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PAGOSA PAST: Cutting My Own Firewood |
Jerry Driesens | 2/7/08
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We stayed in that one bedroom log cabin the Lavertys rented us until just before Marrie, our oldest daughter, was born in June of 1977. I hated to leave my river, but Joanie insisted we needed another bedroom for the baby. (Derek and Dr.Kitzel Farrah made major additions and remodling to it to where you can’t recognize the old cabin today.) We had brought a woodstove with us from Flagstaff in the U-Haul and installed it with Lavertys reimbursing us. We had also brought with us a little 12” bar Montgomery Wards chain saw, You would not believe how much firewood I cut with that little saw! Later, after I got my Stihl Farm Boss with a 21” bar, I used that little Monkey Wards saw to cut live oak brush. We discovered that our Franklin fireplace/stove was not airtight and would therefore not hold a fire until morning. (Sometimes urban refugees need to learn the hard way!)
 We cut all of our own firewood and hauled it in the back of a 1962 Chevy Carry-All, a panel truck that predated the Suburban. It had been the 16 passenger school bus for the Upper Piedra when the school district decided to retire it and get a real bus for that route. They had a sealed bid auction for “Ol’ Blue.” (It was school bus yellow, but Jim Panter called it “ol’ Blue”, and the name stuck, so I ended up donating it years later to Challenge Wilderness Ministry, which Jim ran.) It had 16.5” split rims, Positraction, and there had been two 7’ bench seats along the back part facing each other. The kids had to stoop/crawl their way to the back without hitting their heads on the top. (Ask Jean or John or Raymond Taylor or Becky Taylor Guilliams what it was like- they rode in it and drove it more than anyone else.) The other two passengers got to ride shotgun across from the driver. There was a handle between the driver and them that swung the passenger door open, just like a bus, ‘cause that’s what it was. A 12’ aluminum boat would fit inside with all the doors closed.
When our friends from NAU, Paul and Cathy Henry, came to teach in 1977, Paul was the high school girls volleyball coach. He would have a short, light practice on Friday afternoons, before Saturday games. He and I would head out to Echo Lake after these short Friday practices with his boat inside “Ol’ Blue.” We’d get some fishing in during our busy coaching seasons until right before Thanksgiving when the lakes would usually freeze. There were red flashing lights on top and I must confess, now that the statute of limitations is past, that on a couple of occasions when someone tailgated me too closely and for too long, I resorted to turning on the red flashing lights to back them off.
I paid $302.75 for that bus in the sealed bid - half a month’s take home pay as a first year teacher (with a masters degree, don’t forget). The only other bidder was Benny Johnson, owner of Johnson Chevrolet (located where the plaza with Plaza Liquors is now. The bus was stored behind Johnson Chevrolet and we were to get the keys from him to test drive it. He told me that he thought it ran good and was going to offer $215 for it and to just offer more than that if I wanted it.
I misunderstood and thought he’d said $250, so I figured if a dealer would bid that much a private party would bid $300, and a smart guy would go $301 and so on… and I think you can see how I outsmarted myself into paying $87 plus some change more than I needed to. I asked Mamie Lynch, the business manager (and Joanie’s boss ) what happened to the two bench seats that had been in the back. She called up Worthe Crouse, the bus superintendent and welding teacher.
Mr. Crouse later wrote a column for the Pagosa Springs SUN entitled, “Weld Spatters,” that talked about Pagosa country in the really old days before any of us newcomers had even heard of Pagosa. This guy was a real local character, larger than life to some, and somewhat of a legend around here; and if he was still around it would really help a lot of recent newcomers to understand what Pagosa used to be like.
Mr. Crouse told Mamie that the sale was “as is”, so I wouldn’t be getting the bench seats, which were stored up in the loft of the bus garage. Mamie told him that if he didn’t have any use for them that I would like them and might even be willing to pay extra. She held the phone away from her ear as he thundered, ”Tell the boy that there’s people in hell that’d like ice cream cones, too.”
(I never thought I would come to like this crusty old character, but years later when I became the high school baseball coach and needed to have some welding done to help me build a batting cage, we actually became friends when he saw I was planning to erect it myself, although he was dismayed to find that I had never taken welding - he thought it should be a required course, not an elective.
Well, I ended up cutting a lot of firewood over the next 20 years. The log home we built on Lake Pagosa had no other heat source than an airtight Earthstove (plus some south facing windows) for the first 18 years we lived there. I learned a lot about cutting down trees, what kinds of wood were better, splitting, hauling and everything else, much of it the hard way. (Like — if you even touch the dirt, you might as well stop and sharpen your chain.) At first I kept breaking handles on my splitting maul until Paul Decker, the owner of San Juan Supply, patiently explained to me what I was doing wrong after he had graciously given me the new handles, which I had mistakenly thought were defective. (I finally bought a 14lb.all steel Monster Maul, which I still own - but have to be very careful using to not pull the muscles in my back or neck.) San Juan Supply was on Lewis Street and sold feed, hardware and lumber in its day. Paul Decker owned it for 40 years and you got old fashioned service by very knowledgeable help.
