Firewood, Firearms, & Firemen

Animal lovers read at your own risk:  

The three F’s:

Firewood

Firearms

Firemen

All these very ominous words suspiciously start with the same letter as that perniciously troublesome word: “Father”.  

Is this chance?    I think not.

Last Saturday afternoon Chloe and I decided to spend the day at the local bookstore while the boys headed for the barn to cut and stack wood.  And that right there is where this little narrative goes wrong.  Right from the start, which is to say that Chloe and I leaving the boys on their own was our first mistake.  Male brains make way better decisions when estrogen is nearby and unfortunately on this Saturday, it wasn’t.

First, the firewood:  We needed some.  But the getting is not as labor intensive as you would imagine.  In the modern age, cutting and stacking wood is not what it used to be.  Mark uses his chainsaw while the boys man the gas-powered wood splitter.  Barely an ounce of sweat is produced by these activities.  Stacking the wood is another matter but we still don’t feel sorry for them.  Especially since I helped split and stack the incident-free weekend before.

Out behind are barn is plenty of wood, it just needs to be cut up.  There were a dozen large timber trees that Mark had gotten off a property that had just been thinned.  Mark would cut sections off the tree into rounds, roll them to Mitchell who’d split them, and toss them into a pile for Connor to stack.  How wrong can that go?

Wrong enough. 

At some point during Mark’s chain sawing, he cut through the tree and it looked as if it were starting to bleed.  He stopped the chainsaw, wondered if he’d cut himself and inspected his hands and legs.  Nothing wrong there.  He returned to cutting and more blood gushed from the tree.  Once the tree was sliced through he discovered a squirrel --or more accurately, two halves of a once whole squirrel, who made the unfortunate decision to take a cozy winter nap inside the tree right smack in the center of his cutting line. 

The boys decided the best plan of action would be to cremate the poor squirrel by piling up all the excess bark into a big mound, setting it on fire, and tossing in the upper and lower regions of their fallen comrade along with a jumble of associated guts. 

The bark pile was set ablaze with a brazen amount of gas, sprinkled with squirrel parts, lit with a match, and then they went back to work.

Soon more cutting and splitting ensued and once more another tree began to bleed.  Apparently our tree was a squirrel duplex and another cruel eviction had been served.  This time when the tree split in half they found its occupant miraculously alive yet horrifically mutilated beyond repair.  Now what?

Well according to testosterone this is where the second “F” comes in:  Firearms.

Mark went and got the gun.  Had estrogen been on the scene, any gaggle of girls would have been running away from the grisly scene to seek refuge in the house leaving the poor squirrel to meet its maker unassisted.  This is not the way of testosterone.  In sharp contrast, the boys were posturing as to who among them would be the best henchman to put the thing out of its misery.  Somehow Connor prevailed.  In some bizarre male bonding experiment a proud father loaded the gun and unleashed the weapon into his son’s hands.  Soon the deed was done.  Squirrel dead, young boy hopped up on adrenaline. 

One more for the crematorium, which was fully ablaze by this time.

With that, they set off back to work once more cutting and stacking.  They weren’t at it long when a few visitors showed up at the barn.  These visitors brought with them an enormous fire truck.  Yes, the third F: Firemen.

Mark looked up at the fully clad crew, put down his chain saw and said, “Let me guess…today is NOT a burn day.”

They smiled and nodded.

Mark has never been known for his fact-checking.  He had simply surveyed the valley surrounding our house, spotted several smoke plumes, and assumed it was a burn day.  Unfortunately it was only a burn day for the government.  So when the local fire department saw the smoke they jumped in their biggest firetruck and came to check things out (my theory is that perhaps they got a tip from an irritated neighbor who had had it with the copious amounts of chain-sawing, gun-firing, and fire making going on next door).  But soon they admitted they weren't really concerned about the now identified fire and that they were simply bored and this gave them something to do.

Meanwhile Connor got a little nervous as this was his first brush with the law (that we know about anyway) and was hoping the firefighters wouldn’t notice the dead carcasses in the fire--or the gun.  He was relieved when they finally left and he "wasn't arrested".

At the end of the day when Chloe and I returned nothing about their firewood shenanigans was ever mentioned.  But late that night, right before bed, we always ask our kids what their favorite part of the day was.  Connor couldn't contain his excitement over the days events any longer and bluntly stated,  

“I got to shoot an animal and the fire department showed up.”

And there you have it.  Quite a contrast to girls day at the bookstore.  When a Father's in charge anything can happen, and around here it usually does.