The History and Death of an Iconic Chainsaw

As the observant reader may have gathered from my Damage and Disaster at Don's Dock, I have a history with chainsaws. In fact, the chainsaw was an iconic instrument of my budding teenagehood. The particular chainsaw in question was the centre of much of our cottage adventures. Bought 25 years ago soon after my grandfather had purchased some land by the lake in Peterborough, it had helped clear the road and the area where my grandfather built the cottage. It helped cut up the firewood that would heat the cottage during the chilly spring and fall evenings.

The chainsaw became a productive (destructive?) outlet for a grandson who wanted nothing to do with painting outhouses, raking leaves, staining decks, cutting gyprock or moving rocks. If you wanted me to work, give me a chainsaw and point at a tree.

The chainsaw outlived many trees, and even outlived the management at the hardware store where my grandfather bought the saw. Every couple of years, he would return faithfully to the same store, replacing the chain several times and ordering a new guide bar that never came for five years. Just as he could never get the right guide bar ordered, because this chainsaw was apparently a one-of-a-kind saw, he could never get the right size chain. He would thus have to remove one link everytime he replaced the chain.

The Basswood Chainsaw Massacre

One summer, I became paranoically perturbed by the large number of basswood growing up under the telephone lines and throughout the woods. It became apparent to me that the basswood was involved in an insidious plot to suck the life out of the beautiful birches, oaks, and maples of the forest. This plot had to be confounded, and I was the man to do it. I spent whole days walking through the forest, seeking and destroying by chainsaw the young and old basswood, cutting them mercilessly down to suffer the most ignominious disintegration. I could literally hear the rejoicing of the liberated oaks, raining down thanks upon me for my discriminating assault. I look back on the Basswood Massacre as perhaps an excess.

Circa 1996, my mother bought protective leg chaps for the avid chainsawers which we then had to wear whenever she was looking.

After the icestorm of 1998, it helped cut up the many fallen trees that littered the road.

In 2002 when my family thought I was crazy for joining the army because I might get hurt, I avoided mentioning all the ladder and chainsaw action that I had seen on the front lines of cottage duty. That chainsaw was a key player in some of the moments of where I almost died (forthcoming blogpost). The risks we are most afraid of are the far away risks that we don't live everyday. The risks we ignore everyday are no less than the far away ones (for anyone who drives today's highways).

That particular chainsaw was a symbol of my urgent desire to be grown up at the age of 13, swing big tools, and leave a mark. The chainsaw met its end this year, having seized up once and for all. Trading it in for 50$, my grandfather bought a new chainsaw at the exact same store that he had bought it. The circle of life and death of chainsaws continues, much to the dismay of ill-placed softwoods near Bobs Lake. Somehow, that chainsaw had managed to accumulate a meaning to me, and I would have kept it in the cottage museum. The cottage basement houses the museum, where we keep rusted golf clubs, relic bicycles, oddly cut boards and other mementos of past cottage glories.

The king is dead. Long live the king.