Posts Tagged → lumber
Guys (men), don’t be an idiot
Emergency Room staff: “Hi there, what can we do for you tonight?”
Me: “I’m an idiot.”
ER Staff: “Yeah, we see a lot of those in here.”
Two hours before, the dry white oak board was very hard, and the cutter blades were very dull, and so that board was giving the cutter fits. Never mind that I had been running the cutter all day to fulfill a large order of oak, and that I had already sharpened the primary blade once, hours before. When the board end bounced off the dull blades, I leaned into it to force the cut. The last thing I remember is a flash of white in the dusk that was enveloping my worksite, and suddenly I knew I was hurt.
Reeling backwards and clutching my face, I first checked my teeth, my eyes, and unhappily noted the gushing blood pouring out of my face. The pain was overwhelming, and the copious blood told me it was serious.
After leaning on the order of banded lumber, hunched over and collecting my wits, I again took stock of my injured face. All my teeth appeared to be in my mouth, and I could see through my heavy wire frame glasses with both eyes. A big pool of blood was congealing on the lumber below me, and blood was liberally dripping and splotching all around me, wherever I went.
“Broken nose, you idiot,” I said out loud, to no one in particular. Time was 7:40 pm and anyone who might have been around to help me during regular working hours would have been long long gone home by then. From March through October I work farmer’s hours, which means work only ends when there is insufficient daylight to work by. When you choose to work until dark and until after dark, which I actually greatly enjoy, you usually work alone. And if you make a stupid, idiot mistake, you will bleed alone. If you are really unlucky or a really big idiot, you will die alone.
So, guys, don’t be an idiot.
Here are the idiot mistakes I made, which you should learn from and not make yourselves:
- Working around machinery and powerful tools while tired is an idiot mistake. All week a cold had dogged me, and even before beginning to work very physically, I was already run down from it. Hinyucking huge gobs of nasty green mucus everywhere every five minutes is a signal that your body is not well, that it is fighting off some infection or cold, and that it needs rest. Take the hint and rest, even a little bit, here and there throughout the day. On top of being sick, I had worked hard all day, lifting and moving logs and lumber, and when the accident happened I was just deeply bone tired from the heavy physical labor work. Mistakes happen much more easily to tired people, because tired people have poor judgment and slow reaction time. I had all of this in spades, and paid for it.
- Don’t work with dull tools. That cutter was battering the last piece of oak, not cutting it, and yet I foolishly leaned in close to physically force the very last piece of wood through. Big mistake. The powerful motor kicked that wood back into my face before I had time to second guess my poor decision. And yes, I had just been telling myself that after this very last piece of wood, I would remove the cutter blades and sharpen them. Too late, idiot.
- Wear correct protective equipment. Gloves are a must around wood and power tools, but the job I was doing also required serious face protection. Because I wear large, rugged eyeglasses everywhere, every iteration of which shows the battle scars of years of hard physical work, I have become a little lazy about better protecting my eyes. That became apparent about ten years ago, when some grinding wheel metal incredibly ricocheted up under my eyeglass lenses at an impossible angle and stuck in my eyeball. Took a while for that junk to work its way out. Just like with the safety event that prompted this particular essay, that day at the grinding wheel I had lazily neglected to simply slop my big clear face shield on my lumpy head and enjoy the benefits of complete protection from flying fragments, impacts, etc. Had I been wearing the face shield, hanging up on the wall just twenty feet away, while running the dull cutter, I probably would have had a good bruise across my face from the kick back, but nothing broken and no lost work time.
Last time I had a broken nose was my senior year in high school. Like the young idiots we were, a bunch of us were playing full tackle pick up football, in the dark. Heavily rushed, the opposite QB had lateraled the football to Rafael Richards, who, being athletic as hell, rocketed straight up the middle. Playing safety position, I put my head down and aimed straight for him. Rafael also put his head down to punch through the defenders, and the two of us woke up a bit later in the Chester County Hospital ER on two gurneys, next to each other. Naturally, we each had a mirror image injury, which included a broken nose and a deep gash in the forehead that required 17 stitches in the meat and another 15 stitches in the skin above.
