Late again

Once again, bad timing made me miss out on some fantastic lumber.

A few weeks ago I was shopping at my local Big Box store. I knew they had been prepping the tract of land next to the parking lot for something, but on this day I pulled into a parking spot to see that the land had been mostly cleared. Always interested in wood being cut (and curious as to what they were putting in that space), I walked over and took a look.

Not far from the paved lot was a stump with a single crosscut section of tree trunk perched atop it. And looking at the sawn surface of the stump I saw some incredible spalting.

I’m not always very good at recognizing tree species from just a stump and bit of bark, so I had no idea what the wood was. It was hardwood of some kind, of course, and judging from the concentration of spalting at the base I had to guess that it must have run many feet up into the tree trunk. Perhaps even the entire tree.

But the trunk was simply not there. There was a good bit of chips and sawdust at the base of the stump, and a lot of thick branches, but not nearly enough all over the ground to indicate that the bulk of the trunk had been cut up into smaller chunks for disposal as you might expect. Besides, if they had cleaned up chunks for the landfill, why didn’t they cut up and take those branches?

Of course, that trunk could have been taken offsite intact for later cutting and disposal. But for all I know, once the tree had been felled, one of the workers may have recognized the spalted treasure they’d just cut into. Hopefully, he or his workmates managed to keep that log for useable lumber, as I would certainly have done. I’d like to think so.