Big swinging axes

Jonny Diamond on chopping wood.

Most of us are far more likely to see a person chopping wood on a screen than in real life—it is an archaic, ancient act. To split wood is to measure your labor in units of heat; it is to understand the flow of seasons, the passage of time. To split wood is to conjure millennia of subsistence and self-sufficiency; it is a gathering act in defiance of winter and death, an act of providing.

To chop wood all day in the thin light of early March is to imagine late October nights by the fire. To arrange a cord of firewood you have split is to commit to a future, to exist beyond yourself and, indeed, for others. As an act, it is evidence of competence, purpose, and strength.

But is it, in 2023, a play-act? All of this has meaning only if one thinks of manual labor as a kind of hobby, as a break from something else. Splitting wood is satisfying only insofar as it is diversionary rather than urgent. I love splitting wood but there have been times in my life when I have not loved it: at age 14, at the command of my uncle on a hot, late August day in rural Quebec (just a beer run away from the Vermont border); at age 22, hungover at my boss’s house, soft-handed from a summer of office temp work; at age 37, after a long day digging out a basement for $12 an hour in an overpriced Hudson Valley town, one eye on the ten-day forecast, the other on a broken down oil boiler that won’t quite heat the house.

In each of these moments, if you’d tried to explain to me the meditative nature of wood-splitting, I probably would have made a wanking motion with my right hand; possibly a fart noise. But despite whatever exhaustion or irritation or desperation I might have been feeling at any of those moments, there would have been a glimmer of satisfaction in the act itself; a brief pause to acknowledge a pile of useful firewood and understand, even subconsciously, I made that.

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