Rafael went on to get his MD from Harvard Medical School, long before DEI and wokeness there rendered such a degree a question mark, instead of the world class achievement it should be. Somehow I just know that Rafael does not run the risk of getting his nose broken while being a fancy Harvard trained physician in an air conditioned office.
Me? I’m an idiot farting around with penny ante wood orders in the mountains. Because I like it.
But guys, regardless of doing what you like or don’t like, don’t be an idiot.
Cheap but highly effective face shields are sold everywhere for twenty bucks. Buy one and wear it. Don’t be an idiot
The beautiful power of a free market guitar
A lot of the recent discussion and reporting about the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is how hard the participants there are trying to centralize decision making, to aggregate power into as few hands as possible, and to control the choices that individual people have available to them all around the world. This effort to concentrate power and decision making in the hands of elites runs opposite and directly against the democratic forms of government that many people around the globe have fought and died to achieve.
Places like India, France, Britain, Israel, South Korea, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, the Philippines, and of course my home country of America, have all offered their citizens a maximum amount of personal freedom and opportunity. People living there can make all kinds of choices about what they want to read, to say, to wear, to eat, what kind of job they want to try, what kinds of products they want to try and create and sell. And that last part, the creating and selling part, is really at the heart of democracy. Because free markets offer choices not just in economic spheres, but which naturally blend into our own personal lives.
When a person, you the reader here, for instance, feels personally fulfilled by fully following your natural talent and curiosity, and by fulfilling your creative spirit, often also followed by greatly improving your physical living conditions, then you become a maximally happy person. This pursuit of happiness is one of the main reasons that America exists, and it is enshrined in our Declaration of Independence. A nation filled with happy people is a miracle, because it is so rare in human history. So we see that free markets create the most happy, most fulfilled individuals, who are creative, educated, and opinionated.
And we also see with the WEF that the wealthiest people on Planet Earth are now scheming and trying to take that happiness away. The WEF people do not want “little people” individuals to make their own decisions. Instead, they want centralized decision making for all of us, by a very small number of ultra wealthy people. They do not support democracy or free choice or you having an opinion that threatens their power.
I want to share a neat related video with you. To me it is powerful because it touches on this subject of an individual who follows his dream to make the best guitars possible within the free markets that the world allows. He succeeds within the international guitar market, but because of a natural resource constraint – the almost complete loss of ebony trees, necessary for making guitar necks and frets – he takes a big risk, makes some big sacrifices, and ends up playing an even bigger and more positive role in the world.
Bob Taylor, of Taylor Guitars, uses careful market-driven management of rare ebony trees and their surrounding forests to create the conditions necessary for conserving the vast African rainforest jungle those trees grow in. When the local people no longer need to poach ebony trees to sell on the black market, they become protectors of the ebony trees. Economics and free markets keep ebony trees alive, and growing for the future, as well as the richly diverse jungle habitat in which ebony trees grow. This is powerful stuff only achievable by free markets.
The same dynamic is also at play with trophy hunting in Africa, where wealthy hunters pay much more to kill wild game than that same animal is worth as bush meat to the local populations. Because the locals get the meat from the trophy animal (99% of the trophy animal is immediately donated to locals, the hunter and the safari camp getting the other 1%) anyhow, and they also get the hunting and tourism-related jobs from the international visitors who want to see and hunt wildlife, the incentive shifts away from poaching and market hunting to the locals then protecting and conserving the wild game they once saw only as a meal. Again, powerful natural resource conservation as a direct result of free markets.
Long live free markets, personal choice, personal accountability, and personal reward for hard work and risk taking. May the World Economic Forum fail in its effort to end our choices and to make us “own nothing.”
Here is the Taylor Guitar video. I hope it speaks to you like it speaks to me.
(and here is the ten years later video, which is about ebony tree planting and husbandry)
Happy Economy: Consumers & Local Banks vs. The World
The US economy is strong, and it has been strong since a flood of consumer confidence swept in behind a new president who ushered in to a miserable bipartisan vacuum a refreshing cleansing confidence.
