Making Wood

Photo of Huston Cradduck and Bouncer by Minnie Wabanimkee

By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor

Reprinted from Stocking’s book Letters from the Leelanau (U-M Press 1990), this essay is part of our series on the living legacy of Native Americans in northern Michigan.

I heat with wood. Most of us up here do. Wood is still cheaper than any other fuel, and it’s available. Some of us cut our own wood, but to do that you have to have a woodlot, a truck, a saw in good condition, and time. My husband and I cut our own wood one winter, but in retrospect it seems like that’s all we did.

So now we buy our wood from woodcutters. Over the years I have come in contact with a number of woodcutters and can say without reservation that they are the most independent-minded people I have ever known. The reason for this seems to be that woodcutting attracts them, being perhaps the last profession in the world a man can do alone—all alone—with just a truck and a chainsaw.

Huston Cradduck, the woodcutter, has a wooding yard in an old gravel pit about an half mile down the slop from us. Sometimes early in the morning in the fall we can hear him down there, thunking wood into the back of his pickup truck, filling orders for the season’s late buyers. Sometimes when I drive to the post office to get my mail, I can see him out there with his yellow tape measure, measuring off an exact cord for a customer.

One day I went along with him as he worked, so I could see what it was like, cutting wood for a living. We began the day in the gravel pit at 8:00 a.m. Huston, a young Indian man Dale Miller, and an old man called Bouncer are working a mechanical wood splitter.

The sound of the wood splitter in the old gravel pit is high and whiny, like a cicada. It drowns out everything, even thought. Finally the wood splitter stops. For a minute the sound seems to ring in the gravel pit, in the rock I’m leaning against.

“How’s that for making wood?” Huston asks. He lights up one of his Odin cigars. He seems pleased with himself. I ask him to explain the expression “making wood.” “It’s certainly wood when it’s a tree,” he says, “but then when you go performin’ it over, that’s called making wood.”

We climb into the cab of his old red pickup truck, Huston, Dale Miller, and me. Bouncer goes back to his trailer at the top of the gravel pit. We drive about a mile down M-204, past my house and a couple of other farmhouses to a deep, rutted two-track that bumps along through a swamp. The cab of the truck smells of a rich blend of gasoline and Odin cigars, and every time we go over a bump, a little puff of that odor bounces up with us.

“When I first come to this country,” Huston says, “I bought me a forty-acre parcel in here, put up a cabin for my wife and kids. When I first come to this country, I had twenty-five dollars to my name.” I ask Huston what country he’s from. “Missouri,” he says, “Missouri.”

Huston Cradduck was born in the little town of Rudy, Arkansas, in 1921. “I got to fourth grade, then I was workin’ in the woods, skiddin’ ties with a mule.” It was the height of the Depression; he didn’t return to school. He began cutting cord wood with a crosscut saw when he was ten. “Back them days, that was fifty cents a cord.”

He figures that when he was younger he could cut, split, and load ten cords in an eight-hour day. A cord of wood weighs, “in the estimate neighborhood,” about fifteen hundred pounds. “That’s a young man’s day,” he says. Now at sixty-seven he only works a six-hour day. Huston and his wife live in one of the biggest and best-kept houses in the village. They’ve been married forty-seven years. “Won’t be long and it’ll be a Golden Wedding.”

The truck begins to climb up out of the swamp and into the hills. Finally, Huston pulls to a stop near the ridge. He gets out and oils his chain saw and then begins to “slice down” several beech and maple trees marked with blue paint for culling. Huston is a tall, skinny man with ropey muscles; he clambers up and down the steep hills, as he says, “like a billy goat.” Dale Miller climbs up and down the hills too, hauling logs to the pickup truck, and appears to do so without exertion.

Huston tells me to stay clear of where they’re cutting. Has he ever had any accidents in the woods? “I lost five teeth once. I worked ’til quittin’ time that afternoon, then went to the dentist and had ’em pulled. A limb I was cuttin’ snapped back and hit me in the face.” Another time, on North Manitou, a limb “sliced” his head; he had to wait several hours for the mail boat to take him to the hospital in Northport to get “sewed up.” That day he did not work until quitting time, but he was back on the job two days later.

I find a place to sit on a large, blue-gray rock well up the hill. It is mid-morning now, but the deep woods are still surprisingly cool. From far away I hear a thrush sing. I have brought along a copy of the Detroit News, but I don’t feel like reading it. It sits beside me on the ground, the faces of presidential candidates staring up at me from the ferns. Not until I look at the date on the newspaper do I realize it’s the Fourth of July.

When the men take a break, we talk about the wooding business. Huston gets thirty-five dollars a face cord. “It seems like a lot of money,” he says, “but not by the time you figure your truck, your saw, your wood splitter, your gas, your oil, your repairs. Then I gotta give John Simpson (the man on whose land he’s cutting) every fourth cord.” Huston says it takes about an hour to cut a cord of wood. It takes another hour to load, haul, and unload it; this process is repeated again when the wood is delivered to the customer. Huston laughs. “One woman said to me, ‘Now my husband wants you to stack it right there between those two trees.’ I said, ‘No, ma’am, that’s his job’.”

Sitting there listening, I am thinking of a New Yorker cartoon some months back that showed a bunch of city folk all walking around the city with their matching canvas wood carriers filled with Georgia fatwood. I am thinking that there is a lot that people don’t know about cutting and burning wood. We burn twenty cords a winter, and sometime in February—after months of cleaning up the tracked-in woodchips and snow, after months of getting up at 3:00 a.m. to bank the fire—I would gladly trade my wood stove for a furnace or a servant.

“My wife says I’m crazy,” Huston says. “There ain’t hardly no money in it, but I’ll tell you, I like the woods, and I don’t like no four walls. Then I had a little bit of trouble, takin’ orders offa anybody. Once time a man cussed me and used my name. I was layin’ blocks and I was about to lay one upside his head. I said, ‘Man, just ’cause you’re the boss, you ain’t go no right to cuss me, all you do is pay me, man, you’re human same as me.’ ” He pauses a minute, then says, “Me and my wife got a nice house in town, got a dollar to spend if we want one, got three kids grown and married off.” He stubs out his cigar and picks up his chain saw, “I don’t need nobody tellin’ me how to live, that’s all, don’t need nobody tellin’ me when I can and when I cain’t.”