As you might expect, me being all ‘mountain man-ish and all’, we heat with wood.  What you may not know is that we get our wood as it floats by.  None of that lumberjack crap for us.  Delivery to the front door, if you please.

Sadly, nature has not complied with our expectations as much as usual this year.  The log count is down.  The logging industry is virtually shut, mills closed, very few booms being formed and thus, fewer booms coming apart in storms.

But whatever there is in the way of flotsam, it shows up in December and January.  Makes sense actually – all you have to do is think like a log.

A log makes a break from the confines of a boom and, not being nimble of foot, simply goes with the flow or the current in this case.  The flow, however, has a ‘high’ and a ‘low’ tide and a log, lacking sentience, can easily get caught up on a falling tide.  Of course, the tide continues to rise and fall and, tho the log makes sporadic attempts at freedom, it is usually caught and trapped somewhere along the freedom path (i.e life becomes a beach).

Sometimes it is collected by the local bounty hunter – the log salvager – and sometimes it just sits on the highest point of the beach ‘hiding out’, as it were. 

January and December bring the highest tides often supplemented by forceful storms.  If a log is ever to get free again, this is the time for it.  In fact, the new year usually sees a virtual carpet of loose, natural and man-liberated wood on the inner channels and some choice logs are amongst them.  This is our opportunity to hunt and gather our years wood.

Typically, there is enough that we don’t have to go far.  A few hundred yards this way, a few hundred that way and, so long as we are watching carefully, enough choice pieces float through the ‘target area’ and we simply ‘go get ém’.

Gathering those doggies ain’t so hard.   Stick a ‘log dog’ in one end and tow it to your near-the-house spot and tie it up.  That part is quite do-able.  It is the log-wrangling that gets a bit dicey at times.  After awhile you have six or eight thirty footers floating in an untidy raft and it is time to cut them into manageable lengths and haul them up the slope.

Sal’s work is cut out for her. She ‘beaches them’ and then organizes them.  I am not convinced organizing is all that necessary but, when she is done, Martha Stewart would be pleased at the radial display.  It is lovely to be sure. 

We choose to take only the 8 – 10 inchers as a rule.  They are poles, actually, and much easier to handle than some of the salvager-preferred bigger logs.  Still, a 30 foot, 10 incher is a heavy piece of wood and we wrangle ém on the rock-strewn, kelp-covered beach where the footing is poor and a slipping log can easily put you in harms way.  Add the required chainsaw, ropes, block-and-taykle and peevee-use and cutting-to-length is a sometimes nasty chore.

I tell you all this because sometimes people ask, “What the hell do you two do all day out there?”