The Missileer's Son

From Email...

The signs of season were there, even if some of us missed them.

Mid-January had been cold, and although there had not been flooding on
the Potomac northeast of Leesburg, the local crossing at White’s Ferry
was closed. Ice, likely, that fouled the cable.

I had taken that crossing daily for a dozen years en route to my
Gaithersburg lab and office, and had gotten to know the ferry pilots,
their families, and owner Malcolm Brown, fairly well.

Although my life and business had been centered in Virginia for four
years, the habit of checking local conditions for the run to Maryland
remained.

From mid-December for five weeks, the mill had occupied time and
attention with a swelling response from artisan milling customers.
There seemed no time to mull over harvest notes and absorb the
experiences of my fourth grape harvest.

It was easy to forget the calendar with warm, balmy weather,
occasional rain, but none of the lead-up to February which is always
bad. There had been one previous year of our fourteen on the farm with
honeysuckle blooms and bees in January.

With the intensity of logging, hauling timbers to the mill and
cutting, there had been predictable mechanical issues: if equipment
was heavily used, it was bound to need repair. These done with
customers waiting and a few weather delays, made for the sense that
the saw mill business was taking flight.

In a family of professionals, my upbringing meant that business
activities were somewhat suspect, and somehow the activity of the
businessman as an occupation, seemed to carry with it the taint of
filthy lucre.

Waking to the splendid sunny mornings of January, however, found me
with a joyful heart. The days meant commerce, and a series of
particular visitors, each with his own story. I had no prior
experience with my own business, so the novelty made each day an
adventure I looked forward to.

Half of the appeal of a large saw mill is that curious male affinity
for loud machinery and, what are often referred to as “projects”. We
had had two large contractor orders in the thousands of dollars, and
neither worked out well. Our major successes came from families and
weekend woodworkers with orders in the hundreds.

Ogham Hardwoods Milling (OHM) offered a running commentary on wood
technology, lumbering, tractors, biology and even vineyard chatter,
and they all seemed to relish being in the fresh air and open spaces
of the farm for a morning.

I suspected some came to just “kick the tires” a little, not really to
purchase wood, but to just witness an operation they had dreams of, at
some point.

A surprising number brought their children to watch, and of these,
many were little girls who seemed enthralled by the green fields and
bright sunshine while Daddy was helping the miller.

Most visitors would lend an eager hand hauling logs around, hefting
them on the mill bed, even helping shut down machinery and stack
boards.

At first, there was a guilty Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer whitewash fence
character to it, getting these folks to work for free. However, I
always made a point that our competitive prices were, in part, due to
keeping operations and overhead costs minimal.

The best were active duty military: we saw a lot of them in the winery
business, and they liked being outdoors among the exotic aromas of
aromatic cedar, tangy fresh oak and that distinctive dark aroma of
walnut.

Last weekend, an active-duty missileer and his son brought by several
nine hundred pound oak trunks to be rendered into boards. A missileer
is an officer in the United States Air force whose work is missile
technology and operations.

With him was his sixteen-year old Sam who wanted to build a sturdy
carpentry bench. Instead of buying lumber at a local mall, they
brought timber for milling.

There were a series of logistic challenges: neither our remaining
operational tractor nor Colonel Craig’s Ford pick up could cross the
mill yard that had been ground into sucking mud with recent crossings,
and the rain.

The alternate route meant offloading on a high embankment and coaxing
the log downhill without having it break free on rampage. Once out of
our hands, the log could not be slowed, stopped or steered without
broken limbs, or worse.

On arrival, the kid was full of rebellion, vacillating between his
interest in the project and his disinterest in taking orders from
anyone.

By day’s end, we were a team having survived the basic training, the
grunting and sweating against breaker bar and nearly immoveable timber
object, without injury.

The Colonel wasd delighted with his neatly stacked, thick oak planks
in the truck bed where the massive logs had been wedged, and where
they had dented and scratched the wheel wells by sheer mass.

The tangy aroma a fresh-cut oak reminded me of wine barrels.

By day’s end, the kid had vacated his teenage attitude, mostly from
exhaustion and back strain that left all of us elated at a task nicely
completed.

They say there will be snow today, tomorrow and Saturday, so the
respite from foul weather may be over.

Despite the dire consequences of global warming, El Nino has been good
for business and much to my liking.