HOARDING LUMBER

MAY 25, 2025 –

(Cont.) The hoarder’s grip as it pertains to lumber afflicted my dad in the same two-handed fashion that it applies to me.

There was naturally and habitually, the whole matter of frugality. When other people observed this trait in Dad, they’d attribute it straight away to his having grown up during the Great Depression. Perhaps, but more likely not. Dad’s parents weren’t wealthy, but they never had to scrape or save out of necessity during the 1930s. I think it was a simple aversion to waste of any kind, whether it was time, food, water, possessions or money. This anathema carried over to wood. If a large dead pine fell in the woods and wiped out a fine live oak tree, you didn’t let the latter go to waste. You salvaged it for firewood. If the 2 x 4s you bought at the lumberyard for some project yielded several scraps, you saved the scraps, because as I often heard Dad say, “A guy might be able to use those for something; you just never know.”

Another of the many utterances that I associate with Dad was, “Now there’s a beautiful specimen of [a burr oak; a white pine; a linden; a red maple; et cetera].” When out and about, he never failed to notice a particularly nicely shaped tree; the sort that he might even photograph as if he had been commissioned to assemble a coffee table book entitled, Trees: Nature’s Crowning Achievement. At Björnholm, he was in paradise. If most folks around the lake were focused on . . . the lake . . . Dad’s primary focus was in the other direction—the trees surrounding the lake and most notably, the trees that crowded our property. The main reason he liked going out in our boat was to get a better look at the trees on shore.

Dad’s appreciation for trees was multi-dimensional. In college one of his favorite courses had been botany, particularly as it related to trees. He once showed me his notebook of detailed drawings of leaves and cambium. The illustrations and lettering were executed to perfection. He subscribed to forestry magazines and collected books about trees. He owned two hobby “tree farms,” originally for the purpose of growing and eventually harvesting Christmas trees, where he had arranged for a total of 30,000 white pine and Norway pine to be planted. The problem with the idea was that once the trees reached harvest size, he couldn’t bear to have them cut down. At Björnholm he spent untold hours traipsing though the woods, and whenever he encountered an accessible recently fallen hardwood that was still in good shape, he’d cut it up for firewood and haul it back to the cabin to split manually with a wedge and sledgehammer and stack neatly in the yard. When I was in my teens, he’d let me help split, and sometimes we’d work in tandem. Often he’d stop to call my attention to a particularly beautiful piece of oak or some oddity in the grain. It wasn’t long before I was doing the same—showing him interesting examples of wood grain or embedded knots, revealed when split.

Likewise predictably, Dad admired particularly nice pieces of lumber—a knot free pine board; a perfectly straight 2 x 4; a piece of unblemished oak trim. During the construction phase of Mother and Dad’s dream house, Dad selectively pulled some of the finer and more usable scraps from the site. They wound up corralled in a corner of the basement under the garage—the bomb shelter, as Dad had designed it, though it contained a window well and standard double-hung window to allow in some natural light. I don’t know to what extent Dad pilfered from that stash, but I remember as a kid devising all sorts of my own “creative” wood-working projects based on scraps that I pulled from the pile. The projects were mostly a bust, but a considerable side effect was the appreciation I developed for all kinds of wood.

Our fondness for trees was inextricably linked to our compulsion to hoard lumber. All lumber, of course, comes from trees, and a cavalier approach to lumber scraps would be dishonoring the majesty of trees. A moral equivalency would be loving animals but leaving edible scraps of meat on your plate. Avoiding such hypocrisy is one way to rationalize the hoarding of lumber. It explains in part the compulsion I feel to save scraps from cabin building projects . . . and when at home in the cities, to salvage whole timbers out of a curbside dumpster in front of a house undergoing renovation. (Fortunately, in those latter circumstances, the social pressure not to be seen pulling a 10-foot 2 x 4 out of the trash and carrying it home—not to mention having to explain to my spouse why I did so—overrides my hoarding instinct.)

From a broader perspective—and all kidding aside—saving lumber and lumber scraps is simply being environmentally respectful. Call it hoarding if you must, but in Dad’s small way and mine, hoarding lumber is “earth friendly,” and what’s to criticize about that?

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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson