December 6, 2004

• Mixed Blessings
  Both
  loads of wood were delivered yesterday.  The first load to be
  delivered was the second one I’d ordered, the one from Lou that was
  supposed to have cost me $130 for a cord and a third.   Lou
  had said he’d be here at 1:30 with the wood.  I phoned him around
  2 PM for a sitrep.  He said it was all cut and ready to load as
  soon as Jake got there.

  Jake apparently is Lou’s son.  Lou said that the night before,
  when he’d got off the phone with me, Jake, who had overheard his end of
  the conversation while I was telling him where we are, had said, “Dad,
  you know?  That’s not just outside Willow, it’s almost to
  Talkeetna.”  Actually, it’s about halfway between Willow and
  Talkeetna, but I didn’t argue when Lou added another $20.00 to the
  price of that load of wood, since he said he would be willing to take a
  check for the extra $20.

  Jake delivered the wood at dusk, having gotten lost and phoned for
  directions before he finally showed up.  I eyeballed the load on
  his stake-bed truck and it did indeed appear to be over a cord. 
  Lou is a fast talker and a sweet talker, and that had made me
  reflexively suspicious, but the wood was all birch and apparently
  seasoned.  It did a good job of raising the temp in here from 50°F
  to 59° before I went to bed last night.  No complaints about that
  deal.

  After
  having told me Saturday morning that he’d have my load of wood here
  Saturday afternoon, being delayed a few hours by mechanical problems,
  then setting that time back to “early Sunday” when I told him I wanted
  all birch instead of the “half birch, half spruce, with a little poplar
  mixed in” that he said he would bring, Mark phoned me about the same
  time Jake called for directions, and told me he was leaving Wasilla
  then, was “on the way.”  It was dark when he got here.  He
  said he had to go back and fix a tail light because he only had
  one.  He wasn’t making eye contact when he said it and I wondered
  why he’d even feel he needed an excuse for a slight delay.  This
  morning, I think I may have figured that out.

  I think he wanted to be sure it was full dark when he got here so I
  wouldn’t see how much spruce was in that load.  There was no
  spruce visible at the back of the load or on top when I went out to
  greet him.   The portion of the load to come off the truck
  last appears to be mostly spruce, but since it snowed during the night,
  and I neither wanted to clear off the snow nor dig around under those
  big rounds, I don’t know how the proportions shake out.  Any
  spruce is too much for me, and if I can’t find a seller closer to home,
  Lou will be the one I call next time I need wood.  I am sure there
  was no misunderstanding about what I was ordering.  Saturday night
  after Mark and I discussed the spruce and poplar issue, I called him
  back one last time and repeated that I wanted “all birch, in
  rounds.”  He said, “I got that message.”

  Veracity or the lack thereof aside, Mark is a sorta odd guy, in my
  estimation.  He was out there last night unloading that wood at
  double digits below zero, without a coat or hat, and wearing only
  cotton work gloves.  That is about as un-Alaskan as you can
  get.  Every adult Alaskan I know has and uses good cold weather
  gear even if it is patched with duct tape. 

  There is a certain class of juvenile Alaskan who thinks it is cool to
  run around in winter in heated cars in shorts and tee shirts.  I
  see them hugging themselves as they sprint stiff-legged across parking
  lots in town almost every time I’m in town.  Occasionally, I’ll
  read in the news about one of them dying of hypothermia when his car
  breaks down.  I’ve seen a few of them hopping from one foot to the
  other as they use coat hangers to try to get into the cars they’ve
  locked themselves out of.   Leaving cars locked and running in
  parking lots is a common, although illegal, practice here in cold
  weather.  Sometimes, when it’s sufficiently cold, the cars won’t
  start, so leaving them running seems a prudent move.   Presumably
  some of the people who do that carry spare keys to let themselves back
  into their cars.

  Mark was using the stiff-legged gait that cold seems to dictate,
  too.  When he got the truck backed up to the pile of wood that
  Jake had left, he jumped out of the cab, removed the chain and cargo
  straps that were securing the load, and pushed two or three courses of
  the rounds off the back of the truck.  Twice, while he was doing
  that, he paused to slap his hands against his thighs, then tuck them in
  his armpits for a moment.

  I went back in the house to get his money, and when I returned, he was
  in the cab, presumably warming up.  He got out again, removed
  another strap that was cinched over the middle portion of the load, and
  told me he was going to “dump” the rest of the load.  I stepped
  back out of the way to watch, assuming he had some hydraulics and a
  dump bed on his truck.  That was not the case.

  First, he pulled a few feet forward, then reversed and slammed into the
  woodpile, jolting a few rounds off the tail of the truck bed. 
  After ten or a dozen repetitions of that, shedding four or five rounds
  with each jolt, his tires had worn a smooth, slick groove in the
  driveway and he was compelled to get out in the cold again and shove
  the wood off by hand.  Then he stood shivering by the back of his
  truck, bent over using the red light of his tail lights, and went
  through the sheaf of bills I handed him three times with stiff shaking
  fingers before he got it counted.

  He climbed back into the cab, and tried to get out of the driveway, but
  not only had he created a slick, he had even less traction after
  shedding his load.  He got back out and locked in his front hubs,
  and finally got underway, with two smallish rounds of my wood hung up
  on his back bumper.  Later, as I was telling Greyfox about his
  novel way of unloading his truck, the old fart commented that it must
  be hard on the machinery.  Then I recalled that Saturday’s
  delivery had been delayed because of some broken linkage.  Hmmmm.

  Ah, well, I have wood, finally.  And this was the year I said I’d
  get it all laid in before snow fell.  I was well on my way before
  the contretemps with ol’ bushrat George.  That was
  September.  After George got caught delivering short measures and
  refused to deal with me on a more honest basis, I started calling every
  number I could find.  That included both Mark and Lou.  I
  left many messages on machines, and got no callbacks from any of
  them.  My messages had stated where I live, my desire for nothing
  but birch, and the fact that I needed short lengths not over a foot.

  After that first round of calls, Greyfox said I might get results if I
  waited until cold weather and then told people I was desperate and out
  of wood.  That did not sound like a prudent course to me, but it
  turned out to be what I ended up doing anyway.  I was still
  checking bulletin boards and classified ads for wood sellers when the
  heavy snow came down.  

  Then I started telling Doug he needed to get that side of the driveway
  cleared so that if I found a source for firewood they could get in to
  deliver it.  But Doug had several new PS2 games.  He took
  care of the high-priority (to him) snow removal, from the roof and
  around my car on the other side of the driveway.  I could not
  persuade him to clear out the way to the woodpile until the firewood we
  had was nearly gone.  Since there was no way for anyone to deliver
  wood without leaving it in the road (which would be illegal in addition
  to being dreadfully inconvenient as we’d have had to heave it off the
  road by hand), I stopped making calls to wood dealers.

  Not until Doug discovered that we were almost out of wood did he start
  clearing that snow.  That was just a few days ago.  I had
  already called every number I had, so I went back and called all the
  ones who hadn’t returned my calls.  I said I was out of wood and
  needed it bad.  A few apologized and said they were out of
  wood.  Two refused to deliver this far up the valley.  But
  Mark and Lou came through, probably both of them being justifiably
  confident that they could get away with price gouging.  Greyfox
  was right.
  

  • 4:54 pm
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