San Juan Supply was what C.W. McCall was referring to as the “feed store in downtown Pagosa Springs” in his country hit, “Wolf Creek Pass”. When Mr. Decker showed me that striking the round of wood in the center heart wood with the splitting maul would cause the upper part of the handle to hit solid wood on the follow-through when the round split around a knot, I sheepishly admitted to him that there really wasn’t anything defective with the axe handles, was there? He kindly said no and that those were very excellent ash handles. When I offered to pay for the handles he had given me, he just smiled and told me to keep doing a good job teaching and coaching.
When Eaton International first developed Twincreek Village subdivison in 1977, their road builder left all the pines they cut down along side the rough bladed new roadways. Paul and Cathy and Joanie and I would go out with baby Marrie in her car seat and cut up the green pine into rounds, load them in “Ol’ Blue” and take them to our respective cabins, even though we had to let them dry out for a year before we could even split them. (Love that “free” firewood!) We could barely imagine utilities and houses someday along the rim of Martinez Canyon.
That first year while still at the Laverty’s cabin, I borrowed Johnny Holcomb’s 1954 Chevy pickup with a cattle rack. Johnny and I had first met in 1967 when we were both sworn into the U.S. Coast Guard, in , of all places, Phoenix, Arizona. We lost track of each other after boot camp in Alameda, California, but lo and behold we both ended up teaching school in Pagosa Springs these several years later. He taught 3rd grade and invited us over for elk stew the day I ran into him at the old post office on Lewis and 4th Streets.
We accepted the invitation, somewhat squeamishly as I was a bit of an anti-hunter then, but we were too polite to refuse. (More on that subject in my story entitled, “Elk Hunting”.) Johnny later coached the high school baseball team with me one year.
The first time we borrowed his truck, we drove up the East Fork Road. As we drove up out of one of the creeks that the road crosses, (Silver Creek, I think) we heard a terribly loud crashing sound. The cattle rack had not been “pinned” into the truck bed and sides - and fell into the creek. With great effort Joanie and I wrestled it back into the truck bed and pinned it and proceeded on . Why he let me borrow that truck again after telling him of this mishap (with no damage, however) I’ll never know. He just laughed at the city boy.
The next time we borrowed it was a Saturday and they had just built the Poison Park Road to the trailhead above Williams Creek Reservoir. We’d heard that the Forest Service had instructed the loggers in the road construction company to stack up the trees they had cut along side the new road for wood gatherers to help themselves. This sounded like more free firewood to me, but it was a long way to drive and Johnny’s truck with that rack would haul a lot more wood than “Ol’ Blue” could in two or even three trips.
The firewood turned out to be green aspen and it was cut and stacked in 4’ lengths and very big around. They were very heavy, too much for me to lift alone and too heavy for Joanie to lift one end, so we cut them in half with the little chainsaw, (green aspen cuts like butter) and loaded that cattle rack full. We should have over-inflated the tires first, or only loaded it half full, but back we went to Pagosa. It wasn’t so bad on the gravel portion of Piedra Road, I guess because we must have kept sliding slightly ; but when we hit the pavement at the Job Corp Center it started swaying as the squished tires (only on the bottom) now gripped the asphalt. I had trouble controlling the truck and wondered if it would roll before I slowed her down. We crept back into town and added a bunch of air at the first gas station - The Wayside Grocery and Texaco - where Let it Fly is now - and limped back to the cabin and unloaded the green aspen,. That “free” wood was so wet we could barely get it to burn that winter and had to mix it in with some dry spruce and fir that was already burning hot. I did find that green aspen splits pretty easily when frozen.
When natural gas finally came to Lake Pagosa Park, we put in a furnace and ductwork . After Y2K passed we removed the Earthstove and installed a pretty little gas parlor stove on a thermostat. My father had always told me “that a man who cuts his own firewood is twice warmed.” After years of heating with firewood I told him it was more like 8 times warmed. First you cut the tree down, then you cut it up. Then you load the rounds, then you unload them. Then you split them, then you stack them. Then you carry a supply to a covered area of your porch, then you haul in several pieces to start the fire when you get home from work, then a bunch more before going to bed to hold a fire all night long. How many times am I up to? Don’t forget hauling out the ashes and disposing of them!
For all the money we saved after all that and the time expended (like elk hunting) it helped a lot — if you just considered it physical fitness and outdoor recreation.
Longtime Pagosa Springs resident Jerry Driesens is the broker owner of Jerry Driesens Real Estate. He has been sharing his memories of life in Pagosa Springs during the last quarter of the 20th century, in a series of Post articles. You can visit his website at pagosare.com. |
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