Added to that confidence was –and very much is– a renewed pride in America, in being American, and in American-made products. By mid-2017 a sense of 1950s community once lost and now found again birthed a strong antidote to Obama’s “new normal” of slow American decline.
And we can’t just blame Obama. Yes, Obama hates America and did everything he could to destroy our nation from inside and outside. But he was helped significantly by ye olde typical career Republicans who saw money to be made in America’s decline, just as there was money to be made in its growth. But growth is harder, and why work hard if you don’t really have to, they reasoned. Either way, growth or defeat, the big money Republicans bought their many pet congressmen to safeguard their investments and stood by watching as they hit big on a global economy shifting from their American home turf to China, India, the EU, and other undeserving recipients of America’s health.
In fact, America’s veins were opened up and flowing out. Our life force was draining away, and a host of hungry nations were perched around us, like vultures, picking away at the juicy scraps that fell from our Rust Belt homes and boarded up churches. Both Democrats and Republicans were pumping away, pushing our citizens’ energy force, our very national being, into the waiting mouths of so many other nations. And so our American economy had sputtered, dying
That is, until Trump inspired US consumers, and the local banks they work with and rely upon to take what are big steps in their quality of life.
And so like a thing alive, the American economy has powered forward like it has not moved in decades. And why would the economy not be alive? Our collective economy is us, of us, an organic part of us and an extension of us. America has a sense of good health again, and so it follows that our economy is healthy again, too. And it is getting stronger, despite transparent and treasonous attempts to destroy our economy by the Democrat Party and everyone else allied with them, including the governments and industries of China and Russia.
It is sickening that an entire American political party will do everything it can to badmouth, damage or destroy America’s economy simply in order to artificially malign a president they oppose. The cost to America is enormous! Then again, this is the same political party that advocates for illegal invaders over American citizens, for law-breakers and against law-followers, that claims Social Security will be tossed overboard by the other political party and then does everything in its power to give all of our Social Security money to their new chums, the illegal invaders.
So yes, I guess destroying America’s economy and hurting the American citizens standing in the way is to be expected from the Democrat Party and their communications arm, the Mainstream Media.
One discrete sector of the national economy that is changing is the timber industry. When four hundred million (400,000,000 !) middle-income Chinese aspire to own the nice kitchens and hardwood floors that define comfortable life in America, a huge sucking sound can be heard ’round the world as unquantifiable amounts of natural resources are pulled in to that huge nation. And when the Chinese economy began to falter in early 2018, even before the tariff battle, the Chinese domestic demand for American timber dried up. We then learned in late 2018 that the red oak, residual ash, and black walnut that had been bringing us huge export revenue but which were then beginning to stack up in East Coast log yards were not once destined for Chinese factories re-exporting their finished goods back to America. No, those logs and lumber were being used up domestically in China, as China grew its own middle-income population. A population that is now up against the ropes and cannot buy American hardwoods that make pretty kitchens and flooring.
Accordingly the American timber industry is going through a shake-up due to the way timber buyers invested and spent. The fact is that even as they close in China, new cabinet and flooring factories are opening up in several other Asian countries.
And so now on the battlefield it is the confident American consumer and her local bank officers standing strong against the evil political tide that seeks to reverse what has been accomplished, just begun really, since November 2016. It is happy healthy family and local community versus a global colossus hungry for endless cash, endless money, endless wealth, at any cost, and a domestic political party hungry for power at any cost, even the cost of individual liberties and American success.
In this fight I put my money on the American consumer, not just because I think she is a tough and hard working bunch, but because I am an American. I want her– you, me, us — to win this fight.
Red oak and rain: Taking a strong economy for now while America fights for an even better future
Our present tariff battle with communist China has some personal pain associated with it, but I and everyone in business I deal with say we are ready and willing to put up with it for the long term betterment of America.
“I am just sitting here watching the rain come down,” says ‘D’, a young forester I have worked with for almost twenty years.
A super hard worker, risk taker, and fourth generation forester\logger (he is the first in his family to have a college degree, and in fact he has a Masters in Forestry), ‘D’ has a young family to feed and a great deal of investment in time, equipment, and standing timber that he cannot do anything with, or earn money with, so long as it rains.
