Heart of a Sawyer

ARKANSAWYER · August 13, 2005, 10:00:15 PM

It has been hot and dry here. To go on the road and saw 10 to 12 hours a day in this 100 degree heat is tuff. There has to be more to it then just making money to give to Bankers or keeping food on the table for the youngins. Ticks, wasps, chiggers and the fine sawdust sticking to your sweaty arms and face just make for a long hard day. It seems like the sun will never set or the logs will never quite coming. On and on it drags by only to be repeated the next day. Relentless heat and the sun pounding on you hour after hour. What drives one to keep sawing and sawing inspite of the desire to just go take a nap under some air conditioning? What longing is being deprived that keeps a person at the mill controls hour after hour in the dust haningin in the hot lazy summer day? Must be something special that keeps the drive going in spite of the tuff endless days of sawing. Must be the heart of a Sawyer, a heart made of wood that keeps beating and pushing the Sawyer to cut again.

Corley5 · August 13, 2005, 10:03:36 PM

8) 8)

DanG · August 13, 2005, 10:08:50 PM

Well said, Arkey, and you got a big ol' Sawyer's heart. But it looks like it's gettin' a little flabby around the outside. Maybe ya oughta start doin' 14 hours a day. ;) ;D :D

TexasTimbers · August 13, 2005, 11:13:38 PM

Quote from: ARKANSAWYER on August 13, 2005, 10:00:15 PM .....What drives one to keep sawing and sawing inspite of the desire to just go take a nap under some air conditioning? What longing is being deprived that keeps a person at the mill controls hour after hour in the dust haningin in the hot lazy summer day? Must be something special that keeps the drive going in spite of the tuff endless days of sawing.

So "what drives us..."? IMHO it's called .... Liberty. Freedom. The privelage we have in this country to work wherever we want or don't want. Or for WHOever we want or don't want. Even ourselves ( even if that makes our boss a jerk :D) And if we lose sight of the fact that it is a privelage to live and work in this country and lead the lifestyles that we do then we'll lose that sacred privelage. We work hard because we have a free enterprise system that rewards our hard work dodgin wasps and suckin in cedar dust, even though the communistic graduating income tax punishes us for working hard - Okay, I'll stop here on my Anti Huge Federal Governmet Campaign. :

Yeah, it's hot and humid and icky sometimes Ark, but it's a *DanG sight better than trying to scratch out a living in say ... Haiti or, or, or a hundred other hell holes across this planet

.... so Keep up the hard work Arky - the alternative sucks!!!

;) :D ;D 8)

Roxie · August 14, 2005, 09:37:24 AM

Arky, that is a real pretty heart ya got there. I'd like to think you're gonna do something special with that piece of wood that caused ya to wax so poetic.

Ya gotta have heart and ya gotta love what you're doin. smiley_heart

Part_Timer · August 14, 2005, 09:57:16 AM

The people at work just don't understand why we saw and move logs in this weather. We've been working on cutting and stacking slabs and firewood for next year and they think we have lost our minds.

I just reply "If you have to ask you don't understand the dream."

I didn't realize you were so poetic Arky. Nice one

Pete J · August 14, 2005, 10:07:16 AM

You are a class act Arky!

Well, if not, at least you got ME fooled.

Cedarman · August 14, 2005, 02:25:43 PM

I thought it always felt so good when I quit, that I couldn't wait to get started the next day so I could feel good again :D

Last week when my sons and I were putting that rubber track back on the skid steer for the second time in two days at 1:00 in the afternoon with the heat index at 110 in the hot sun in southern OK and us sucking down water and pouring it out our skins so fast we looked like we had just jumped in the pond, I was beginning to question our sanity. But we got 'er done.

We whacked between 20,000 and 30,000 cedars down in six days. What a sense of satisfaction when we were done to look out over that 20 acres and see the results.
The evening after we put the track back on, we went to the restaurant and began drinking iced tea out of 20 oz glasses. Asked the waitress to just bring the pitcher, drank it, drank another, drank a third pitcher. And we had been drinking hard all day too. Felt good.

Arky, its that good feeling that you get when you accomplish something through hard work. Thanks for sharing.

Frickman · August 14, 2005, 04:31:33 PM

The last few weeks I've been cutting a piece of timber a couple of miles from here. Go to work in the morning, and be sweating by 7:30. Cut till noon, come home and bale hay the rest of the day, until dark some nights. The landowner asked me why I work like I do. I told him it is so I don't have to have a miserable job, working to make someone else wealthy, like he and his wife. He said that he wants air-conditioning in the summer, heat in the winter, and a guaranteed paycheck with benefits. I said that's fine if that's what you want, but I can't see living that way.

ARKANSAWYER · August 14, 2005, 09:17:45 PM

I was raised by the old school where men worked hard and at the end of the day could look back and see all the ground they had plowed that day. They cared for the land, their equipment, and live stock and feed their familys by the sweat of their brow. They did not have to "get in touch with their feminine side" or show emotions to be men. They stood up and put their pants on feet first like every one else but stood tall and had manners as well as respect for others. I am very glad there are those who can stand being in offices all day long and work the factories year in and year out. Not I, for 5 generations sawdust has flowed in the veins of my family and I have passed it on to a 6th. The ranks in which I stand make me proud and if the Lord does not come first it will be men who know what work is and cockroaches that survive the mess that is sure to come. I see fewer and fewer young men in the mills and logging crews. They can stand in Wal Mart and make $6 bucks an hour under AC and chat with girls while showing off their new tatoo. I guess every generation of men has looked down on the ones coming up and wonder what the DanG world is coming to. Ours I guess may be a bit more bleaker then the last. Some times when I work around old men whom many say should be taking it easy under the shade tree I feel proud that they feel I am worth to work beside them. Hoping to gleam some bit of wisdom from them before they pass from this world. I personaly hope to die face down in a plie of sawdust then slip from this world in a easy chair in front of a TV set. If I can not die defending my family and Country then may it be with a Sawyers heart and sweat on my brow from a honest days work.
AMEN!

DanG · August 14, 2005, 09:35:39 PM

AMEN! You said that very well, Arkansawyer. Leave's very little doubt as to where you stand, and you seem to stand on the side of right! It's people like you, and a number of others on this forum, that will provide the core of the next generation of "can-do" Americans.

ex-racer · August 14, 2005, 10:10:34 PM

Thanks for a great question - and many words of wisdom in the responses.

At 67 years of age, I'm sawing lumber to build a summer cottage.
Cut the trees down last winter, yarding the logs out and sawing them now. Stacking/stickering the lumber to season for construction next summer.

Friends and aquaintances are shaking their head and rolling their eyes. They say, "Isn't that a lot of work?" "Wouldn't it be easier and quicker to buy the lumber at the store?"

I don't bother trying to explain, because they just don't understand.

Ed

dail_h · August 15, 2005, 09:24:45 PM

I just quit a good job with Georgia Pacific with a steady paycheck,and good benifits to run an all manual mill with the aid of a 50 year old forklift. That "GOOD" job at GP took away ALL my social and family life,wound me up in the hospital for two weeks,and I probably won't ever be totaly cured.
Am I crazy to spend my days in the heat and dust,and hot,and cold when the time comes and rain when it comes?Well yeah. Then why do it? For all the reasins that Arky said and some more too.