Chopping Wood
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On our first night staying in the cottage, whilst on a working holiday on a farm in France, we were shown where everything was by a guy called Alex. He said he had been working on the farm for 6 months, knew how everything worked and that if we had any questions or needed any help, we could ask him.
I found it cold at night-time in the mountains, so I asked if there was any heating. Alex showed me a wood-burning stove and explained that he didn’t use it often and warned that it had a fault which made it hard to light. I decided that I would light it, both for warmth, and for toasting marshmallows on. Our hosts had provided us with lots of wood in the woodshed, but we had to chop it up to use it in the stove. Alex said he would come to the shed and show me how to cut up the wood. I said not to bother, because I knew how, but he insisted, saying that it was quite difficult and that he would show me the best way.
On the way to the shed, Alex showed me around the farm, and told me about our other chores, such as watering the plants in the greenhouse and feeding the chickens, and showed me the most efficient way to do these tasks. I had the feeling that he knew how to do his job really well and that I could learn a lot from him and I looked forward to working with him on the farm.
The woodshed was hardly a shed at all, one of the walls had fallen down, and the roof was full of holes. I wondered how the wood stayed dry. When we got inside, Alex said that there was an art to chopping logs, and that you had to do it in the correct way, otherwise it could take ages to do a job that should only take a minute or two, and it could be dangerous. I had thought chopping wood was simple, you just hit it with an axe, and it fell into 2 pieces, so I wondered what special trick he had for making it easier. Alex explained that you had to hit the log right in the centre to split the log, otherwise the axe would get stuck. I didn’t understand, because I had never had this problem before.
With that, he picked up his axe and brought it down on the log, but he was right, the log didn’t split, and then I understood why. He wasn’t actually using an axe, he was using a pickaxe, and the point was of course just making a hole in the log, instead of splitting it in two.
Once I had finished laughing, I found a real axe, which was much more efficient, and soon we had a large pile of wood which we took back to the house and used to try and make our fire. Alex was right though, it was very difficult to light the fire in the stove, and it took several attempts to get it going, but the stove wasn’t faulty, the problem was that all the wood was soaking wet, the woodshed, as I’d feared, actually didn’t keep the wood dry at all.
I asked Alex if he had been chopping wood with a pickaxe, and using wet wood every time that he wanted a fire and he admitted that he didn’t light the stove often because it took so long to chop up the wood, and because he had difficulty lighting the stove, and that all winter he had been freezing cold.
