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I've been lucky enough to have met a lot of interesting people in my life. Working in the movie business, I've known some wonderful characters, and I've traveled enough to meet great people in other countries, adding to my list.
Still, the most memorable person I've ever known lived in Lyme, Connecticut, the woodsman Amos Congdon, who has meant more to me than the ex-presidents and their wives, the athletes and coaches, or movie stars that I've met.
I was lucky enough to find Amos Congdon and his family's sawmill
in 1973. It meant so much to him, that rectangular sawmill shed about seventy
feet long and thirty-five feet wide and set on a line running north and south,
built with creosote posts and beams cut from power line poles. It was open
on three sides with two partitions about a third the way down its sides except
for two partitions about a third the way down its sides to protect the mill
carriage and diesel motor from the weather. A roof of bright corrogated aluminum
sheets with a random scattered patches of green fiberglass covered it all,
the saw facing west, the platform in front where the new lumber was stacked,
in back the oak skids where the logs were waiting.
I know this small mill was the proud accomplishment of a lifetime of hard work by himself and his wife Bertha, the progress of his generations' work in the woods, cutting brush, cedar posts, firewood and logs for railroad ties.
His first name, Amos, is from a book in the Old Testament in which the prophet Amos predicts the ruin of ancient Israel for leaving God's ways. The family name, Congdon, is from Scotland or Ireland, he didn't know which, who arrived here in early colonial times.
Amos Congdon believed man's life is the harvest of the earth. He judged the modern world at the end of his lifetime, holding to the idea that a nurturing relationship to the earth was God's will for man.
Like any old person he would repeat his stories and concerns, the life of the tree, the Chestnut's blight, the fate of the Earth. And for all his heavy thoughts, he would be the first to see the joke and laugh. Tell happy memories of school in Pleasant Valley with hay in the meadow all around, how sweet the wild grapes were then, where the fox run traced the land and the stone where the hunter sat.
He was a small man, though he said he'd been stout, that is strong, when he was young, lifting the anvil into a truck when the others couldn't, with bright blue eyes, and pure white hair and beard.
He'd say things
like, "We cut the tree with the hand saw, my brother and me, we felled the tree with
the saw, we trimmed it out with an ax, the Chestnut, the Oak, and the other fine trees.
That was a long time ago. It would take us an hour or more to cut a tree down, get up and
measure it off, junk it into lengths. They have got the chainsaw now, they cut off a tree
in no time."
He wore the cotton shirt and pants uniform of the American working man. Some days he'd wear blue, and I'd think of him as the spirit of the Union. When he wore gray I'd see him as Confederate. And when he wore blue and gray, I'd see him as the spirit of the country united once again. Sometimes he'd wear green, and then I'd see him as the spirit of the woods, which is what he really seemed to me, the spirit of the tree. For he'd say, "The young trees are the best. The old timber uses up the oxygen just to stay alive. Young trees are thrifty growing trees. They take in the carbon monoxide and put out oxygen."
"That's why it's better to have young trees all the time, thrifty growing trees."
Almost every day he'd work at the mill. Coasting his bike down the hill when the weather was good like a silent movie comic, or if it was raining, windy or too cold he'd walk down throug the woods to appear, as if out of nowhere, to stand at the far side of the skids with a cant hook in his hand to help the sawyer, "tail sawing" they call it and teach his sons to saw.
Sometimes he'd "take away," pull the bark slab clear of the saw, wait for the carriage to pass by him, stop, and pull back toward the sawyer. Then he'd lift the slab in two hands, carry it across the mill tracks and throw it up on the pile.
The sawyer rolls the log one handed, pushing it back onto the carriage with his thigh. He reaches for the setworks arm, pulling it to him and lifting it away, pulling it forward again, racking the log into line with the saw. The old man turns back toward the saw. The sawyer dogs the log, that is clamps a hook into its side with his right hand, screwing the hook right with his left. He pulls the feed arm with his left hand and starts the log toward the saw. It takes four or five seconds.
The log seems to scream when it's drawn into the saw, especially in the winter when the wood is frozen. It takes five or six seconds to cut the length of the log. The old man crosses the tracks just in front of the carriage.
He
pulls the slab clear. Turning more than seven hundred times a second, the
blade is a blur and whir under the noise of the diesel. He carries the slab
away, throws it up on the pile, steps back to his place at the saw, reaching
down to clear the bark and ice away from the blade. He'd take away the slabs,
carry every board to its place on the deck, the two by fours to their pile
behind him, dropping the four by six, six by six timbers off into the pit,
hurrying back to the saw just as the next cut is made.
There are sixty to seventy pine logs on the skids. It takes less than a minute to saw out a log. Amos Congdon has six, maybe eight seconds to carry away and return to the saw. With four to eight cuts to the log he'll take awaymore than four hundred times before stopping. And seldom will the sawmill have to slow for Amos Congdon, 78 years old.
He had a favorite story of standing in the orchard on the hill in back of the mill at dusk with Canadian geese flying past on either side of him, standing still not to be hit, with the soft sound of the wings all around him.