There are many ways to get firewood from buying it from the local firewood merchant to gaining a permit for the local forest to go and get your own or having your own block of land where you can collect the firewood whenever you want. I am lucky enough to have my own block of land so that I can go and get my winter supply of firewood whenever I want.
At the end of last winter I had cut down eleven trees for the next winter’s wood supply. Everything was going well until I fell off the waterfall. I had enough wood to get me part way through winter but I like to have enough wood to ensure that I don’t run out in the cold months. Ever since my accident I would look at all those firewood rings and just want to be fit enough to split them. Finally I felt that my body was ready to take on the log splitter and have a go.
The first log that I took to was a dry piece of wood that looked like it would split easy. I smashed this ring into about five pieces then stopped and rested for the next hour to see how it would affect my body, I felt that good that I went back and split some more. This got me thinking about the injuries that I had sustained, two breaks in my back a broken neck fifteen broken ribs and a broken blade bone.
How we think about our injuries is how we react to them and my way of thinking is that when I have a part of me that is sore I need to increase the muscle in that area. This reminds me of when I was in hospital and one of the nurses said to me that they had a guy in one time who had a broken neck for seven months before he went to the doctors.
The guy was a body builder and he had so much muscle that he could still move around with a broken neck. This tells me that my injuries would be better if I work on getting my muscles stronger. I have always enjoyed splitting firewood by hand, I can recall one day a couple of years back going to help out at a firewood day for my son’s hockey team. Instead of taking a chainsaw I took my hand log splitter, one of the young hockey players, Roy got the job of setting up the rings for me to split. I went hell for leather for about an hour before giving young Roy a turn, he lasted about five minutes before he wore himself out so I took over for the rest of the day. There was also two motorized log spliters working. The two trailers that they had taking away the split wood was now struggling to keep up with us. At the end of the day we had a beer where one of the other workers came up to me and said that he was watching me and reckoned that I was splitting one and a half times more wood than either of the motorized log spliters. When splitting wood by hand you need to be accurate with your hits and you need to know where the weak points are in each ring of wood and as an added advantage you get to warm up. So what better way to help me recover than splitting firewood? Another advantage of this was I could have a pig dog or two in the block with me bailing pigs while I give my body a work out with the log spliter. My first couple of swings with the log spliter were a wee bit hard on the body but as I kept at it I soon forgot about the pain and started enjoying having a body that was capable of doing some physical work again. I started getting that carried away with splitting the wood had it not been the dogs bailing pigs I probably would have split all of the wood in one go. The thing is I did not want to split all of the wood at once because then I would have none left next time I come into the block. On the second day that I went to split wood I had Snow and a training dog Snow’s brother Snipe In for a run. As I walked into the block I had a singlet a shirt and a jacket on. After four hits with the log spliter I ditched my jacket in about ten hits latter I was down to my singlet. While I was splitting wood the two young dogs had time to go and find a pig to bail. While the two dogs did not work as well as I would have liked they both got to bail a pig during that one hour session. On the third trip to do firewood I had two of Richard Hands dogs Keith and Snipe, Keith is Fogs brother and I knew that he was a good dog so the two dogs got to have a great run around the block. At one point I had to put the log spliter down as the boar the dogs were bailing was backing up to me for protection from the dogs. Every time the boar tried to break away the two dogs rounded him up and brought him back to me.