The Mill

Afterthought

When Hadley and Ernest Hemingway lived in early 1920s Paris, their flat was situated above a sawmill, 113 rue Notre Dame-des-Champs. His description did not become public until A Moveable Feast appeared in 1964, a few years after he committed suicide.

There are no emerging writers here a century later, nor is this Paris, however, the best natural landscape in the world can be enjoyed while driving east on Rt. 50 through Ashby’s Gap overlooking Paris, Virginia, and Leeds Manor Road below and in the distance.

There is, however, a mill.

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The plot of land had been designated as a source of timber since 1810. The real estate was mentioned in an old will when it was bequeathed to a man’s daughters.

It wasn’t this fact discovered later, that led us to set up a commercial sawmill at the farm.

That was ten years ago, and a continuing source of unexpected stories ever since.

The people one meets trafficking in wood!

But their images and actions will appear here at some later date: the recently retired Old Guard member of the U. S. Army Fife and Drum Corps with timber from a tree planted by George Washington; the couple who sought out lightning-struck timber; the banjo maker from West Virginia; the attractively single nurse who still entertained fond images of a medical doctor she knew who had gone native, forging his own iron implements. Ash for the airframe of a replica Wright Brothers machine.

The mill at hand taught me everything and saved my life.

Off-season when winery and vineyard are quiet, there is time to take stock of recently fallen trunks to see which might yield the greatest profit.

We supply lumber, custom cut, from our own stocks but also accept jobs from those who bring their own, in some cases a beloved trunk from an old home lost to the violence of a windstorm. Although the tree went down, the owner felt a connection having grown up under its shade. By using its lumber for a table, the loss of his old friend was lessened.

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I had cut nothing in eighteen months.

It was a hospitalization that many, including myself, thought would be terminal.

I did not think about it at the time, but being given temporary reprieve seemed the greatest gift imaginable.

The recovery took more than a year, and once the first signs of strength returned, there was the neglected farm to address. Emerald ash borer had killed so many trees, there was deadfall green ash everywhere.

Not a few, but dozens all of which were large, some attaining forty inch diameters.

The meadows and pastures kept so neat and tidy previously, had gone to seed. It is not possible to mow where tree trunks and broken branches lie beneath two years’ waist high field grass.

Yesterday all that changed.

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Without the excruciating detail, a mill depends on the miller’s health. Likewise, it depends on the serviceability of a stable-full of chainsaws, sharpened chains, and a tractor fit and tuned for the task of moving timber from the forests to the millyard.

A cubic foot of woods weights about sixty-five pounds.

Many subscribe to Gold’s Gym for weight-bearing exercise that is the foundation, with a good diet, of good health.

In the millyard, there is so much heavy work it is easy to forget the equivalent sets and reps in the course of a day’s work, that is, until quitting time and that lag just before supper when the muscles remind you of their recent disuse.

Yes: the exercise is measured and at times severe, but by the end of the day, there are crisply edged beams and boards to show for the effort.

As a natural product, the orderliness of its end state, whether a timber frame or an exotic chair, contrasts with the organic, often fractal nature of grain, orderly but disorderly according to growth season and aspect of its cutting and infestations that give fascinating character to a burl or a figure such as quilted, curly, birdseye, tiger or spalted maple.

There are aesthetics quite apart from the application or structural engineering that springs from the physical characteristics of the wood species.

Yet another laudable dimension brought out by the cutting, crosscutting and ripping of tree trunks, is aroma.

There is no aroma quite as enticing as the tang and spice of freshly milled oak. Such aromatics are imparted into red wines stored in oak barrels, and each species, even each French forest of oak finds an immemorial home in a wine bottle, some of which if properly made and stored, can stretch into centuries while improving in taste and aroma.

Another strikingly pleasant aroma is acetophenone in fresh-milled black cherry wood, that quintessential and unmistakeable aroma of cherries.

I could go on.

It is good to be back.

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