We knew from the start that the timber sports team from the University of Toronto was the underdog. As dawn broke grey and bitter cold over the frosty fields of Fleming College’s Lindsay Campus, our team, trudging to the competition grounds, saw competing teams jogging past — in matching plaid jackets emblazoned “UNB Woodsmen” and “McGill Woodsmen.” They ran in formation.
As its first job, each team had to collect the wood we would saw and chop that day, from a stack of lumber large enough to build a house. We gathered pieces of trembling aspen, fresh-milled, squared, 8″X8″ for the men and 6″X6″ for the women, the butt of each log labeled with our team’s assigned number, 9.
The white beams weighed as much as the equivalent volume of cement. The teams of women and men (yes, the “Woodsmen” teams included women) would compete, throughout the day, in events such as the Standing Chop and the Swede. The goal: to split, saw, chop and generally hack up all this wood more quickly than the competition.
The trouble was that, while our competitors all came from universities and colleges, they did not look like scholars. I would say they were Of the Pickup Truck. I watched one of these McGill competitors pick up a chainsaw and cut two cookies from a log — one cut down, the next up — as naturally as lifting a spoonful of cereal into his mouth. He later told me he grew up on a farm near the Quebec-Vermont border.
Quite ironically the U of T, Canada’s largest university and among its most renouned, fielded a team who, while full to the brim with spirti, did not match the competition for brawn nor skill. “Just don’t come in last, someone had asked me, back at the Faculty of Forestry, as we loaded our axes, saws, chainsaw, and Tin Woodsman type protective foot and leg coverings into the back of Paul’s pickup truck.
Teams battled throughout the day with cant hooks and axes and saws, and by the afternoon chunks and chips of aspen littered the grounds. My event was the last one of the day: Water Boil. The organizers gave each competitor a dry stovewood-sized chunk of cedar, a soup can filled with about 3″ of water, with a little soap to help it foam up, and three matches. It was strictly Bring Your Own Hatchet. The goal: get the water to boil. You don’t get a match book or match box: you have to light the match on the hatchet or on your zipper.
I’d practiced a bit, so I first split up some sticks and built a kind of pyre for the can. Then I made some shavings and tried to get them to light. The first match lit, but blew out; I quickly blew through my three matches. Behind my back I could smell my competitors’ fires beginning to crackle, and the roar of the crowd. At great length and after perhaps 20 matches, I managed to light my fire. Then people yelled, “Blow, blow!” and so I lay down in the grass and blew. And, finally, my water boiled. Mine was the last water to boil. My time was a princely 9 minutes 20 seconds — the winners boiled their water in under two minutes.
Apparently one team failed to get its water to boil at all.
In the end, the men’s team from U of T reached its goal: we did not come in last.
As I mulled over the whole experience, I cast my mind back to the past few weeks when, as students, we’d all struggled to understand a complicated statistical programming language called R.
“You know,” I said to a fellow competitor, “if they had an event at Timber Sports called “R”, we could win that event. He didn’t pause before replying.
“No,” he said, “we’d probably fuck that up too.