The Log, The Machete, and Gravity

You may have mentally winced upon reading the title, and let me be the first to say that your reaction was one hundred percent justified. Allow me to explain the situation, it was the summer of 2018, my last jobless summer, my last free summer. For me, it was quite eventful, with myself and my neighbors, whom we will refer to as J and D, going about our days doing, well, just about anything you can dream up of when you mix three high school aged boys, a plethora of tools, and a vast expanse of forest and swamps. One of these days, the three of us had planned to have a bonfire. Nothing too out of the ordinary, especially for us, but this fire was going to be different. Naturally, we all unanimously agreed to this idea, just as we did to any ludicrous idea that was conceived by any of us, and so the fire would be on the proceeding day.

I should mention this beforehand, for the sake of foreshadowing, D is notorious for being a klutz on an ungodly level. So much so in fact, that it was a rarity to go a day with him without some chaotic mishap occurring, so rare in fact, that we often celebrated a day without one of D’s “events”, and that is no joke.

The next day, we all woke up unusually early in the summer, just around nine o’clock, and we almost immediately met down at J and D’s house. We took to their garage in search of whatever sharp items we could use to chop down trees, and we settled on the following: a dull splitting maul, a well-rusted hand saw, and a small katana that J ordered off of Amazon. Best of all, however, was our pride and joy, Our ride or die. The tool we never left at home when going in the woods: a short-bladed machete, which we had named Minichete, for obvious reasons. With our arsenal equipped, snacks packed, and morals high, we set off down the hill that led to the woods.

Something had stopped us at the last minute, an idea had popped into my head just as we are about to enter the tree line. With aspirations to build a bonfire larger than usual, we would need larger logs, which I am not willing to carry the long way home, so how can we make the shipping process easier? The answer was clear. We walked back up to my property, and sat in seclusion between two rock walls was my barn. Right beside it, there she was, in all her beauty: a beat up, moss green, pull-start, unregistered ninteen-ninety something four-wheeler. It was to be our savior of the day. We took her down to J and D’s house, where off in the pucker brush they had dumped a small two wheeled trailer, which didn’t have the necessary pieces to keep the dump bucket attached, nor for actually hooking it up to the quad in the first place. So what did we do in a situation like this? We rigged it. With the help of ratchet straps and bungee cords, we managed to patchwork a halfway decent system to connect the trailer to the quad. Finally, everything was set in stone, and we could get to wood harvesting.

The process itself wasn’t anything noteworthy, the same as usual to us, the repetitive laborious task of cutting down large white pines, and suffering through the agonizing step of milling the trees into digestible chunks and logs. We slaved the day away like this, trailer load after trailer load, until we believed we had a sufficient amount of wood. We returned to the fire pit I had built in my backyard where we had dumped all of our wood. Being close to four o’clock, we decided that now it would be a better time than ever to start the fire up. Without any struggle, the fire lit up beautifully and was roaring in just minutes, but there was one thing missing: chairs.

I took the liberty of fetching the three of us some camp chairs that my mother kept in the trunk of her jeep, which of course is around the other side of the house in the driveway. I set off, and as I take the chairs out, my excitement to relax and enjoy this fire was at its all time high after the work we put in to have it in the first place. You see, it’s at this moment in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones puts fourth a lot of effort to find the Ark of the Covenant, and obtains it. Upon beginning to take the Ark out of the Well of Souls, he gets interrupted and thwarted by… Nazis. If you could imagine Indiana Jones’ disappointment in that scenario, you could probably imagine my own, when I turn the corner of my house to bring the chairs, I find D nowhere to be found. The process itself wasn’t anything noteworthy, the same as usual to us, the repetitive laborious task of cutting down large white pines, and suffering through the agonizing step of milling the trees into digestible chunks and logs. We slaved the day away like this, trailer load after trailer load, until we believed we had a sufficient amount of wood. We returned to the fire pit I had built in my backyard where we had dumped all of our wood. Being close to four o’clock, we decided that now it would be a better time than ever to start the fire up. Without any struggle, the fire lit up beautifully and was roaring in just minutes, but there was one thing missing: chairs.Apparently in my extremely brief absence, D decided that it would be a grand idea to stand atop one of the logs set beside for the fire, and he ended up falling. Falling on its own wouldn’t be all that terrible, as he wasn’t far off the ground to begin with. The problem with this scenario was that unfortunately, Minichete was propped in the ground right in the path of D’s graceful tumble. The result was nothing short of something you would see in a horror movie, as D’s palm, all the way down to just under his wrist was cut clean open, exposing tendons, muscle, and even some bone. D, of course, was immediately sent to the hospital, and our fire that we had worked so hard for, was wasted. It was then that it had hit me, a lesson I would never forget for as long as I live. When D is involved, always expect the unexpected.

Photo by: Hunter Spencer