The Axe

by Reid Bryant of North Orange, MA

The axe is a marriage of opposites, a union of hospitable wood and formal steel. In solitude, an axe-head is cumbersome, impossible to safely handle, a muddle of angles and sharp edges. From the first the axe struck me as timelessly simple, delightfully hazardous, each one in itself an object of artistry and endless possibility.

In the aisles of a Maine logging and tool shop, I watched quietly as my father selected the axe whose scarred head rests on my shelf today. It hung small on a rack, dwarfed by its slab-sided brothers, self-conscious in its adolescent angularity. Even at six, I heard that axe speak to my father, himself a small and quiet man against this background of loggers, smoky wool, split and calloused fingers. He held the axe to the light by its hickory shaft, ignoring the wood but engrossed by the metal, aware in his engineer’s mind that quality steel would far outlast both him and me, while within a year’s time the handle would surely be reduced to sweat-stained splinters, collapsing to ash in the family woodstove.

On the night drive home he told me that the axe was a Hudson Bay, made by the men at Snow and Nealley up in Bangor, and was the same type carried by the Voyageurs and Trappers of the Hudson Bay Company. Its angled shape made it light and practical, equally adept at splitting kindling, tamping sap spouts, or chopping holes in the ice of the trout-stream millpond. The design, he said, was unique to the North Woods, and to the raw-boned people for whom it had for centuries been home. His voice was tinged with reverence, and I was humbled when he announced gravely that, assuming decent household conduct, I would learn the proper and safe use of the new axe.

In retrospect, that axe offered me the very first skill I actually craved to learn. In the months after its purchase, I would sneak down to the cellar to secretly heft it from the workbench, in clear defiance of the rules. I longed to let my skinny arms swing the full weight of it, to fill my ears with the rhythmic thump as a shower of chips flew from the log on which I stood. My father, I assume, sensed my eagerness, as I was never casual about dropping “axe lesson” hints, but I don’t think he fully realized the desire that embraced me. Not a natural teacher himself, I suppose he did not see the opportunity that lay before him, the unique and unbridled need to have him teach me. As a teacher now, I live for such opportunities, and indeed, am occasionally blessed with one.

The axe-head on my shelf reminds me so clearly of childhood, so clearly of desire and opportunity and the aching need to “grow up.” I look at it today with memories of years and use and places I’ve swung it, things I’ve built and things I’ve destroyed, but through it all I am reminded of a thirst to learn. I have known that thirst in times since, but never with the absolute power that I felt it with my father, twenty-five years ago, headed home with a new axe.