Welcome to StumpPhest: Nothing says Friday Night like sharpening chainsaws

My gas-powered Canis Lupus.

I’ve been pushing myself off the garage floor for a couple of years now, instead of just jumping up as if my knees were made of spring-loaded titanium. I’ve been making weird noises during the process too, like grunting and exhaling loudly like a ticked off ‘Squatch. But I didn’t know I was finally old until I discovered that I have a ‘good’ bucket, knew how to fix a lawn spreader, and got excited because my chainsaw sharpening kit came in a week early. Now it’s on. Old Guy Stuff.

I have two giant stumps from 80-year-old oak trees right in the middle of my lawn. I have to drive around them every time I cut the grass. Can you believe it? Drive around them? Who has time for that? All that lefting and then righting. Anywho, I’ve gotten sick of looking at them too, as they are rather unsightly. Since I got semi-laid off right before Christmas, then COVID happened, money is now on the Watch List. Before QuaranTimes, I had gotten stump-pulling quotes – $800 each. Umm, no.

Then I found a few homesteaders on the YouTube who burned their stumps into the ground, literally. But they had homesteads and could let their fires burn for days. I'm on a couple acres, true, but I’m rural with people sort of around, in a forest that just experienced a massive caterpillar raid that left 90 percent of the oaks in my yard standing dead. Add to that the 478 Nor’Easters we've had in the last two years, and now there’s a forest’s worth of prime kindling in the wooded half of my backyard.

So, in an effort to save money and torch up some kindling, I decided to follow suit with a little Homestead Lite and burn my stump to the ground. Well then. I burned about three years' worth of campfires in my stump hole last weekend and managed to get rid of about a half-inch of an inch of stump. Hmmm.

The Mighty Mini. The Poulan 2300 CVA produced in the early 1980s.

Very Edward Chainsawhands like, I went about the business of cutting this thing up – or trying to at least. I cut straight down. Sideways. Diagonally. Woodchips and sawdust flew about the yard as if I were sculpting a grizzly bear statue at a lumberjack convention at the Montana Marriott. The sawdust really turned to dust-dust and it started smoking and smelled like the campfire was starting on its own. That’s when I knew my chains were toast.

To be fair, I had made some progress on Betty. I managed to cut off four giant root tops and a few awkward sideways slices off the top. For good measure, I even drilled a few holes in the thing, down from the top and into the side so they met in the middle sometimes, to create like a mini jet-stream backdraft that hopefully would create a firenado and burn the stump in minutes. Yeah, so this didn’t happen.

After a few minutes online, I discovered that buying a chainsaw chain every time one got dull was cost prohibitive, particularly during QuaranTimes, with only a part-time gig. After a few more minutes, I discovered a fancy thing called a chainsaw-chain sharpening kit, which seemed to do the trick, according to a few online videos. Consumer warning, you can never, for whatever reason, call a chainsaw-chain a chainsaw ‘blade’. You will be laughed and ridiculed right out of the forest. This has been a public service announcement from the Greater Voluntown Metro Area. You’re welcome.

A week early mind you, my chainsaw-chain sharpening kit came in! I got the Oregon brand from, of all places, The Oregon Store. It just happened to be Friday night and what could be more exciting than getting a sharpening kit ahead of a Saturday Night Stump Burn heretofore known as StumpPhest 2020? I’ll get to that later. Watched another video for good measure and actually read the directions on the package and sure enough, the things started getting sharp. Imagine that! [Note: The second file handle split on my kit when I installed it onto the file. I sent the Oregon gang a note requesting a replacement handle and they sent me one right quick in the form of a whole new kit! And I got both kits in less time than I anticipated the original order, so good on them!].

I got the sharpening kit for the big fella and I had some files in my vintage, monster toolbox that my father gave me when he retired. The Snap-On logo is even in script the thing’s so old, like mid-1960s old. This thing worked on V8 Galaxies, Mustangs, and Challengers. So it was a big night at Slapdash Racing World Headquarters & Conference Center, aka my garage, on Friday night. The beer was cold. The files were sharp. The chains got super cutty.

Saturday morning I set about the task of having a go at Betty, the stump.

I donned my gear like a Lumberjack Superhero and started cutting.

And cutting.

And more cutting.

After 10 minutes, dust.

Dust-dust.

Smoke.

More sharpening.

And filing

Filing.

And sharpening.

I did this process three times and barely got anywhere. Clearly this 80-year-old stump had petrified into granite and it was laughing at me as my chainsaw bla… chains dulled within minutes.

Side note, there is hardly a finer smell in the world than chainsaw exhaust, bar oil, and fresh sawdust. That’s my kinda aromatherapy. If you use VP pre-mix, it even smells like rally car exhaust. Be forewarned though, that stuff is expensive as heck, but worth it to me to avoid mixing the little oil jugs with the big gas jugs hoping you get it right the first time and not after 17 trips to the small engine guy.

Defeated. I was defeated. I admitted defeat.

Sort of.

Sure, Betty had damn-near killed both of my chainsaws and my willingness to sharpen things 50 times a day. So I got primal. I drilled more holes and cut some haphazard slices and filled them with kerosene, then invited the socially-distanced neighbors over for the first edition of StumpPhest 2020. As previously mentioned, I had plenty of fuel from storms of yore, so we stacked on the logs and twigs and sticks and bark and let’er rip.

Betty had me, uh, stumped.

Now, with the shear amount of logs we blew through that first night, I expected a giant divot of ash in my yard akin to the Meteor Crater in Starman.

This was not the case.

While we did do some damage, taking off X inches both from the top and around the perimeter, clearly Betty was a fighter and StumpPhest was now a regular neighborhood feature. Every couple of weeks, I drilled more holes, gathered up more firewood from the yard, splashed a little kerosene for inspiration, and off we went. Each week, Betty got smaller and smaller, but had taken on that Devil’s Tower look, which perfectly played into my enthusiasm, because dammit, I love Close Encounters of the Third Kind. All the beeping and booping going on in the desert on that Jumbotron-looking thing and Richard Dreyfus making mashed potato towers and the like, it’s great stuff.

While Betty has proven a worthy adversary, and one could view this burning of the stump thing as a nuisance, what I learned was we started getting closer with our neighbors in a time when we all needed to be physically distant. They started bringing their own coolers and snacks so we wouldn’t have to interact at a communal table.

My wife and I have only lived in Voluntown for 2.5 years, but I feel like I’ve been welcomed so much that it seems like I’ve been here for a decade. I was in my last neighborhood outside of Providence for nine years and only knew two of my neighbor’s names on a street of 31 tightly-packed houses.

So the negative has turned positive in this sort of a microwaved evolution. But the irony is, since this has happened, my wife now wants me to move the fire pit to where the stump pit is – so now I still have to drive around the thing with the lawn mower. A small price to pay I suppose, for all the good that has come from Betty and StumpPhest 2020.

The StumpPhest 2020 results thus far.

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