Vermonters love the natural world. We tend to know our property well. We notice our beech trees are dying. A black gunk oozes from their silvery bark.
Barbed wire
You used to see where barbed wire was stapled to a small tree. This was done to save buying fence posts. After 50 years or so, the tree has grown over the wire, the wire rusted through and broke off. When you lay into a tree with your chainsaw and hit the hidden barbed wire, you’ll know it.
Another long-hidden, man-made object also resides in a tree. White porcelain electric fence insulator knobs were also nailed to small trees. As with barbed wire, you can’t see them today. Your chainsaw will sing when it hits one of these porcelain knobs.
Occasionally, iron sap spouts were left in a maple tree. These really cause damage to a chainsaw. But the damage a sap spout causes a wood processor is very expensive. I have seen 6-foot-long, live-edge maple slabs used for table tops. Along both live edges you will see where sap spouts had been bored.
Moby Dick
Vermonters have always collected oddities of nature. The photo with this article I named “Moby Dick.” Did you ever see “Moby Dick,” starring Gregory Peck? Near the end of the film, there is a closeup of the white whale’s eye and his wrinkled brow.
The photo I include here is a chunk of hemlock. You can see a round glass object. The glass is an old insulator used along railroad tracks on telegraph poles. It amazes me how it was ever found.
I imagine, in the early days, linemen stringing wire from pole to pole, or in this case pole to tree. As railroad communications improved, more permanent poles were installed. This glass insulator was abandoned and left mounted to the tree.
As time went by, the tree just about overgrew the insulator, leaving only what you see today, Moby Dick’s eye! Years later, someone cut the tree down and went to work cutting it up. It was then with his keen eye that the workman noticed the glass insulator.
He cut around the insulator so there are flat areas to stand it up. It was owned by at least two people before it found me. I value these objects.
As far back as 50 years I met old Vermonters who collected these oddities when they found them. We still collect these objects. It is who we are.
Burl maple
Another thing Vermonters treasure are burl woods. Cherry burl is probably a little more common than maple burl. Burl objects date back to the Native Americans. Before the white man’s iron tools, Indians used stone tools and sometimes fire to hollow out a burl to make a bowl. These are very expensive when they show up on the antiques market. When growing on a tree, a burl will look like a large wart.
Today, a large burl can bring good money. The second photo with this article is a slab of maple burl. It has a wild grain and live edge. It’s quite large, and when propped up like I have it, it appears to be a chinchilla. The wild grain resembles folds of fur. You’ll also notice his nose looks like the Old Man of the Mountain.
This week’s old saying refers to someone really cheap. “He’s tighter than bark to a tree.”