Every year, I collect a couple truckloads of free wood I find on Freecycle or Craig’s List, haul it home, and split it. I don’t have a log splitter. I do it the old-fashioned way with a splitting maul and a wedge, which is great cardio.
I mention that this wood is free so you understand it’s character. People have trees cut down. If they keep any of the tree, they tend to keep the smaller stuff that doesn’t have to be split. The wood I end up with tends to be trunk sections anywhere from 18 inches to 3 feet in diameter, which take a bit of work to split. As long as they’re not really knotty, it can be done.
This year, I wasn’t paying attention to the wood I grabbed. I’ve split all of it but one piece. That piece has been staring me down weeks. It’s big. It’s just barely under 2 feet long, and it’s 30 inches across. It’s full of huge knots, some as big as my head. If you walk a circle around it, there’s no place where you can’t see a big knot. It’s oak, which means that it’s going to be like hitting a brick.
Today I took the first few whacks at it. After burying my wedge in it a few times and striking it with the maul at every possible angle, I finally got a promising crack. I drove in the wedge, and after pounding it hard for a while, one piece of wood broke off. And then another… and another.
Now before you get the idea that this was easy or pretty, none of these pieces looked like those nice wedges of wood you normally get from splitting firewood. These looked like chunks of randomness that had been beaten into submission. That’s what they were. I said to myself “You’re not really splitting this log, you’re just breaking off fireplace-sized chunks.”
Then I realized that last statement is as good a definition of splitting wood as you could come up with. But it didn’t meet my definition, or my perspective on perfection. But the wood I’m breaking off is perfectly serviceable in the fireplace. It won’t burn any differently than those nice, neat wedges. It’s just not perfect.
Sometimes perfect isn’t what you need. You need serviceable.