The Axe in Winter

‘The times are urgent; let us slow down.’ – Bayo Akomolafe

A January morning in the Maine coast woods. A pallid sun breaks grey clouds, glimmers on the ice rime. Scent of snow on the wind. In my hand is the axe. I am going out to coppice a tree.

Since we moved to this land several years ago, I have worked in the woods to provide our winter fuel. Cleared for a 19th-century homestead, and subsequently cut several times, these woods have come back dense and in need of thinning. The recent treatment of this land is a result of the colonial mindset. Now as its steward, I am working to care for it, promote its health, while meeting our modest needs.

I cut in winter, when the sap is down and the wood is quicker to season. It’s also the right time for coppicing, an ancient practice for harvesting wood while promoting regrowth. It involves cutting a deciduous tree at ground level, optimally between leaf fall and bud swell. In spring the stump, or ‘stool’, will draw on the energy of the roots to send up vigorous new sprouts. These can be thinned and tended, and depending on the need, can be left to grow between five years and a quarter century before being harvested again. In the meantime diversity increases in the forest with the variability of canopy cover.

Left to their own life arc, trees sprout from seed, root or nurse log; grow to their fullest size; senesce and fall; rot into the ground. By coppicing a tree before it reaches its largest size, one can reset that cycle. The stool can live much longer than the individual tree might. There are coppiced stands that have been continually harvested for hundreds of years.

The crust of ice covering the snow crackles under my boots. I am heading down the hill to a stand of birch I have been working in. They have been bent nearly horizontal by ice storms and will start to rot when they thaw.

When I go out to fall a tree I carry the axe and little else. Other tools will come out of the shed later and be carted to the woods to process the tree. If pushed to it though I could do nearly everything I need to do with the axe alone.

Down in the meadow beside the stand, I pause and pull the leather cover from the bit, bright where it is honed, harp string of an edge. A heavy slope of metal narrowing to disappearance. I spent time with it last night in preparation for today’s work. A file rasps away the cheeks, the coarse stone takes the file marks away. The fine stone polishes the metal smooth, then the strop buffs the taper to a mirror. All these tools bringing the edge down finer and finer, bringing the metal closer to its absence. A silver crescent reflecting the sun.

The head was forged, and handle carved, by Amish folks near here. Barring abuse, this tool may outlive me. If the handle were to break, the head could be rehung. When the edge is dinged or chipped it can be ground back with a file or stone to the correct profile. All of the above can be done by hand, from the falling of the tree for the handle stave to the final stropping of the edge.

Many days, if you were watching me, you’d see me simply standing in the woods, holding the axe near the head, looking off into the brush or up into the canopy or at the clouds. Breeze clattering the naked branches, call of the crow, grey cloud light and snow about to fall.

Here is a practice: stand in the woods and forget why it was you went there. Let your thoughts be the clouds passing over. Let your feet root, your legs bole, your arms branch. Let your body go still as heartwood through its core.

This may take however long – never mind time is running short, the fuel wood must be cut so that it can season and warm the cabin next winter. Never mind that years run like water one to the next without cease and soon you will be old and no longer able to do this work.

Never mind. The trees stand here all year round, in bitter cold making songs in the chimes of their bare limbs, in the heat of summer drinking up the light with fluttering leaves, ten thousand waving wings.

It’s from this stance, feet planted firmly in the ground, hips relaxed and ready to revolve, the trunk and spine rising straight up to the light canopy of the head, the air flowing through us, that we choose a tree to cut, that we swing the axe.

Here the intellect is brought back to bear. Like the whetstone it is a tool to hone action, allow for precision. We allow the intellect to give us clarity about how best to care for our woods. This is only possible when mated with empathy, extending to the tree we will cut.

Know that here is a feeling being, one that has endured longer than I have from sapling to this moderate size, about ten inches in diameter and 40 feet tall. This birch, bark the colour of snow that peels in sheets like paper. See how it leans downhill, how it must have curved out of the shadow of a nearby spruce as a sapling, and then turned upwards to chase the light of the open sky.

I put my back to the birch, the bark rasping my coat. I look down the slope where the trunk is leaning. The weight of the tree hangs over me. A tree falls where it leans. If I’m under it when it comes down, this tree could kill me. I lean up against it and look out from where it has stood all these years.

Then I step away and look at the place where I have been, the bark in horizontal stripes of grey and white. The wind sways the trunks. My hands hold the axe handle loose yet firm, the blood coursing out to the fingertips.

Yesterday I cleared the underbrush in preparation; there are several paths of escape. I plant my feet. I look at the place on the trunk I want to cut, and my hands swing the axe down at an oblique. The head hits and goes in several inches, a wet tock rings out through the woods. A crack like dark lightning runs down through the bark from the cutting edge.

I work the handle up and down and pull the bit free. Then I set my feet and prepare to swing again.

*

The earliest hafted axes date to around 6,000 BC. The heads were flaked or ground stone, associated with Neolithic industry. Across these thousands of years the form of the axe has remained relatively unchanged. Its elegance, efficiency, and fittedness to a task are demonstrated by its tenure in our working lives.

