Author Archives: Buster Burk

At first I did it with an ax – thin, slight but with weight, sharp, and with a solid easy-swing handle oiled and darkened from relentless swinging. This technique worked, but usually with a great deal of extra effort after the blow. After the blow would come the wrestling and the knees on the ground, reluctant reverence. I would be summoned for dangerous yanking, twists, back and forth swinging, and, if this didn’t work, hits and smashes to literally sledge hammer my beloved ax out or through. My little naughty adversary and all of his family tree would take my over-the-head strength with this long, thin axhead, accept it with silence, and hold tight. The dumb silence of this interaction can really get to you. Often enough, I repeatedly made a new, quite useless sledgehammer with a huge 33 cm long wooden mallet head. It is not smart to swing around very insecure, large pieces of wood on the end of a stick in the air and over the head. But this is what you have to do when you are like me, a city fool, and haven’t been made aware of only the most unchanged technology since the Stone Age.

Split wood burns more easily. The water comes out of it and it seasons better in the air. When we received five steres (one cubic meter) of soaking wood in the rain, sometimes in lengths which were really too wide to handle properly next to the glass woodstove door, or simply too big for it, splitting was necessary. I didn’t mind. I liked directly contributing to the warmth of my house, of my family. I can’t burn checks or cash for warmth, but wood is the next best thing. Continue reading →