Shiver Me Timbers!

It's been established that I was a brat of a child in my youth. So, as to be expected, I didn't have just one incident where I proved myself benign and noble in my obscene pursuits of random violence, among other things. Well, there was one time...

My family lived in a house with a woodstove. Every summer it was expected that we (by which I mean my father, my older brother and I), would travel into the middle of no where and begin the art of logging. Only we weren't using the trees for lumber, just firewood. Mostly snags (dead trees) were cut down of the pine variety. Sometimes hemlock or birch, whichever my dad was in the mood for.

Well, on this particularly overcast day, my brother and I found ourselves up a steep embankment, probably at an angle of about forty-five degrees, or maybe even more severe. I was about eight at the time. My dad had just finished cutting up a number of trees into movable chunks that my brother and I would toss down the hill, slowly following them down and kicking them out from behind trees and bushes they happened to get caught in, which was actually more frequent than it should have been. So here I am, throwing logs down a bank with my brother and whining about it. I can hear the sound of the chainsaw roaring away as my dad cuts up another tree up above us. My brother at this point is either a) telling me to shut up, or b) ignoring me. I am after all a pain in the ass.

This is where things get interesting.

The noise of the chainsaw cut out a moment. I continue my vocal grumbling, and then my dad shouts down at us. "I'm going to toss these ones down to you!" I'm not that bright. I don't see the harm in this, and shot back "Okay!" since I see it as a means of getting out of work that would mean hiking back to the top and then coming back down again. My older brother has more brains, and as his eyes widen, he yells back up, "No, Dad, wait!" Only, Dad doesn't hear. We stand there a moment, my brother shocked, me kicking at the dirt. Then a sound I still can't forget to this day -- it was almost like rolling thunder. Apparently my dad had set it up to get numerous logs going at once. Yay? Not really. My brother grabs at me yanking me towards an indentation in the steep bank that happens to have an overhang. Not deep enough to be a cave, but deep enough to shield a small, stupid and defenseless eight-year-old and his older brother from what's to come.

The sound gets a bit worse, like stampeding animals. Then the first log flies overhead. Another flies past off to the right. It continues like this for a bit. The sound wanes for a bit, so my brother sticks his head out only to yank it back in as a piece of rumbling wood flies past at the point where his head had been a moment ago.

Another piece flies overhead, rebounds off a tree and comes back at us. Time seems to slow as my heart rate spikes. I'm thinking at that moment, I'm going to die and it's all my dad's fault. Only it hits another tree on the way back and flies off in a random direction down the hill.

We're safe.

My brother and I stand there a while, quiet, breathing heavily. Then my dad walks into view, spots us and smiles.

"Hey boys!" he says, "What're you guys doing in there?"