With the rise of early grain states sometime later, the axe became associated with the denuding of landscapes and destruction of ecologies. Expanding empires required vast quantities of wood to fuel their fires and to build structures and ships. Drawing material from hinterlands they cared little about, empires converted the stuff of the earth into power and control.

The axe as blade of empire cuts across history, morphing from stone to bronze, then to iron and steel, arriving here in the land where I now live as a tool of war and settler-colonialism. Within very few years of European settlement of what we now call Maine, the old growth forests tended for millennia by native people had been converted to farmland and ship masts. The primary hand tool in this endeavour was the axe.

It was not long after that the advent of fossil fuels poured oil on the fire of empire, and the age of machines began.

Like hand tools, use of fire has been a defining feature of humanity. It has been a partner at our hearths and flowed across the landscape with us. It is another living thing, sustained by what sustains all life: the fire of the sun. We used to have to live within the limit of sunlight falling on the Earth, what could be held in the body of a tree.

The incredible surfeit of stored sunlight that is fossil fuels has caused our fires to rage out of control, a global conflagration. With that energy pouring through our machines, the power of civilisation to ravage the Earth has grown exponentially.

‘I believe there is a single causative agent in back of most of our troubles,’ writes Richard Heinberg in his book Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. ‘The causative agent is power – our pursuit of it, our overuse of it, and our abuse of it.’

In his book he makes the case that the megawatts flowing out of power plants and the social power held by the privileged is not so distinct. As Heinberg points out:

At base the definition of power is the ability to do something or get someone else to do something. We order things that were made half a world away, only for them to arrive a short time later via a vast network of human hands. The incredible energy this must require, the damage to landscapes and the forced labour of our fellow humans rarely pierces our thoughts. As a function of wealth, our effect on the world scales up from there.

We often look for ways to avert catastrophe via the avenues laid out by industrial civilisation, shopping for solar panels on our laptops. Even large scale policy changes amount to a continuation of the same trajectory, exchanging coal and gas power plants for gigantic turbines and solar farms. But the important word here is power, which we decline to give up.

‘Whatever degree of resilience or sustainability,’ Heinberg writes, ‘we can achieve prior to, during, or after collapse must come from a return to self-limiting behaviors.’

We may not be able to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools, but we may be able to rework it with the hand tools neglected in the master’s shed. Making by hand, especially with locally gleaned materials, is one way of short-circuiting extractivist consumerism, grounding our activities in place, focusing on care. We can lessen our demand for watts and the work of other people at once. It is self-limiting, based in the power and skill of muscle and bone. It provides a particular opportunity: letting go of our damaging use of power, while enhancing our sense of sufficiency and self-determination, the kind of ‘power’ I suspect most of us crave.

*

The machine of civilisation cleaves us from the ground, covering it over with concrete, forcing it into the straight lines of the plantation. Our lives glide over it on rubber wheels, not touching the soil. This separation is our ongoing grief, along with all the losses we know the land continues to endure.

How are we to live with this world-wide grief when the basis of our lives, the clothes we wear, our furniture and our homes and our needed fires, our every meal and the utensils we eat it with, seem to be derived from the spreading of that grief?

The making of art and handcrafts is sometimes offered as therapy. When I chop wood, pump water from the well by hand or dump the compost bucket, grind the grain to feed the sourdough or form the loaf in my grandmother’s bowl, cut a board with my grandfather’s saw or carve a spoon for my mother to use, I am allowing my hands to work through my grief. Meanwhile, I am responding to the source of that grief in my small human way, trying to do some repair.

This is no prescription, and is not scalable except as a general philosophy. It’s merely an attempt to be aware, rooted, responsible, humble, however that looks in our particular place. Charting our narrow course, trying to meet our needs by way of bodily effort, to help living things grow and thrive, and to let the hands make with the stuff of the land.

*

Afternoon I come in from woodcutting, stoke the fire in the stove, prepare a meal. We bathe the kids in a galvanised tub.

Later I work on a spoon designed to stir dough and scrape the curve of the bread bowl. The fire burning bronze, collected heat of the sun from the past seasons, and all the family asleep, even the kitten. The axe oiled and leaned by the wall to dry.

Under my small lamp I carve down the blank with my knife. Black cherry, most of it a ruddy heartwood with a sudden border of blonde sapwood at one edge. My hands find the way to hold the knife, to slice away shavings of this hard wood, the body of a tree I recently coppiced. My hands learning what is possible from the wood which sets its limits with the flow of the grain, the tree’s sensibility. Finding and refining the shape, metal burnishing the wood after the edge has passed. Together my hands, the tool, the wood make the spoon. If thoughts are here they sing a quiet song in another room.

In the night the snow will fall deep and silent around the sleeping trees.

Dark Mountain: Issue 25

Our Spring 2024 issue is an anthology of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, interviews and artwork inspired by the struggle for land rights, and by the living land itself.

Read more