The deep woods glistened with a scary silence, now and then broken and highlighted by the crack of a freezing limb swearing it would fall to earth, yet promising a minor distortion. Sometimes that crack or cry sounded like a baby in the night, a wailing, a voice given to what has no voice. We stood, some yards apart, some huge oaks apart, their ugly and monstrous arms clawing at the daylight, my friend and I. It was the moment of pure silence before we would set the forest on its ear with the roar of our chain saws. Apart we measured each other, having worked this forest for a full year that was to prove eventually a twelve-year spin at cutting and hauling wood. A friendly prophet could have cast this duo; not one word of argument had crossed our lips, ever, or one word of advice. That had covered the years since we met in a carpool heading off to our jobs some twenty-five miles away from home, another twenty years earlier. The other, each assumed, was old enough and wise enough to do his duty, enact his wisdom, share his energy. We fished, we played cards, we drank beer, we watched hockey games on TV because our own skating was long over, we lent tools and energies to the other’s needed tasks… car brakes, roofing jobs, electrical problems, you name it and we did it.

But we never argued and never gave advice. Now the silence penetrated each of us, was mystical in its impact, the deep cold making it so much clearer for a listener in this deep forest fifteen miles north of home.

From the crest of the hill just above me, my long-time friend, carpool companion, fellow fisherman and logging buddy, Eddie LeBlanc yelled down at me. “Wood burns twice, you know. That’s what they say up in Moncton and Memramcook, in New Brunswick, the wood-burning LeBlancs.” And he was so right. Sweat ran on me though the temperature had continually dropped since our arrival in the deep woods. Droplets gathered speed until they hit an obstruction… a belt line, an elbow, a high ankle sock. If I stopped working, my joints would freeze up.

It was a sudden December storm of 1971 and the energy crunch was on, oil prices escalating with frenzy. We were cutting trees and hauling logs, part of a State Forest Management effort, in the Willowdale State Forest in Topsfield, MA, not far from the Topsfield Fairgrounds. Being throwbacks, we had committed ourselves to do something about energy and conservation. Tight, cast iron, wood-burning stoves had been trundled into our homes, chain saws and six-pound mauls brought into our tool collection, our energies dedicated and fused: two saws, two vehicles, two temperaments at one task. In my then-231 year old house, one of the two chimneys that had serviced four fireplaces on each side of the house was re-lined. Eddie had erected a new chimney on an outer wall of his house, which was a mile away from mine. We’d do battle our way; gunshots of the maul.

For close to eight years the whole wood-burning routine was a snap, though the work was hard. Many Saturday mornings and parts of Sundays were spent in the forest. Sometimes the struggle versus the weather more difficult than the work. But we were a team.

On the way home on the good days, the season right, the van and truck laden to brims, cooling down from the first heat of the wood, having a noon sandwich, a quenching beer, we fished Pye Brook or the Ipswich River for the elusive and phantom trout. Now and then across the water a quiet nod at each other when the first nibble came or a hungry carnivore snapped at our line. At times, I’ll swear to eternity, we were in Elysium. I’ve always believed that can only happen with keen and lasting friendships. On that account I have always been right.

And the harvested log, for that matter, still burns twice, I keep telling Eddie on the phone these days. Close to twenty years ago he moved to Orlando for a job opportunity and we talked every weekend until the computer chat room came upon us two years ago. Then it was every night, his old chain saw, above the mantelpiece, a hard trophy of our efforts. And I do not go to the forest alone with a chain saw, but manage to cut down a few neighbors’ trees, hustle drops from the town tree workers now and then, pick up logs piled at a curbside, scrounge through the Recycling Center at the town dump, often unloading logs from another vehicle right into mine.

Wood still burns twice no matter how you look at it.

Mostly, for me these days, it is with the maul, the exercise decent and productive in many ways, for a number of reasons. But I don’t think I’ve ever swung the maul over my shoulder when I have not thought of my friend’s downhill shout that “wood burns twice,” knowing the graces of communal effort, feeling like a throwback to another time.

