Lickety-split

There is nothing quite like splitting wood.

I got out my trusty splitting maul Saturday and started the long process of reducing a small mountain of treetrunk pieces to stackable, burnable logs for our stove. I wasn't sure how the catalpa tree from our neighbors' front yard would take to splitting, since I've never used catalpa before. This would be a test.

Cue the orchestra. Leonard Bernstein's score swells from the pit as Tony sings from an alley beneath a fire escape on the West Side: Ca-tal-pa, I'll never stop saying Catalpa, and suddenly I've found how wonderful a sound can be, Catalpa! Say it loud and there's music playing, say it soft and it's almost like praying...Catalpa.

In short, the stuff splits like a dream. Nice straight grain, you can slice it as thin as you like. One stroke and it falls apart, clean as can be. Toss the pieces and do another log. Some of them are so big around I get 16 pie-shaped split pieces out of a round section of trunk. If it burns half as well as it splits, this wood will go a long way when it's dried. It passed the test.

It only took an hour or so to clean up the stray chunks around the edges of the pile, barely making a dent. It might have been two hours, who knows, I lose track of time when I get in that zone. It was getting dark, so it was time to quit. Even the bigger chunks, which I can barely lift, cleave open with one hit of the maul. I'm looking forward to several satisfying afternoons splitting and stacking on early spring weekend so it will be ready to burn by next November.

I remember when I was about 15, after we moved to the northside Detroit suburbs and had a fireplace, my Dad showed me how to split wood. Balancing a small log on the chopping block - the biggest, flattest log you've got - and bringing the ax blade down square in the middle of the upright log, relying on the weight and angle of the ax to find its way into the grain. It helps, of course, if the log has dried a little and started to crack in cross-section, so it kind of shows you where to split it.

Chas Golly still prefers a nice sharp ax, probably because that's what he grew up using on the farm when he and his brother Stu chopped firewood. I asked him once, and they used an ax from start to finish; there were no chain saws then, and apparently they didn't use a crosscut saw, the way loggers once did, to cut up logs to stove length.

I've used axes, which have their advantages, and I've used a sledge and a wedge, which give you more power. A double-edge ax is nice, but you don't want it to bounce back and hit you in the forehead. I switched to a splitting maul as a compromise and now use that almost exclusively. It's like a light sledge hammer with a wedge on one side, heavier than an ax but not as sharp, and the wedge is attached to the handle, so it isn't flying around loose. If I didn't miss so often and chip away the handle, that sucker would last forever.

And you know what they say: wood you cut yourself warms you twice.