Rite of Passage

The boys who had been chopping trees before went back to work. There were several trees down and cut into logs waiting to be dragged away. Mr. Pizarro pointed at a gray tree trunk with a white mark on it.

“That’s your tree,” he said, as the cling of axes and the whirr-whirr of saws started around us.

I walked around the tree and looked up at it. Finally, just as we had been told and shown, I picked the direction I wanted it to fall. I didn’t want it to fall on anybody, and I wanted it to fall where it could be cut and hauled away.

Then I braced my feet, lifted my axe and started my undercut. This is a small cut in, the tree on the side you wish it to fall. The axe struck the tree and made a gash. Once again and a big chip flew. When I had my undercut, I stopped to rest.

“Very good,” Mr. Pizarro said. “When you are done, send Sonja up here. You know what you are doing this afternoon, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded and walked away then. He was overseeing all the different jobs that we were doing, plus doing a good bit of the heaviest work himself. You could expect him to be at your elbow one minute and then gone the next — he had come and tasted a spoonful of the soup while I was making it that morning. As he walked away, somebody yelled, “Stand clear,” and we all looked up.

One of the trees was ready to fall. There was a ravine between us and both of our trees were aimed to fall there, this one about thirty feet closer to the river than mine. Mr. Pizarro moved up the hill away from it. The boy, seeing everyone clear, pushed the tree and stepped back. It wasn’t cut completely through, but the undercut projected beneath the major cut and the push was enough to break through the bit of wood between and the tree wavered and then with majestic slowness toppled forward. In the silence left by the quieted axes, there was the sound of wood breaking, of branches crashing and then a great splintering rack as it smashed against the ground, raising dirt. Then the axes started again.

I moved around to the uphill side of my tree and started my major cut. I stopped from time to time to catch my breath and kick damp aromatic chips. At last it was beginning to waver and I knew it was ready to fall.

I yelled, “Everybody stand clear,” and checked to see that everybody was.

Then I pushed the tree and stepped back. My foot skidded on a chip and I sat down hard, looking up at the tree. At first I thought I was wrong and it wasn’t going to fall at all, but then it slowly tottered away from me. It fell and when it hit the ground, the butt, snapped clean from the stump, leapt high and then smacked back against the ground only a few feet away. The tree top that had been high over my head was now fifty feet below me in the gully. The tree, landing on the slope, slid forward a few feet and then came to a stop.

I looked down at it with a great deal of satisfaction. Then I got to my feet, dusted off the seat of my pants, picked up my axe and started back to where the cabin was going up. I wavedat Jimmy as I passed.

Of the fifteen of us, seven were girls. Five had cut down their trees in the morning, the only ones who hadn’t being me and Sonja. So I found her making a door for the cabin with Riggy. The saw pit was now turning out slabs from medium-sized logs — the slabs being really half-logs, flat on one side, round on the other. The slabs were to be used for shutters, doors, roof and cabin floor. In the case of the door, the poles cut in the morning were being nailed to the flat sides of slabs about six feet long. I gave Sonja my axe and sent her along to find Mr. Pizarro, looked at the saw pit in operation for a minute, and then turned to my afternoon job. In the pit, one person gets down in it, one person stands on the ground above, and the log is sawed between them. The only disadvantage is that the person on the bottom gets sawdust in his hair, but if you switch off this evens out.

My afternoon job was taking the mud and moss brought by the mud-and-moss detail (Juanita) and chnking the cracks between the logs. By the time I got back, the two boys on the walls were working on their third tier of logs. They had skids in place and were now looping ropes around the logs and pulling them up the skids and into place. I happily went along, pushin my mud and moss in place, thinking of ethics, and whi ing the afternoon away as the walls rose.

After Riggy finished the door and shutters, Mr. Pizarro showed up and they stopped putting up walls for awhile. By that time the walls were high enough that I felt surrounded, tall enough that I had to stand on a cut block to do my chinking. Where I had yet to chink the light slanted through to cut across the shadowed floor.