So much comes out of concerted energy. So much gets done. So much is learned. About yourself. About others. Comes about you knowledge and command and respect, trusts deeper than most friendships. Eddie would say, as the wind started to rise, the chill coming on, “If you want to keep your feet warm, wear a hat.” It was an old survivor’s saying. He’d been in Scouts for years. Or “Don’t let your shadow fall across the water when fishing.” For years he had fished with the legendary Artie Tash and Brother Bentley and Ray Costanza Exel, getting his limit every opening day on the Saugus River, beside one of the fairways of Cedar Glen Golf Course. That river’s gone south these days, as far as the trout are concerned, in a manner of speaking. Eddie’s there too.

Yet the maul arcs, the logs crack apart some days like gunshots, neighbors mark the energies, the stacked pile climbs higher in my back yard, sweat rings and rises and is cast off in vapors. I look at the growing cords of wood, the coming winter, and make no assumptions: more first-time heating is needed, so the second heating can drift inward, lift itself slowly and surely through this old house, can climb stairs, most welcome tenant, when the Montreal Express beats at the outer walls.

The arc, swift, accurate, concerted, catches silver from the sun on the maul’s edge, where the sun splinters itself into smithereens, joining my fusion. I move into another experience of my life and bring along what I have learned: Wear a hat if you want to keep your feet warm… Don’t drop shadows on top of trout… Wood heats twice (or more) if you have to cut and haul, and split it… Spending time in Elysium with a friend does not have to pass away from being. The maul in my hands, like any good tool, does wonders for the soul, for old statements made by my body, for respect and friendship anchored by sweat and good service to one another.

When we cut up a neighbor’s apple tree one evening’s rush into November, as a favor for neighbor, as a ruse to rouse winter apple smoke, the words ran through me like music…They have all gone now, the fire engine-red Macintosh, under batter with cinnamon, gone to day school on yellow buses with brown-baggers, or bruised to a freckled taupe and plowed under for ransom and ritual. Some will have the life crushed out of them for Thanksgiving cup. Standing on the stiff lawn downwind of winter, I drop the first cold moon of November into a fractured wheel of apple limbs and hear the bark beg away. A pine ridge, thicker than a catcher’s mitt, grabs half the wind riding off Vinegar Hill and squeezes out wrenching cries that hang, like wounded pendants, on necks of far, thin stars. Deep in the Earth, in a thermal tube of its own making, an earthworm grows toward a rainbow trout sleeping under ice and waiting to be heard, or the last of an apple’s pips still this side of the grass.

It all ends up, most generously, in a letter to Eddie continually ringing in my ears these days as winter plows through: “All day this December cold is a secret of my fleece lined jacket and the bottom of my mittens. The senseless wind, without any direction and purposeless, gets hung up in the muffler I wear as some corrective device, thick and woolly and itchy, around my neck. It’s the one you left in my van the last winter we cut wood in Topsfield and waded through that white tide until we fell exhausted. You used to laugh about wood heating twice. Now you’ve gone south, and I can hear the cry of the gnarled and aged oak as it lets go and throws the Earth out of kilter, the topmost branch brazenly and suddenly at hand, an old nest scattered. I walked quietly there yesterday, snow thrown like paint everywhere except on the sun side, and half-gray birches, like stalkers sly and half-white in the wind, made me think of Finnish ski troops the Russians didn’t like around or our own boys of the 10th Mountain Division rampaging 1944’s northern Italy. I suppose there are pieces of the battlefield left down south, but I bet you think of Topsfield when a cool wind grabs your neck, an old jacket lets out secrets, your fingers remember wood’s endless caress, and all across a sunset sky falling downhill to your ears, a chain saw’s evening prayers. I swear to you, Eduoard, I can feel it all in the handle of the maul. It’s like this: A three-beer push on the maul handle. My shoulders shooting nerves into fibrous white oak, elm never letting go, maple reporting splits clean as firecrackers, one time good wood lets go. Out and beyond an Arab watches me through the eye of a coin hung on edge. I hear the flag sing in front of the house, my own drummer beating high on a hill, and, in strange field, crevice and creek bed, from here to foothills of the Montanas, gunshots of the maul, and my chain saw’s deep roars, my Howitzer in the fray.