Pave the North Fork? Not so fast...

We cut firewood on Sunday, which is to say we slogged up a sizable hill where there were a couple of sizable Doug fir down and immediately pinched the saw as tight as the butt on a woodpecker.

So it was a trip back down the hill to get the little ax I carry in the truck “just in case.”

The ax is sharp enough to slice bread, but even so, it still took a while to cut the chainsaw out of the pinch.

After that, things went fairly smoothly, which is to say I only pinched the saw one more time and it didn’t take that long to get it out.

The romance of cutting firewood, if there ever was one, has long since passed. The next day I feel like I’ve been beat up, even though the boy does a lot of the work. It takes a long time to load up the old diesel pickup truck, which I have a healthy love-hate relationship with. It’s a 12-valve Cummings Dodge, which is a very good engine, but the truck that’s built around the engine leaves something to be desired.

The truck was in very good condition when I bought it, but a couple months after that the boy threw a piece of firewood down the hillside and even though the truck was parked plenty far enough away (or so I thought) the piece of wood hit a stump, took a hard right, bounded down the hillside and went for the truck about a 100 miles per hour like it was some sort of giant flying wood magnet.

Bang! It put a big old dent in the box.

Ugh.

Since then I’ve put about 50,000 miles on the rig, and every three months or so it develops a vibration or leak, which, without so much as thinking about it, costs a 1,000 bucks or so. I suppose that’s par for the course for a truck that’s 22 years old, but I still like to grumble about it, because grumbling is something I do best in life.

At any rate, we got the truck loaded up to the hilt with wood, put it in drive and were promptly stuck. I’d like to think that my rocking back and forth in my seat somehow jarred the 10,000 pounds of truck and wood loose. The reality is it sometimes takes awhile for 13 quarts of transmission fluid to warm up on a cold day, but when it did, we lurched out into the North Fork Road.

The saw came loose from the nook I jammed it in and landed in the middle of the road.

I hopped out, picked it up, and it was no worse for the wear.

Thank God the North Fork Road isn’t paved.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.