Pedagogy and Lumberjacks: The Art of Deforestation
**Author's Note**
This isn't due for workshopping until Wednesday of this week so comment away in the mean time. My initial thoughts is that it should be longer but the problem I ran into was that I began running out of manly animals and machinary to use ase similies for beards and mustaches. So any suggestions you can come up with would be fantastic.
Pedagogy and Lumberjacks: The Art of Deforestation
“Everyone shut the hell up or, so help me, I will make an evergreen fall on you!” Lumberjacks, perhaps one of the most ill tempered, incompetent, short attention spanned, creatures to grace the face of God’s green earth. I was tasked, over the course of a twelve week training program, to transform this otherwise useless group of individuals from deranged, axe wielding, sociopaths into finely tuned, flannel clad, denim loving, beards with axes, tree cutting men.
“O’Kelly, your response better not compel me to throw you into a raging band saw. What color schemes did I explain during our last seminar, were appropriate for Lumberjack living?”
He ripped a chunk of beef jerky off in his teeth, swung his axe forcibly into the side of a spruce tree, and squinted hard in my direction before replying, “Flannel that looks manly”.
“If that had been a question O’Kelly, I would have torn the beard from your face. Now, if you don’t rip those sleeves off that shirt this instant I will lodge my spurs in your eye sockets”, He grunted with recognition, and with a single unified motion from both arms striped the sleeves off his shirt. With one sleeve, he quickly fashioned into a functional head band. With the other he rolled up and ate, presumably to be coughed up later to be used as a tourniquet for some lesser weaker creature, a belt, a rag for non-cleaning purposes, a flip line, a blind fold, an ascot, or a gift for a woman.
There was no correct approach to educating a fledgling lumberjack. It had only been four weeks and all ready this group, now brimming with masculinity and beards, had been transformed drastically from the bewildered soon to be incarcerated piles of baby powder and satin underwear into the chain saw juggling, bear wrestling, tree murders that stood before me now. I had no “approach”, no “technique”, I simply knew what was and what wasn’t lumberjack. When I saw something that was lumberjack I craved beef jerky and the smell of cut pine. When I saw something that wasn’t lumberjack I swooped down on it like a P-51 Mustang swooping down on a bald eagle’s nest, machine guns blazing, cigar clenched in my grimacing and gleaming teeth whose white perfection defied all discernable medical explanation.
My eyes darted away from O’Kelly who stood whittling the likeness of Abraham Lincoln out of a chunk of splintered wood. My glower came to rest on Moose, a brutish, bear of a man. Formerly a truck driver he had been fired after crushing his employer’s femur with a tire iron when a dispute broke out between the two men over the definition of patriotism. No charges were filed. “Moose, what is the safest number of axes a single lumberjack should wield at any one time?”
His eyes sparkled like stars and his cheeks blushed red, white and blue, “I am unfamiliar with the term ‘safest’”.
“If the lumberjack that chopped down every tree in the garden of Eden permitted affection between two men I’d lunge head first into a wood chipper for feeling it”, Maybe it was the quart of moonshine, the previous night spent with loose women, or eating dynamite and grits for breakfast, but just maybe this coarse team of knotted muscle and mustaches so thick they’d just about strangle you for making eye contact would actually pull through the next eight weeks and graduate.
My last group of doe eyed, smooth faces had all been killed when a pack of timber wolves, fleeing a forest fire (started earlier that day to demonstrate appropriate uses of fire) leapt into the frigid waters of the river. My pupils had been practicing log riding, and the logs upon which they stood proved the nearest possible salvation for the flaming wolves. Their beards had only begun to grow in and their axe skills were un-honed. The wolves made the best of their predicament and gorged themselves on the lads as they cried out desperately for help. With those cries, they died and were devoured.
“Men, whoever here can throw his axe from where he stands and hit that redwood tree” I let fly my axe which, with the scream of a Comanche Indian bred with a wolverine and George Washington, hacked through the air, felled a Norfolk island pine and a maple, before penetrating the bark of my target some 200 odd yards off, “will have the opportunity to be thrown into a pit of rattle snakes”.
Nikolai Grushnyvsky stepped forward first, his expression hidden behind the tangled mass of granite and masculinity that grew out from the hard, unforgiving soil of his face. I suspected that if his face could be seen it would have a held the look of a mountain lion driving a back hoe. Mr. Clean and the Brawny Man would have killed to be strangled by Nikolai’s hands if he ever cleaned, which he didn’t.
He raised his axe in his hands, his knuckles whitening on the handle. His eyes narrowed and his flannel chest garment wept tears of elation. With a force that would have made Zeus envious, he hurled his blade and sent it toppling through the air. 500 miles away an environmentally friendly car burst into flames, the driver committed her first act as a man and died. The tool hooked, and as the sun winked off its gleaming edge it sailed past the redwood. Mother Nature breathed a sigh of relief only to suck it in and curse her misfortune, John Howard had just finished building a two story log cabin and now stood glistening before his compatriots, his shirt and pants long since falling into taters from the strain of his labor. Now, only a few shreds of denim and flannel hung loosely about his waist.
A laugh erupted from his throat comparable to the sound of an oncoming avalanche, a tsunami wave, and stampede of lions who had eaten nothing but steroids and bear meat everyday of their lives. Dormant volcanoes erupted on the other side of the globe. His face took on a somber look as he took hold of his axe and with all the grace and agility of Mount Everest, he heaved his instrument. It whirled with such speed that anyone caught by its passing gust would have a mustache the size of a cougar spring forth, growling with pride. The axe struck the red wood and held fast in its bark. If I had believed in mercy or a God more powerful than a lumberjack I would have wished he take some upon the trees around us, their rings were numbered.