Guest Post: The Tools Make the Woman, by 'Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods' Author Christine Byl
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Photo Credit: Gabe Travis. |
It's fall in Interior Alaska, and with migrating sandhill cranes overhead and vibrant tundra underfoot, fall means firewood. Temperatures drop and freezing nights require banking the woodstove for a slow burn. After a record-warm summer, the realization hits: we have to refill the woodshed.
I love getting wood. Felling, bucking, splitting and stacking is concrete work, requiring one of my favorite tools: the chainsaw. Though I've been using a saw now for 18 years, my orange-and-white Stihl always conjures memories of my first season on a trail crew, when the tool was both intimidating and seductive. If you'd told that 23-year-old rookie on a Glacier National Park trail crew that someday I'd be a sawyer like the ones I admired from afar--men and women who could start a saw, fix it, and heft it over shoulder without a grimace--I would have been skeptical. But here I am, decades later, my life heavily reliant on a chainsaw and its efficient use.
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Photo Credit: Christine Byl. |
In honor of mastery, history, and people the world over turning their hands towards their daily survival, here's a loving nod to some of the tools that have moved with me from my first trail crew job to making a living--and a life--in a remote home.
Chainsaw Initial tasks were basic: how to start it, avoid kick-back, buckle my chaps right. Now I use a chainsaw weekly. This summer's jobs included decommissioning an old timber bridge, log bench construction, clearing a neighbor's hazard trees, brushing on our property, and endless firewood. As field season wraps up, we'll use the chainsaw for log notching on a cabin-in-progress.
Axe I thought I knew how to use one until my first crew leader asked me to chop out a downed tree. It turns out the proper use of an axe is as intricate a skill as running a chainsaw. The axe is now among my top 5 hand tools. With the hatchet and maul, this family of tools gets near-daily use. On a trail layout job, the axe blazes standing trees. At home, it chops rounds, splits kindling, and limbs small trees. (It also skinned my finger last week, but we won't talk about that.)
Shovel Where would any of us be without you? On this summer's job sites, shovels helped me shape banked turns on a mountain bike trail, set rock bollards, dig bridge abutments, and sample soil along a trail reroute. At home, I've dug footings for a shed, a grave for our dearly departed sled dog, gravel poached from an abandoned DOT roadside pile. Mulched the garden, planted potatoes in old tires. Stockpiled chicken shit from the neighbor's coop to cover raised beds for winter. Filled spice bottles in the bulk aisle with the world's tiniest shovel, the scoop.
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Photo Credit: Christine Byl. |
Pulaski This axe/adze combo can handily chop or grub, making it the Superman of tools, with no need for a phone booth to switch identities. With the shovel, a pulaski comes along to every job site. I grubbed tread, chopped roots, and blazed a tree with one when the axe was absent. Building a bridge with a youth crew, I taught a 16-year-old girl how to sharpen a pulaski, a season highlight. Grubbing aside, I've used a pulaski to uncover pavement for traction beneath a tire spinning on ice, and to bang the handle of a lug wrench when changing a flat with a tight nut (same tire.) In a remote, cold place where town's a two-hour drive, we don't leave home without a tow strap, a sleeping bag and a pulaski in the back of the truck..
Sledge/Hammer/Mallet Practically ubiquitous, some member of this tool family gets used every day. My first laborer season I could barely lift the 12-lb sledge, let alone swing it overhead like John Henry, but this year I used the double jack to spike bridge decking. The framing hammer built handrails and the youth crew loved learning to twirl it in the air like seasoned carpenters. The rubber mallet is indispensable for driving in survey stakes, and just yesterday, was the perfect soft-blow deliverer to whack an old door back into plumb. Not including my fingers, few things are made worse by a couple well-directed blows.
So many more cherished props help hold up my days: wheelbarrow, wedge, rope, chisel, drawknife, bucket, tarp. Years ago, by accident and then by choice, I made a life out of tools, and somewhere along the line, tools enabled me to make a life. I'm thankful to them every day.
If you're interested in learning more about Christine's work as a trail dog, the tools she used and what it's like to get a real education in the woods, be sure to pick up a copy of Dirt Work.
Have you ever done any trail building? Do any of these tools sound familiar?
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