Spike Wells Cedar Song In The Green Gray Cedar Swamps, The Trees Grow Close And Tall. The Sawmills Rumbles Shake The Ground. Inside, The Blade Spins, Slicing The Yellow And White Heart Of A 6-foot Cedar Log. By Douglas Campbell, Inquirer Staff Writer Posted: April 11, 1991 Lewis Spike Wells knows cedar. He knows how it grows in the swamps of South Jersey, how its red roots hook into the wet bogs like giant talons. He knows how the logger can sweat and stumble and skin his ears on the bark as he flips a cedar log end-over-end to get it to where his machine can drag it. Spike Wells knows the right way to drag a felled cedar tree from a swamp so the roughness of its bark wont fill with sand and dull the teeth of the sawmill blade. Spike knows, in a way that few human beings still alive know, how to hew a beam or a plank out of a rough cedar log. He knows why its important not to wear gloves when delivering a cedar log into the whirling teeth of the blade. He knows that sucking a small, smooth pebble can keep a body cool in the summer. He knows that sap from a pine tree can heal a sliced finger. He knows which Avon product to mix half-and-half with water to keep away the cedar swamp bugs. And Spike Wells, 39, a logger and sawyer his whole life, knows that cedar - a wood valued for its resistance to rot - is harder to get these days than a summertime swamp that has no bugs. You find Spike most mornings at his mill on Route 206 in Indian Mills, Shamong Township, just up the road from the Pic-A-Lilli Tavern, in a weathered shack at the back edge of a forest clearing. Its the house where Spikes father was born. Running beside the shack, all the way back to the sawmill near the woods, is a sandy driveway that treats your car like a rollercoaster. As you walk closer to the T-shaped sawmill shed - back beside a yellow dump truck with a broken windshield and the corpse of a big, pale blue flatbed truck and piles of limbless logs - you begin to hear - or, more precisely, feel in the soles of your feet and in the concussion of the air around you - the deep rhythm of the sawmill machinery that was made 100 years ago. And, every few seconds, you hear the scream of the sawblade as it bites again into a log. Morning is not a good time to talk with Spike. He will be in the cross part of the T-shaped shed, the part that is parallel to the highway. It is in the center of this section that the four-foot circular blade spins, slicing through the yellow and white heart of a six-foot cedar log in 10 seconds. Spikes attention is, of necessity, focused on that blade. Better to come in the afternoon, when Spike can sit down in the little office at the front of the shed, where a small radio on the sill of one of four little windows plays country music and where the walls are paneled with rough-cut boards. The door to the office is on the right side. When you step in, a tiny, steel desk is to your right, pushed against the wall, a space heater tucked in its kneehole. The office is about six feet deep and 12 feet across, and at the left end is another desk, wooden and well worn, with a phone and a stack of phone books on it. Atop the books sit a couple of bird houses. Beside the desk is Spikes chair. Spike is a man of modest height and marvelous beard. A wispy growth of white and blond falls in straight strands from his red cheeks to his sternum. A narrow-brimmed hat jammed down on his crown pushes the curls of his long, white and blond hair into bangs that crowd in toward his sharp, blue eyes. He wears tan overalls, stained with the oil and sawdust of his trade, and a red-and-black checkerboard shirt and, in the sawmill, combat boots, although in the swamp hell wear rubber knee boots. Theres very few sawmills, Spike says, sitting in his office, staring out a front window toward the highway. The wood is harder to get than it was when his grandfather, Clarence Wells, was a woodsman. And then, the works hard, too. Nowadays, people dont want to work for so little money. The Pinelands Commission doesnt want you to get cedar. I dont think it does no good to protect the white cedar trees that grow wild in vast stands, he said. You got to clear cut it in order for it to grow back right. If you cut it clear, all them buds of them cedar trees, theyll really start growing. Theres a lot of places, too, where it should be cut, Spike says. Left to its own devices, a cedar swamp will eventually collapse and its trees will rot, he says. Spike doesnt cut much cedar now, although about half the lumber he saws is cedar. He buys the logs from private parties who, in theory, have cut it on their own land. (The Pinelands Commission is patroling for cedar poachers.) Its hard anymore. I know a guy who got a fine for cutting a tree in his own yard. I guess its a good thing, he says with the same enthusiasm a man on death row might show for capital punishment. Spikes great grandfather was a woodsman. He lived to be 104. We used to have a picture of him here, a big oval frame, he says, nodding toward the end of the office above the little, steel desk. Somebody swiped it. Spikes grandfather delivered logs by horse and wagon for new buildings in Medford Lakes. His father, whose name was also Lewis, built the mill here at the end of World War II. When the younger Lewis came along, the older one gave him a nickname. Ive had people make a check out before with that on there, he says - just the name Spike. Recently, when consultants for Burlington County were looking for cedar shingles for a restoration project, they went back to the freeholders and told them they had been talking with Spike. The freeholders then had a conversation about Spike and no one ever mentioned his last name. The consultant, in fact, did not know whether