Chainsaw Carpenter

  When I was  a little kid, I used to tell folks my dad was a carpenter. When he found out, he got mad and corrected me, mentioning that he was a contractor. I didn't understand the difference at the time, but know now that the knowledge he possessed was far beyond carpentry.

 

One Christmas I received an Erector Set. For those who aren't familiar with such a thing, it was a set that had numerous thin, flat bars of aluminum or steel, all of which were drilled with multiple holes up and down the length of the bars, which were about twelve inches long and maybe 3/8 inches wide. Also included was a number of little screws, as well as nuts, and an illustrated catalogue that showed the various things you could make; towers and small buildings and cranes and  I don't recall what all else. I suppose the idea behind the set was to encourage future engineers and architects or iron workers. It all fell flat with me. For a short while, when I was bored on a rainy day, I would dig out the pieces and play around. I think about half of the nuts and screws ended up down the heating vent in my room, so I never had enough to put together anything that even  remotely resembled a structure that would be of any use in the real world. I'm sure my dad was probably disappointed that I wasn't cut out of the same cloth as him.

 

When I was about fourteen, he said I wasn't going to be spending my summers lazing around, going fishing and reading comic books. He wanted me to work with him. Oh no! It wouldn't have been so bad, but he had a foul temper, and was impatient. To make matters worse, he never taught me anything about carpentry. I guess he assumed that through osmosis or some such thing, I would naturally come by the same skill that he had. On the job, I usually was responsible for cleaning up the mess that the crew made. Once in awhile he'd tell me to hand him a 2x4 that was laying in the corner. I didn't know a 2x4 from an I beam. When I inevitably grabbed the wrong thing he'd look at me like I'd grown horns out of the top of my head. If he asked me for the square, and I brought him the level, he'd swear and say, "Don't you know a level from a square?" Well, obviously not. I was searching around hopelessly for something that looked square. A level was the closest thing to it. For all I knew, he meant for me to hand him the long rectangle with bubbles inside.

 

It didn't take too long for him to realize that I was pretty useless on the job, and he stopped asking me to come to work for him. I was so relieved. I managed to find jobs around the neighborhood; mowing lawns, planting some bushes, painting houses. I managed to make a little money, and I wasn't goofing off, so I guess that appeased him.

 

When I moved to the farm in Alaska, I was once again put in a position of needing knowledge I didn't have. Prior to joining the navy, I had worked in retail. In the navy I was a Radarman. Not much need for the skills of a Radarman on an end time farm. 

 

For the first few weeks, I joined the farm labor force packing water in five gallon buckets from the creek, chopping fire wood, or working at the sawmill. My good friend Uncle Bill was put to work building cabins. He had been a construction foreman prior to coming to Alaska. Bill and I both hated the farm, and all the crap that went on there, so I naturally wanted to work with Bill. He had a lot of patience and didn't mind teaching me the basics. There was also the added advantage that he never quit smoking, so once in awhile we'd sneak off to the woods and smoke a cigarette.

 

After I sold my car, I went in to Juneau and purchased a few carpentry tools, things I never needed before. I bought a square and a level ( I knew what they did now) a tape measure, hammer and a few other necessities, plus a supply of ink pencils. I'd never seen ink pencils before, and I've not seen them since. They were unique to Southeast Alaska I guess. Because so much of the wood that we had to work with was soaking wet, due to the constant rain, the only way to put a mark on it for cutting was to run a line with an ink pencil. The pencil was dry until it came in contact with wet wood, then it made a permanent ink mark. They were wonderful.

 

For the first five years that I lived on the farm, we didn't have any electricity. Thus all the power tools that one would normally expect to use in carpentry were useless. We had to make all the cuts on the lumber with chainsaws. There were no circular saws or drills, just ink pencils, squares and chainsaws. I managed to get proficient in their use.

 

We had a sawmill on the farm, but it didn't have a planer, so all of the lumber, aside from being green, wet and heavy, was rough cut. It was easy to get a splinter. In fact after we built benches for the tabernacle you had to be careful for the first year or so not to scoot down the bench or you'd pay the price. When I left, ten years later, those benches had been polished by the countless hours sitting, listening to sermons.

 

One thing about the sawmill, for whatever reason, it didn't always cut the boards true. Sometimes a 2x4 would be five inches wide and one inch thick on one end, and the other end was four inches wide by an inch and a half. It made building anything a challenge, and a good bit of the lumber went to the burn pile, which was good. That much less wood to have to chop.

 

When we finally got electricity, those that had power tools used them, but I always had a place in my heart for the skill that the chainsaw required. Not many could say they built their homes with one.