I don’t write much about chainsaws. It is because I don’t like them. I’m afraid of them. Your basic chainsaw is the classic ‘accident waiting to happen’! And I know that.

But the reason I don’t write about it is because I get the sense that the chainsaw knows too. It’s like it has a little black soul and it wants to hurt somebody. Hurt ’em bad. And even writing about it’s little ugliness is enough to set it off. I just don’t trust the little bastards.

But they are a necessary evil out here. No question about that.  Emphasis on the word: ‘evil’.

First off, I mostly try to leave my chainsaw be. Like a sleeping dog, (one derived from the Baskervilles line) it is at it’s best when left alone.

Then, when it must be perturbed, I make sure it is fed and lubed, well-sharpened and treated with respect. The trouble is; I don’t feel any of that for the little blood-letter. I just have a sense of fear. Chainsaws can smell fear, you know. And none of that ‘respect’ is reciprocated. The chainsaw is salivating. It is lying in wait. It is nearing the kill zone. Good times are ahead.

You might think I anthropormor-something-machines. And, of course, you’d be right. Machines don’t have souls. I know that. No, they are more like sociopaths, really, and do I really care which form of madness (human, machine, animal, bureaucrat) is trying to kill me? No. So, even if I am wrong about the character of the machine, I am not wrong about it’s intentions. It was born to kill and it was born to kill indiscriminately.

Chainsaws are evil.

I am not alone in feeling like this. My friend, Bert, has been ‘with chainsaw’ for some considerable part of his life. He has a Stihl big enough to carry a 24 inch bar. But he put on a 16. And he put on a pointy bar, too, not the usual ‘bluntnose’ kind.

“Well, you need power. If you are gonna do this thing, power is your friend. Go big. Go Stihl. But the trees we are taking are usually smaller so we can gain control, get some of that power back in our hands instead of the blade with a shorter bar. And I like the pointy end kind because it gives the saw less bite at the end with which to flip up and cut you. It’s a way to emasculate the beast, you know? Geez, Dave, you gotta watch that thing, you know. They got minds of their own!”

It is not the saw alone that presents the danger. It is the circumstance you find yourself in. Rarely do you get to cut a log that is well secured in a nice horizontal crib where your feet are flat and the saw is at arms length. Usually, you are standing on a moss-covered rock in the rain trying to free up a caught snag that is threatening to fall on you or a nearby building even before you attempt to cut it down.

Chainsawing is done, as a rule, when – even without the tool – you are already in a dangerous place. I do mine most of the time on a beach, on irregular ground, littered with sea weed and boulders in a natural log collection area that has storm-strewn logs stacked up like pick-up sticks. Cut the wrong one in the wrong place and the piece you expected to fall does not but the other one slides over and whacks another so that it then falls on your head or spins and takes out your legs.

Think of it this way: you have a vicious ferret in your hands and you are being careful but you have to climb a greased ladder in the dark and in the rain to put it back in it’s cage. That’s chainsawing ‘on-the-go’.

I won’t let Sal touch the chainsaw. I don’t care how sexist that sounds. The beast doesn’t get near her.

In this new world of safety emphasis, in this mad, mad, stupid-mad world in which we live in fear of packages of nuts containing nuts and bottles of shampoo exploding on airplanes, chainsaws would not be allowed due to obvious safety concerns. Hell, I doubt that small, sharp chains would even be allowed. If these products hadn’t already passed some kind of ‘safety inspection’ at the turn of the century when regulatory boards were on Opium, chainsaws would not be permitted for sale to the general public. Nor should they be.

You can’t get a Taser off the shelf. You can’t buy a hand-gun. And I don’t think a 12 year old ballerina or a thirty-something psycho should be able to walk into a Walmart and get a chainsaw, either. Call me crazy.

I swear: chainsaws are the single scariest thing you can buy for $500 without taking some sort of safety course and registering.

It is their only appeal.