With incessant rain like we had throughout 2018 and now well into 2019, most forestry operations stop. Marking timber on steep mountain sides, building roads into timber, cutting, skidding, and hauling timber just is not safe or environmentally possible in rain. Then, as a result, the sawmills slow down. They cannot get the trees they need to make the hardwood lumber products so much of America and the world require for flooring, cabinetry, moulding, doors, tables, furniture, etc.
But the rain is only part of the pressure on the timber industry.
Almost half of Pennsylvania’s hardwood timber economy is comprised of the red oak tree, which grows a beautiful wood used around the world. Until the tariff spat began last year, China was the primary destination for almost all of Pennsylvania’s red oak. China took our exported red oak logs and manufactured all kinds of wood products that they then sold back to American companies. When the tariffs started to bite in 2018, demand for red oak logs began to slow, because Chinese companies could not afford to compete on that new level playing field. Their own tariffs on manufactured American goods had protected them from competition, and so with tariffs on their products, their own manufacturing slowed down, and their decreased need for raw materials followed. A year later, the demand for red oak lumber has nearly died. Spectacular high quality red oak trees, that six months ago were highly sought after in a fiercely competitive free market, are now being turned into railroad ties and pallet wood (some wood workers specialize in making beautiful furniture from homely oak pallets; well, guys, get ready for a whole lot of very nice red oak pallets to become available).
Standing red oak trees have lost over half their value since this time last year, and as a result, roughly a third of Pennsylvania’s powerful hardwood lumber industry is at a stand-still, with landowners, foresters, loggers, and sawmills trying to figure out how to make up that lost productive time, and lost revenue, and to find another tree species to take the place of the red oak.
Back to the rain… the forest products industry can weather this storm, as well as the tariff tiff with China.
“It’s for the best, for a better America, a better economic future for all of us” says Mike, a heavy equipment operator from Renovo, Pennsylvania, to me this morning, as he finally found time to discuss a timber project we have together, and the China tariff effects on it.
Mike, too, is stalled out temporarily by the non-stop rains, and he is also bitten by the temporarily slow red oak market.
“It hurts, but we needed to do these tariffs,” says Mike.
“It’s sacrifice and pain now, so that America will have an even better economy in the future,” says ‘D’.
I feel the same way. Pain and sacrifice, risk taking and hard work, all for a better future for us and our children. We will all be creative and find ways to make a living; after all, overall the economy is very strong.
Carry on, Mister President. We understand what you are doing and why you are doing it. The tariffs hurt, but we support you. It is about damned time that someone in Washington, DC, gave a crap about our country and we people who labor out of sight in flyover country.
Logger “Pete” takes a breakfast break on his log landing. A tough, super hard working little Irishman from central Pennsylvania, it’s Americans like Pete who keep our economy going from the ground up
Tom Wolf & Republican legislature should agree on this, if nothing else
A version of the following essay was published by the Patriot News at the following URL: http://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2014/12/if_they_can_agree_on_nothing_e.html#incart_river
Conservation: An Area Where Democrat Tom Wolf and the Republican Legislature Should Agree
By Josh First
Land and water conservation are not luxuries, they are necessities in a world of growing demand for natural resources. As America’s population grows, the natural resources that sustain us, feed, us, cloth us, nurture us, warm us, and yes, even make toilet paper (and who can do without that), must be produced in ever greater supply.
Some of these resources are at static levels, like clean water, while others, like trees, are renewable. All are gifts that God commands us to manage wisely in Genesis.
Pennsylvania is facing some challenges in this regard, however, as the Susquehanna River shows serious signs of strain, and our world-famous forests face a devastating onslaught of invasive pests and diseases.
John Arway, executive director of the Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission, has been advocating for officially declaring the Susquehanna River an “impaired waterway” for years. The data Arway draws upon support his concerns: Dissolved oxygen so low that few animals can live in the water, one of three inter-sex (hermaphroditic) smallmouth bass populations in the country, a bass population with insufficient young to keep the species alive, the remaining bass covered in tumors and pfiesteria lesions, invasive rusty crayfish pushing out the tastier native crayfish, among many other factors. Once-abundant mayfly hatches are now non-existent.
