“Keep Walking, Sweetheart, and Don’t Make Eye Contact”

I got up very late today because I got to bed late. I had to go steal more of my neighbor’s trash, because the trucks roll on Monday morning. I had to seal the ends of the wood I’ve already cut. And I had to spend time with Marv and Maynard before hitting the sack.

The wood has turned out to be mahogany. For some reason, the bark on Miami mahogany varies a lot, and sometimes it looks a little like live oak. But live oak never looks like mahogany. What I mean is, live oak has very coarse grey bark, pretty much all the time, while mahogany may be grey and coarse, black and coarse, or grey and smooth except for woodpecker holes. The wood I found has bark that is mostly grey, but I found areas where it’s covered with hard black flakes which you only get with mahogany. So that’s what it appears to be. In addition, the wood is extremely fine-grained, and it’s much softer than oak. Oak has its virtues, but it’s not the prettiest wood on earth. It has little cavities in it after it’s sanded. Like ash. Think of the surface of a baseball bat. I guess this is why they use maple on bowling alleys and gym floors, which have to be pretty and smooth, while you are likely to find oak in stair treads. My aunt Gladys has a dining table she made from oak stairs taken from a school where she taught.

As the wood dries, strange things are happening. The middle is turning purplish pink, and the outer bits are getting more yellow. It may sound nice, but it’s a little gaudy. I don’t know what it will look like when it finishes drying.

I’m not sure what to do with it. I have read all sorts of depressing things about drying wood. People make it sound impossible. I always thought you cut up a tree, let the boards sit for a few weeks, and started working it. Not so. If you don’t seal the ends, it starts to split from the ends in. Then it’s ruined. If you don’t dry it long enough–one year per inch, I’ve read–it will warp and generally go crazy after you turn it into furniture. And drying it yourself is not as good as having it dried in a giant kiln, which is what wood companies do.

I have read that you can dry small pieces of wood effectively by leaving it in a freezer. I think I read that on a museum site, so it’s probably true. Last night, I stuck a little piece of wood in the freezer, and sure enough, by morning ice had been squeezed out of it. You would think the expansion of the ice would split the wood, but I guess wood is springy enough to resist. If that were not the case, I guess we would have entire forests of split trees.

I’ve also read that some people toss wood in their ovens to dry it. I might risk a piece just out of curiosity; I don’t have a lot of confidence in this method.

The bits of wood I’m drying are so small, I could put them in a closet and worry about them in a year.

People are recommending that I get a metal detector. Very good idea. Sooner or later, I also need to invest in a real chainsaw. If I’m going to run around stealing trash and cutting it up on the bandsaw, I’ll need a tool to cut it down to bandsaw size, and a chainsaw seems inevitable. Last night I considered getting a maul, but a chainsaw is easier and better, and it’s useful for things other than preparing wood for woodworking. Also, a maul can chip and send pieces flying into you like bullets. I saw it happen to my cousin. It was amazing; it shot through his jeans, went into his skin, hit his shin bone, and slid down his leg. He had to have it cut out.

By the way, in Kentucky, a maul is called a “go-devil.”

I’m not going to run into nails in the mahogany I find in the trash here. Nobody puts metal in these trees. But I know how life works. As soon as I decide to depend on this generalization, it will fail me. I’ll find the only piece of mahogany in South Florida that has a nail in it.

My neighbors’ trash piles are no longer safe. I wish they would throw out some nice machine tools.