The Best Life Possible

Sending a white ash into its next life

The Ash before it was felled

Do you want an Ash log? I hadn’t heard that question in a long time, I laughed thinking it was a joke.

Seriously Man, this is a stud. I was on the phone with my favorite logger. And it had been 3yrs since a decent Ash log crossed our paths.

Hardwood sawmills have been closing their doors for what feels like every month for the last while. Not little backyard mills, the big boys, the ones that saw millions of feet a year. When mills close, the infrastructure collapses, loggers and truck drivers disappear making getting timber more and more difficult. It was a week one of the last local mills shut off gate logs* and put loggers on quota** and I had a feeling he called because he was trying to scratch together a load out of his logs that didn’t require him to drive 100 miles to get paid. He’s my favorite logger, because the forest isn’t just a cash machine to him. We share a lot of values surrounding forest health and the environment, a respect for trees. He also knows I’ll take weird stuff no one wants, like walnut logs from the county landfill or ailanthus or that single Virginia pine log all by its lonesome. Keeping him in business is important for me and I’m not worried about “overpaying” if that means he looks out for me.

Is it white? I ask, which is code language for was it alive when it was taken down. You see Ash is functionally extinct in much of the US now, due to a little bug. And when an Ash dies the wood turns a smoker yellow color and gets soft within a month, then post beetles and black flea beetles get in it and have a feast, so a standing dead Ash is likely no good, especially for chairs which is what I really want it for.

The hollow butt end

Let me send you a picture, He says.

I couldn’t say yes fast enough. The tree had been on an estate and was a monolith, a staggering giant of a tree that the estate had been treating for emerald ash borer to keep it alive. But unbeknownst to them the tree had already started its decline. It was hollow and started to die so they took it down. The base of the tree was well over 40” across and after he trimmed more than 12’ of hollow section off the butt it still yielded a 12’ long log 35” in diameter on the small end, 35” 24 feet off the ground. That is 698’ bdft of lumber.

The log was so heavy that the hydraulic loader arms on the sawmill couldn’t lift it onto the mill bed and we had to cut the log back to 10’ to get it on the mill. I didn’t have a plan for it exactly so we quarter sawed it, I didn’t want to let it sit too long and go bad so we sawed it up right away and it was perfect with virtually no defects.

That beautiful marbling of heart and sapwood

A few weeks later I got a text from a chair maker. They normally order several hundred feet at a time and had just blown through a load of cherry I sent them and needed material. About 500’ they said. Well have I got the log for you.

on the sawmill

I pulled the lumber out of the kiln on Friday and have mixed emotions. The woodworker in me wants to keep it. I see a lot of nice material and don’t get that feeling very often. But I know it would take me years to use it and where it’s going it will all be turned into chairs in the next few months. This tree graced the lawn of an estate for over a century, was tended, sat under and cared for. And rather than being discarded is being sent on to live another century as chairs in people’s homes. I’m not sure a better life could be had for a tree. And I know that matters and is a big part of why I’m in the lumber business at all. Alan, myself and next week Chris will all be stewards along the way. You could accuse me of being sentimental here but I don’t think we realize just how lucky we are to be surrounded by amazing trees like this. And we often take them for granted.

Fresh off the mill

* Gate logs are uncontracted logs delivered directly to a sawmill by independent loggers or landowners without a prior purchase agreement or pre-arranged order.

** When mills put loggers on quota they limit each logger on how many loads per week they can bring to the mill. This is a cash preservation measure and is often a sign the mill is under duress.