The Power of Placement

by Susan Charkes

I stand listening to the forest. No sound. No whisper, no rustle, no call. Nothing moves.

I tug the starter cord back. My chainsaw rips the air into shards, unleashing a primal scream into the quiet of the forest. I touch the saw to the top of the log in front of me. The running chain catches ragged bark in its jaws, spits it aside, and with a heartbeat's hesitation, slices into sapwood. Sawdust spews onto the forest floor like snow.

Once, this log was a living tree. Now it bridges the trail: one of its ends is resting on the ground, a tangled wall of newly exposed roots; the other end, suspended waist-high, is cradled in the V of a still-standing tree. I'm excising a four-foot section from the log, beginning at its perched end.

The rotating chain wants to drive me into the log with the sawteeth; it's reeling me in as if I'm a caught fish, and my back muscles are twisting and straining with the effort of resistance. So I relax, give myself up, and let gravity draw the saw down, until the moment when the kerf -- the opening in the log -- suddenly, swiftly, begins to close. I whisk the saw up and out, stepping back as I do.

Sliced half-through, the log sags. I reach underneath it and pull the whirring saw up from the bottom. Now I'm simultaneously working against the gravitational force that resists the saw's ascent, and using it to do my work: the weight pressing down on the saw pops the fibers on the underside of the log that are being stretched taut by the wood at the apex of the bend. As the margin shrinks between the top and bottom cuts, I ready myself, primed to escape.

The log waits, too. Waits until the instant that the cuts merge, space to space, to become a separation that sunders the continuity into pieces. Almost with a shrug, not so much cracking in two as shifting its weight groundward, the log splits. I flick my left wrist forward against the chainbrake to stop the rotating teeth and quickly step back. The portion of the log that blocks the trail drops with a thud, just the way a seesaw crashes when one rider bails out.

The cradled end is now a stub stuck in the tree like the last of a cigar. It's long enough, balanced against the portion on the other side, that it should drop too -- but if I've miscalculated it could knock me out with an uppercut. Slowly, gently, as if it's on a puppeteer's string, the freed end sinks, touches the ground, and stops. I switch off the saw to plan my next cut.

Quiet returns to the forest. Quiet -- but not quiescence.

Forest trees, living and dead, relate to each other within a complex system of physical forces. It's a system that I didn't appreciate until I took to disturbing it, as a volunteer trail maintainer.

A tranquil woods is at equilibrium. But it is full of pent-up, potential energy, expressed in relationships defined by leaning angles, sprung arcs, arrested falls.

Forest forces are balanced against and within each other. Change one value -- as when you cut one end of a log -- and you compel the system to recalculate. Energy is conserved; it doesn't go away but merely shifts elsewhere. That breeze that elicits a creak from an orphaned limb caught up in the swaying treetops operates within the range of the system's tolerances. A stronger wind may bring down the branch. A fierce wind from a storm, perhaps.

Or the breeze from a falling tree. That one, the one that had been pinned in place by the hanging deadfall you've just finished removing. Whoooshhh.

They call those branches widowmakers.

A log lying on a downslope, however slight, is in the grip of gravity that wants to slide in a vector along the log down the hill. Stand below it at your peril.

Even within a log, forces are at work. Seemingly inert, the log bends, just as a bridge cable does, wherever it is suspended between two points -- rocks, or roots, or undulations in the terrain. Along the bottom of the curve, fibers stretch in tension, while along the top of it they are being compressed. Imagine holding a thick twisted rope, one end in each hand, and let it drop into a U: the fibers at the top crumple, while those below become taut. A log cantilevered from a single point has the forces on opposite sides: let go of one side of your rope and see the crumpled fibers tighten, while those underneath slump.

The living tree is displacing air that would have occupied the space that life has made for it. At the moment the tree falls, equipoise is broken. As the tree falls it creates a wedge of low pressure. Something must fill that space. Another tree -- an older one, say, one that is hollow and lightning-scarred and ready to lie down and die -- feels the tug of differential pressure like a noose tightening and pulling it down. Shhhhhhoooomp.

When it falls, the old tree doesn't just fall to the ground. It falls through a space filled with the limbs and branches and trunks of its fellows. The oldest may lose limbs or tops, but survive, while the youngest, the ones at the bottom of the heap, are more likely to be crushed.

The young tree may yet live, if its cambium layer can still transport nutrients. Dead or alive, though, it's a trap: a springpole waiting to be sprung at the least disturbance, ready to snap back and decapitate the unwary hiker. Such force must be neutralized.

By drawing imaginary tangents on either side of the springpole' arc, then bisecting the angle where they meet, I identify the point of greatest stress. At a 45-degree angle from this point, I shave the inside of the tree, reducing the tension on the outside by breaking the compressed fibers on the opposite, inner side of the curve. As I shave down the tree it relaxes, the arc widening degree by degree until with a snap, the curve is transformed into a right angle. I turn off the saw.

I stand listening to the quiet. It is the sound of forces not immediately comprehensible by any of our senses, of relationships forged out of the temporary holding-off of chaos, of power gained in death that life never afforded. This is the system that creates the four-dimensional structure of the forest: what is standing, sitting, lying, leaning, bending, or hanging at any one point in time. To chainsaw is to enter into this system, to work with it, and, in the end, to alter it.

Every trail that traverses a forest by its very purpose gives sensate access to the natural systems at work within the woods: those systems we can see and hear, feel and smell. These impinge on our senses by kinetic forces that create movement, at the macro, the micro or the molecular level. But the trail itself is the artifact of a process that gives access to the forces that create stasis. Each cut log is the remnant of a release of tension and a discharge of pressure. Every sawed-off limb is the stub left over from a shift in the fulcrum of a lever; every stump, the base of a re-located column of air. All the piles of sawdust are the atomized remains of fibrous chains that bear the weight of the earth back to itself.

I stand and listen. The forest is quiet. Nothing moves. I am held in place by its power.