130 Rings

The dusty slab of ponderosa pine in the shed leaned against the wall among all manner of odds and ends. It was four inches thick, nineteen inches wide, eight feet long and it hadn’t been sawn from the middle of the tree. Dave Lindsey, owner of Spotted Owl Timber, the local sawmill R and I were visiting said, “That slab’s been standing there eight years. I remember the tree it came from, a blow down from the Jemez… it had to be at least forty inches in diameter, probably forty two.”

We were looking for lumber to become the top of a butcher block sideboard I’m building for the kitchen, and a section of this slab would be just the ticket. After we negotiated a price, Dave picked it up as though it were a two by four (and Dave, like me is not exactly a spring chicken anymore) and carried it across the yard to the resaw, essentially a giant bandsaw to cut it into two two inch thick slabs. In less time than it’s taking to write about, the cut was made.

I then selected the best piece for our purposes - looking at the grain and color and knots - and with his daughter’s help Dave surface planed it and cut a rough length so it would fit in my car. Clearly Dave was pleased with having his daughter helping him. “She knows how to operate the resaw…” he said, and then went on with a long list of other machinery in her repertoire. And it is cool to see a woman working in a primarily man’s world kind of business. R and I were pleased as we could be with the result, and while I don’t get too wrapped up in the soul of the tree thing, using this piece of lumber feels right and good.

A couple of days ago, well into building the sideboard, I was trimming the pine slab. Taking a moment to count the annular rings in one of the end cuts, I came up with one hundred thirty.

And so, 130 years + another 20 for the edges already trimmed away + 8 for the time the piece stood around in the shed… a seed germinated and took hold in some favorable spot in the Jemez Mountains and stood quietly and grew for the better part of 160 years; in the changing seasons, by day and night and through snow and rain and sun and drought and wet and likely through a fire or two. The tree stood in the same place through all this for that long, growing, until one day a wind came along it was no match for.

Gordon Bunker