Fishermen used to travel to Harrisburg from around the country to fish for smallmouth bass; not any more.
This past September a friend and I hunted geese out in the river, wading in our shorts. We saw none of the usual turtles, water snakes, birds, or fish that once teemed there, and the water smelled…odd. One day later, a small scratch on my leg had became infected with MRSA, and I spent four days hooked up to increasingly stronger antibiotics at Osteopathic Hospital.
In November, we canoed out to islands and hunted ducks flying south. Except that over the past ten years there are fewer and fewer ducks now flying south along the Susquehanna River. We speculate that there is nothing in it for them to feed upon, and migrating ducks must have turned their attention to more sustaining routes.
The river almost seems….dead.
Feeding the waterways are Pennsylvania’s forests, the envy of forest products producers around the world. Our state’s award-winning public lands and their surrounding mature private forestlands sustainably and renewably produce a greater volume of the widest variety of valuable hardwoods than any other state in America.
Our forest economy isn’t just about timber production, however, as hunting, fishing, and outdoor recreation themselves represent large economic sectors. Our robust black bear and wild turkey populations draw hunters from around the world, but these popular species depend almost entirely on acorns from oak trees; without acorns, they would hardly exist.
The oak forests at the core of our world-famous hunting and valuable timber were once considered under the gun from overabundant deer herds, but with that problem now resolved they face an adversary that could turn them into the 21st century version of the American chestnut – sudden oak death disease.
Recall that the American chestnut, like the now-extinct passenger pigeon, once carpeted the entire east coast with unimaginably abundant white flowers and nutritious nuts that fed wildlife and humans alike, and its wood was a more available version of cypress – strong, rot-resistant, straight grained, easy to work. And then, like the once unimaginably vast swarms of passenger pigeons that had blackened the day sky until they also suddenly disappeared, the mighty chestnut was wiped out in a few short years, 100 years ago, by an imported disease.
Our oaks, ash trees, and walnut trees seem to be facing a similar doomsday right now.
Thousand cankers, emerald ash borer, lanternfly, ailanthus, mile-a-minute weed, Japanese honeysuckle, Asian bittersweet vine, and many, many other non-native invasive plants, bugs, and diseases now threaten our valuable native forests on a scale unimagined just a few years ago.
Ironically, the edges of our state and federal highways appear to be the greatest means of spreading these pests.
Today, Pennsylvania has a true balance of power between Democrat governor-elect Tom Wolf, and an overwhelmingly Republican legislature. There isn’t much policy that these two equal forces are going to agree on. But if there is one area that they should easily find common ground, it is land and water conservation.
Something is seriously wrong with the Susquehanna River, and something is about to be seriously wrong with our forests.
Whether a crushing regulatory response is the appropriate way to address these issues, or not, let’s hope that Pennsylvania state government can help fix these problems before they become catastrophes future history books write about.
Josh First is a businessman in Harrisburg
Fifty years of designated wilderness
Two weeks ago marked the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Wilderness Act.
It applies to federal designation of remote areas, not to states. States can create their own wild areas, and some do. States closest to human populations and land development seem to also be most assertive about setting aside large areas for people and animals to enjoy.
I enjoy wilderness a lot. Hunting, camping, hiking, fishing, and exploring are all activities I do in designated wilderness.
Every year I hunt Upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains, in a large designated wilderness area. Pitching a tent miles in from the trail head, the only person I see is a hunting partner. Serenity like that is tough to find unless you already live in northern Vermont, Maine, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming or Alaska. It’s a valuable thing, that tranquility.
This summer my young son sat in my lap late at night, watching shooting stars against an already unbelievably starry sky. Loons cried out all around us. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves on the birch trees above us and caused the lake to lap against our rocky shore.
Only by driving a long way north, and then canoeing on a designated wilderness lake, and camping on a designated wilderness island in that lake, were we able to find such peace and quiet. No one else was anywhere around us. We were totally alone, with our camp fires, firewood chores, fishing rods, and deep sleeps in the cold tent.
