we try to maintain a balance of trade-offs between self-preservation and self-destruction. To save our fingers from frostbite, we periodically chop them off. Or, we split the wood to feed the stove that heats the bath water, which we use to soak away the aches and pains we get from splitting the wood in the first place!
Yet, for all these benefits, I still noticed one day that my enthusiasm for turning rotund wood into pie wedges was waning rapidly. What I needed was a new fiction…a new medicine, for I’d grown immune to the old cure. My pilgrimage began in earnest.
A new approach
Traditionally man makes play out of work in one of two ways: Either he calls it sport or religion. I could find sport in splitting, I reasoned, if I took one aspect of the task and made it important, I mean really important, say the way antler size (representing the sport) is to food hunting (the labour).
Task One: Split one block with only two strokes.
Task Two: Split two blocks with only one stroke.
Boring. Being both competitor and referee, I soon lost interest. The cheating alone was enough to alter one’s faith in good sportsmanship. Besides, athletics lead to muscles and, if Aunt Ellie is to be believed (she was right about Farney), muscles constrict the bones, making them brittle before their time. No, what I needed was less physical and more metaphysical, less concrete and more abstract, less hometown and more highfalutin’. Give me that old time religion!
Thoreau, Emerson, Frost and of course Grandma heralded the chopping block as the sacred icon of their theological “back-to-ism.” But I’d been down that road before, and somewhere along the way I discovered you can commune as well with nature snoozing under a spreading spruce or flailing the air above a trout stream with a fly rod as you can sweating over a bunch of dead wood. The icon was too much like a cross, and I’ve never cared for martyrdom when there’s trout instead.
The next path I pursued was already well worn by Southern slaves picking cotton…working with “da good God-spel beat!” Just swinging, swaying and splitting with black rhythm and blues…”Rock-a-ma soul in the bosom of Abraham (Thwap!)…Rock-a-ma soul…(Thwap!)” Alas, even the hallelujah trail has a dangerous pothole. When the spirit of the music is abiding with you, it’s too easy to swing and sway faster than the muscles can flex and reflex! Oooh Lordy! Two broken axe handles convinced me God-spel should be left for Sunday.
The Zen of splitting
It was quite by accident that I found the way of Zen in wood splitting. As I remember, I was on a long string of successful one-stroke splits (good wood), and the functioning self was functioning away by rote, and the reflective self was off reflecting on the “sound of a half block splitting,” (you’ll notice that the difference between enlightenment and boredom is very thin), when suddenly I decided to try chopping with my eyes closed! I tried to concentrate the mind’s eye on the cutting edge of the axe meeting the pith of the wood. The swing began smooth and even. Then, just at the top of the arch, cognition grabbed the controls.
“To the left, Turkey! More to the left!” I damn near lost my kneecap as the block came flying backward, and the glancing axe went forward.
Blind splitting is not splitting blind. Splitting blind is like being blind drunk. It is complete disorientation the moment the eyes close. Blind splitting, on the other hand, is knowing intuitively exactly where the axe and the axer are at all times, with the reflective hemisphere set on “auto-run.” Disciplining the muscles comes with practice. The hard part is disciplining the concentration, and for that you’ll need a Zen attitude.
Zen discipline is simply shutting down the thinking process and concentrating your entire being on an Absolute, (in this case, the absolute centre of the wood) in much the same way one might focus on a mantra during meditation. The Zen form, the objective, is a controlled fluid swing, like the Tai Chi dance. When done successfully…when you’re in the groove and your entire being is one with the non-self Oneness, and the block splits in two without traces of blood on the axe, the reward is nothing short of a glimpse of satori!
To do it right, you’re also going to need the proper tools. First is the axe. A Zen axe is one that is tuned to follow the inner harmonics emanating from the firewood. Translation: pick an axe which goes straight to the heart of the wood without passing first through your foot or leg.
Next you’ll need the right wood. Wood has character (though not soul), and the measure of this character is its use. The measure for firewood is Btu’s and the standard for Zen wood is its willingness to cleave. Wood of karmic character is a mass of enlightened cells ready to split at the first kiss of the axe. And wood without karmic character, such as knotty pine or rock elm, is eons of incarnations away and should be left alone until it returns as birch or cedar.
Finally, you’re going to need a stable splitting block: one that imitates the Buddha posture and just sits there. If your present block has a tendency to jump about the moment your eyes are closed, simply remind it that it too is just a stroke away from being incarnated into the woodpile.
Once you have amassed the proper tools, attitude and control—that is, once you’ve practiced enough to think, “Hell, I can do this with my eyes closed,” then do it! There’s no limit, I suppose, to the heights before you. Once you’ve mastered blind splitting who knows what lies ahead…maybe even psychic splitting, where the axe is abandoned altogether and the Will does the work. I can only speculate about these things, for it was here that my pilgrimage ended and I discovered the True Way.
It occurred to me one day that for all of his many poses, Gautama Buddha was never formally immortalized with an axe in his hand, nor calluses on his palms, nor bruises on his shins, nor pain in his back, nor any of the other maladies common to wood gathering. You see, the Buddha posture is the result of owning a wood stove big enough to handle whole blocks! And splitting with a Buddha grin really isn’t splitting wood at all…it’s splitting from the practice of splitting altogether! That’s why he’s always grinning.
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