TOWNSHEND — Walk to the highest mountaintop and listen. Somewhere, off in the distance, you will hear one singing its song. Its lone voice drones on, rising and falling.
Somewhere, someone is using a chainsaw.
Its sound is so common that it should be the state bird.
Long ago, people used hand saws and axes to fell, limb, and split their wood. It was slow and tedious. Today, only cranks cut their cordwood by hand.
The chainsaw is too useful to be restricted to mundane tasks like putting in firewood.
I had a shop teacher who used to cut up old tires to heat his shop.
“You gotta watch out for the radials, though,” he said, then laughed in the way that crazy people do sometimes.
In New York, burglars once used chainsaws to cut their way into apartments.
A friend of mine liked to to go camping. He traveled light, taking only the minimum gear. But he always brought a chainsaw. “In case we run into any bears,” he said.
Dirty Dave, a building contractor I worked for, used a chainsaw to cut holes in walls. Once we had to cut a hole in a third-story roof.
Dave paced around on the ground impatiently as we measured and marked and drilled. Infuriated by the slow pace, he grabbed the chainsaw out of his truck. He scaled the ladder as a small crowd gathered below.
He fired up the saw and cut the hole for the dormers. Sawdust flew into his face, and a small cloud of blue smoke rose into the air. The crowd applauded, and Dirty Dave smiled. He was an artist, and he knew it.
The world was his canvas, and the chainsaw was his paintbrush.
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Of course, all of this convenience has its price. Chainsaws are notoriously dangerous. The blade can bind and kick back. The saw waits for you to make a mistake, then it bites you.
Once I walked into a gas station as a small group of hunters stood around the coffee pots trading chainsaw stories.
“It still hurts when it rains,” one of them said, holding out his hand. Some of the fingers were shorter than they should have been.
But he was lucky, and he knew it too. You could hear it in his voice.
He picked up his coffee and walked outside into the cold fall air.
Somewhere in the distance, you could hear a chainsaw singing out its song.