Spike had one. What the consultants and the person with the check do know is that Spike knows cedar. His wood comes from the wetlands that are found in the forests of South Jersey. In an unharvested stand of cedar, the trees grow close, perhaps five feet apart, and rise virtually limbless to their crowns, 60 feet above the swamp. The view through a cedar swamp is dark, tinged with green and gray. Because there are few limbs, you can see well into the stand. The long trunks of blown-down, uprooted trees angle across the vertical lines of standing cedar like scattered pick-up-sticks. Water stands in still pools at the tree roots. Moss grows up from the water, giving an illusion of earth where there is none. In the swamp, Spike says, the bugs can be unbearable - unless you have your mixture of water and Avon Skin-So-Soft. You smell like a woman, but it keeps the bugs away, he says. In the summer, the swamp heat can be oppressive, too. Spikes father and grandfather would put a smooth, round pebble in their mouth to keep the saliva flowing, which helped keep them cool, he said. Loggers now, as in Spikes grandfathers time, start at the edge of a stand, felling the first trees away from the others until they have a hole cut into the stand. Then the trees are felled so that their tops land deeper in the forest. The modern logger uses a four-wheel-drive vehicle called a skidder, which has a cable at the back that can be attached to the butts of as many as four trees. The cable raises the butts off the ground to perhaps six feet above the swamp. The logger drags the trees from the swamp without removing the branches. This keeps the logs themselves from skidding in the swamp and avoids the accumulation of sand in the bark. On dry land, the limbs are removed and the logs are cut to the lengths that the sawmill wants for boards. They are then loaded on trucks and driven to Shamong, or a dwindling handful of other mills farther south. The rumbling heart of Spikes sawmill lies under its corrugated steel roof and under its floor - a 52-foot long shaft, three inches in diameter, that is turned by a belt thats not much different from the belt that carries groceries to the scanner at a supermarket checkout. The belt is driven by a six-cylinder Minneapolis Moline gasoline engine, set in a lean-to beside the T-shaped shed. At the end of the shaft nearest the highway, a belt rises to drive the four-foot saw blade. At the end nearest the forest, another belt drives a shingle-making machine. Between, there are belts to drive two saws, a planer and a blower that sucks sawdust from the mill and into a trailer behind the building. As long as the Minneapolis Moline is running, the belts are rumbling and the sawblades are spinning. Spike says he doesnt give tours of his mill. You could easily back into an exposed blade. To convert logs into lumber, Spike piles a load of them crosswise on two parallel beams that protrude from a bay of the sawmill. The beams end perpendicular to a narrow-gauge set of rails, along which runs an 18-foot-long iron chassis mounted on wheels. A log can be rolled from the beams onto the chassis where it stops against three vertical posts. Iron teeth called dogs are attached to the posts and, when a log is in place, are brought down to stab into the bark and hold the log stationary. Then Spike reaches across the rail car and tugs gently on a small handle, connected to a collection of levers, ratchets and gears that move the log so it overhangs the edge of the chassis in the path of the sawmill blade. With his right hand on this handle and his left hand clasped around a tall, wooden lever near the big saw blade, Spike is ready to cut lumber. He pulls gently on the lever, engaging a belt that causes a cable to pull the rail car, with the log hanging over its side, toward the saw blade. Spike watches closely, adjusting the position of the log as it nears the spinning saw blade, the thick, rough fingers of his left hand feeling for increased tension in the belt as the saw teeth begin to cut. When the log has made its first pass by the saw blade, Spikes brother, Stanley, is waiting at the other end to take away the slab that has been removed. Then Spike pushes on the wooden lever, and another cable pulls the rail car back. Now Spike lays the fresh, flat side of the log against the chassis, so that the next cut will be perpendicular to the first. Then the log passes by the saw again. Each pass of a log brings a wail from the saw blade, a sound that becomes more of a groan as the saw moves through the length of the log and ends in a rising sigh. Spike and Stanley are respectful as they reach their bare hands toward the saw blade, as if it could bite. They have never been cut by a saw, Spike says. But when you are working with lumber, you can get cut other ways, and so it is good to know not only what Spike knows about cedar but what he knows about pine. Whenever he goes into the woods, he notches a pine tree. There is one freshly notched pine beside the sawmill. If he gets a cut, Spike goes to the notched tree, takes out his pocket knife and scrapes some of the clear sap onto the blade. Then he butters his cut with the sticky stuff. In a half hour, Spike says, you can feel the cut throbbing. And soon, the skin will be as white as a sheet of paper and the healing will have begun. Spikes father told of a fellow who, when he was a kid, lost his finger to a hatchet. They stuck it back on and slathered it with pine pitch. When the fellow died at age 71, he still had the finger. Or so Spike was told. Thats not something that Spike knows about as well as he knows cedar.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 04:04:51 +0000
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