These are memories likely to make my son smile even as he ages and grapples with responsibilities and challenges of adulthood. We couldn’t do it without wilderness.
Wilderness is a touchstone for a frontier nation like America. Wilderness equals freedom of movement, freedom of action. The same sort of freedoms that instigated insurrection against the British monarchy. American frontiersmen became accustomed to individual liberty unlike anything seen in Western Civilization. They enshrined those liberties in our Constitution.
Sure, there are some frustrations associated with managing wilderness.
Out West, wilderness designation has become a politicized fight over access to valuable minerals under the ground. Access usually involves roads, and roads are the antithesis of a wild experience.
Given the large amount of publicly owned land in the West, I cannot help but wonder if there isn’t some bartering that could go on to resolve these fights. Take multiple use public land and designate it as wilderness, so other areas can responsibly yield their valuable minerals. Plenty of present day public land was once heavily logged, farmed, ranched, and mined, but those scars are long gone.
You can hike all day in a Gold Mine Creek basin and find one tiny miner’s shack from 1902. All other signs have washed away, been covered up by new layers of soil, etc. So there is precedent for taking once-used land and letting it heal to the point where we visitors would swear it is pristine.
Out East, where we have large hardwood forests, occasionally, huge valuable timber falls over in wilderness areas, and the financially hard-pressed locals could surely use the income from retrieving, milling, and selling lumber from those trees. But wilderness rules usually require such behemoths to stay where they lay, symbols of an old forest rarely seen anywhere today. They can be seen as profligate waste, I understand that. I also understand that some now-rare salamanders might only make their homes under these rotting giant logs, and nowhere else.
Seeing the yellow-on-black body of the salamander makes me think of the starry night sky filled with shooting stars. A rare thing of beauty in a world full of bustle, noise, voices, and concrete. For me, I’ll take the salamander.
Forget sexy issues like “climate change,” let’s solve real environmental threats
By Josh First
Pennsylvania’s forests are suffering from a one-two punch-out by both invasive bugs and pathogens that kill our native and very valuable trees, and then by a following host of invasive vines, shrubs, trees, and other plants that are filling the void left after the big natives are gone.
Today yet another bulletin arrived from PSU plant pathology / forestry researchers, noting that ‘sudden-oak-death disease’ was detected on a shipment of rhododendron from Oregon.
Oregon got it from Asia.
Pennsylvania’s forests are becoming full of non-native, invasive plants, bugs, and pathogens. Each of our valuable tree species now has its own specific attackers. God knows what our native forests will look like in ten years.
The Asian emerald ash borer is literally making ash trees go extinct as a species. I see whole stands of forest, hundreds of acres, where not one ash tree is healthy. Dutch Elm disease killed off most of our elms in the 1980s. An Asian fungus killed off the once incredible and mighty American chestnut tree. Forget pathogens and bugs, because lots of aggressive, fast-growing invasive plants are taking up room on the forest floor, pushing out and overwhelming needed native plants. Few if any animals eat the invasives, which are often toxic and low value.
Human-caused climate change? It is a sexy political issue, and it is highly debatable. But forest destruction from non-native invasives is a real, tangible, non-debatable, non-politicized issue we need to address immediately. So many people and wild animals depend upon our native forests, that without them, our rural economies could dramatically fall and our wildlife could disappear.
Forester Scott Cary had this to say, tongue somewhat in cheek: “With the 1000 cankers disease in Walnut now in southeast Pennsylvania, that area is quarantined…maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on black birch and red maple [low-value native species long observed to be acting like aggressive, non-native invasives, and therefore harvested aggressively by responsible forest managers], that may be all we have left to choose from. Of course, Asian long-horned beetle may get the maple, so that leaves us black birch, the tree of the future.”
That is a sad place to be, folks. And to think that so much money is wasted selling the phony issue of human-caused climate change, while real environmental disasters are actually happening…it shows you just how dedicated the environmental Left is to political dominance, not useful solutions to environmental problems.