Firewood
When used for cooking, especially in the morning, the savoury aroma of bacon and eggs wafting around the camp site is simply astounding, or if you have the patience to wait on the perfect glowing coals where you can toast the most incredible light brown, puffy marshmallows. You can certainly do all of this, but it requires good, preferably dry, firewood. Several years ago we had a friend who was in need of a summer job and wanted to stay at the lake during the summer. He suggested selling firewood as he could borrow his father’s wood splitter to really produce a good quantity of split wood. We agreed and Troy arrived with his wood splitter loaded in the back of a Chevy Suburban. Troy’s splitter was an older model with a Briggs & Stratton motor which hadn’t been used for a long while. The first job was to clean the sludge from the carburetor to get the splitter operational. Once that was complete he was ready to go. I sharpened up a saw and sent him out in search of his dollars standing in the woods. As it turned out Troy had not really handled a saw very much, let alone cut down a tree (city boy). I believe he had watched it being done. I sent him to some wood piles already cut suggesting that would be an easier task with less risk; he worked away at it managing to cut several loads, while trying diligently to keep the saw chain out of the ground. Splitting went along just fine; the wood was loaded on the truck and peddled in the camp ground. Troy found several customers to purchase his wood, everyone was happy until the recipients of the wood tried to light a fire. As it turned out Troy must have found the wettest wood on the pile, I believe you could wring the water out. Recently I spoke to Jerrod, one of the recipients of Troy’s wood, he recanted with some colourful language that he was only now able to burn that wonderful wood from Troy. I suppose you could say it’s not always the product that made the sale it’s the “salesmanship.” |
