“Observations from the Woodpile”
Jeff Yocum
Prologue
Observations from the Woodpile” is a collection of essays bundled together and given as a birthday present for my wife, Nancy, in 1997. Twenty-seven years have passed since the collection was given. The two main subjects of the essays, my sons Justus and Jacob, have grown into men with families of their own.
The Natural History of the Roddy Road Covered Bridge
This is the last installment of the “Observations from the Woodpile.” I hope they have brought you a measure of enjoyment. This last submission is a little different in that it does not specifically address the enterprise of cutting firewood. The subject is, however, a close cousin.
Trees are remarkable scribes of history, provided you know and understand the language with which they write. Sometimes, as the boys and I are cutting, we’ll take a breather, and we’ll look at the stories the logs have recorded for anyone who cares to read them.
The simplest story they tell is the pattern of rainfall. The rings are generally wider in years of sufficient rain. Comparing several logs together will tell if they came from the same location. Trees from the rich bottomlands tend to have consistently wider rings. Elliptical or eccentric rings indicate the tree leaned or came from a large branch. Lots of branches and knots show that the tree grew at the edge of the woods near an open field.
Occasionally, a log with a shake, a separation of the rings, will show up. These are pretty rare, particularly in oak. They are created when the wind whips a tree back and forth so violently that the rings shear apart. Sometimes, extremely cold weather will cause a freeze shake just like pipes freezing and bursting in a house.
Reading the wood like this can further be used to tell the stories of old wooden structures. During the summer of 1996, the Roddy Bridge was closed for repairs. The corners of the bridge were rotting from some previous “improvements.” The Roddy Bridge is a simple king-post bridge. At that point, it had been in service for more than a century. Like all things old, it occasionally needed a little fixing.
The timber framer contracted to the job is a friend of mine, Dean Fitzgerald. He let me help on occasions when I wasn’t going to be in the way of his regular crew. The benefit of helping Dean was being able to get a close look at some of the wood being replaced. The timber in the bridge came from a completely different era of America’s history. Forests that had never seen an ax or saw were being felled at an unsustainable rate.
The bottom chord is the beam that spans the entire length of the bridge. It is a single 10-inch by 12-inch beam, 40 feet long on both sides of the bottom of the bridge. The “improvements” made in 1978 caused more rotting in 15 years than had been experienced in the previous 120. The rotted portion had to be cut back far enough to get solid wood—much the same way a surgeon cuts a gangrenous limb back to vital flesh. The cross-section of the chord told an interesting story.
Starting in the year 1856, the year the bridge is rumored to have been built, and counting the rings from the outside in, the tree’s beginning proved to be no later than the time of the first colonies. Since much of the outer portion of the log probably was sawn into higher-grade lumber, the tree was likely much larger. Quite probably, its beginnings predated Columbus.
The rings closer to the center of the cross-section were so tightly spaced, they were difficult to distinguish from one another. There were maybe 50 of them at about an inch and a half from the center. The tree at that point was about 50 years old but only three inches in diameter.
Suddenly, the rings widened significantly and continued to be wide all the way to the outer edge of the beam section. A knot started just at the first wide ring and continued almost to the perimeter. This indicated that there was a sudden source of sunlight causing the tree to grow an extra limb to capture the newly available energy through more leaves. Trees will do that because light is what makes a plant grow.
The tree that later became the bottom chord of the Roddy Bridge once lived in the shade of much larger trees. Light was scarce because of the more dominant taller trees. The smaller tree spent decades unable to compete and subsisted on just enough light to keep from dying. Then, one year, something cataclysmic happened to that one spot in the forest. Perhaps an ice storm or some insect infestation or disease; but, for some reason, the dominant overstory was no more and light flooded the forest floor. The smaller tree, with its established root system, dominated any latecomers to the new island of light and it became the dominant tree. For more than a century and a half now, the little sapling that became the tree has been the load-bearing member of the Roddy Road Covered Bridge.
This is a lesson specifically for my youngest, Jacob. I know he often stands in the shade of his older siblings. They excel at most of what they undertake. As a parent, I love that. I also know that following older siblings through school and the different sports teams tends to create a certain level of expectation that’s probably not altogether fair. This is compounded even more by being in a small town.
I try to encourage Jake to reach his own level,and do what interests him. A time will come, as it must and should, when Justus and Sarah move out and he’s the last one home. Eventually, he too will be on his own, free to make of his life what he will.
