A wood pile time bomb ~ October 8, 1992

David Heiller

The time bomb is set to explode at our house. It’s doesn’t look like a time bomb. It looks like a woodpile.

But because the woodpile will fall down, I think of it as a time bomb.

David and his maul: the never ending battle to keep the wood box full.

Hopefully no one will get hurt. My woodpile fell last spring while I was on a canoe trip. It covered three bicycles, a garden tractor, and a compost shredder. I had to buy a new front rim for Noah’s bike. But it didn’t crush my children or wife, thankfully.

It took a year for that woodpile to fall down. That was a long stretch. I remember once when my brother-in-law and I spent the day stacking wood. He had to go back to college that afternoon, so I drove him to Moose Lake to catch a bus. I drove home thinking how great it was to have a brother-in-law like Randy, what a great job we had done stacking wood together.

When I drove into the driveway, the woodpile looked like someone had shot a cannon through it. Half an hour, an unofficial Guiness World Record for a fallen woodpile.

Our woodpile never ever looked like this one!
 I wouldn't want to use it!

There’s nothing like the sight of a sprawling, fallen woodpile to deflate your spirit. You work so hard to get to that point. Risk life and limb cutting down the tree and cutting up the wood. Drive the tractor into the woods, load the wood into the trailer, drive the tractor home, unload it, split it, all the while listening to your lower back do the Rice Krispie Shuffle: snap, crackle and pop.

Stacking it is the final reward. You get to make it look so nice and neat. Maybe you even crisscross the ends so that it stands without any posts. That’s the sign of a good wood stacker.

I plod along slowly, pulling at the pile every few minutes, feeling it start to sway a little at the bottom, feeling it tilt even more as it gets higher.

I can tell a woodpile that will fall. The one I stacked today will fall real quick. If you push against it, it sways and creaks. Unless we get some cold weather real fast, I’ll have a bunch of birch logs to pick up soon.

Cindy came out while I was stacking it up. She gently reminded me to move her bicycle away from the 8-foot-high pile. She knows my wood-stacking skills are low.

Cindy on the other hand is a great wood stacker. When we used to stack wood together, she was always rearranging sticks here and there, tightening things up, and the pile would be as solid as a wall.

But she threw out her back two years ago. Now she won’t go near a woodpile. (Or else she hasn’t forgiven me for conking her on the jaw with a piece of popple. One bad throw.) But she still knows she has woodpile superiority. I think she gets a perverse pleasure seeing mine fall. She even calls her friends and tells them. Last spring, about a week after the canoe trip, a friend asked me with a smirk how my woodpile was doing.

“Geez, does the whole township know?” I asked. That reminded me that the only thing worse than a fallen woodpile is someone asking you about it.

Time bombs are like that.