Split Cedar - The Smell of Home

January, 2002


Although the senses of sight, sound and touch always take precedence over the sense of smell, sometimes it is our noses that bring back memories so strongly that they wring tears from our eyes.

When I was a small child I lived with parents and sister in a two-room log cabin on the shore of Adams Lake, a place of surpassing peace and beauty well away from drawbacks and frills like roads, power lines, telephones, central heating and indoor plumbing. But then my father, an amazing city man who translated the seven-year itch into a thirteen-year wilderness adventure, built a house.

By sheer good fortune, the previous owner of our 150 acres of mostly forest had left a stack of big red cedar poles, ranging up to 50 feet long and two feet across the butt, peeled and seasoned and fairly demanding to be used. So Father hired a nearby horse logger to bring over his big Clydesdale and haul the poles to the chosen site--a shoreside knoll--and then he got to work.

In the first couple of years in the bush he had become highly skilled with axe and crosscut saw and, while he had no formal carpentry training, he made sketches of what he wanted (in consultation with my mother) and pretty well winged it from there. Mother helped in the challenging job of rolling the big logs into place, up skids, with heavy use of cant-hooks, block-and-tackle and occasionally saddle-horsepower. It was killing work, but with a scow-load of shiplap and two-by-fours for the second floor, the house rose up to its roof inside of a year.

It was 40 feet long and 30 wide, with a huge stone fireplace and chimney, with another stone chimney for the cast iron cook-stove in the kitchen. To my five-year-old eyes it was the marvel of marvels. Even sight of the five-storey skyscrapers of Kamloops that we saw once a year failed to dim the wonder of our new house rising on its hillock to look out at the mountains across the lake. Father, who by then had built three trapping cabins up on the mountaintops plus a barn, a chicken house and a root cellar, called it simply The Big Cabin.

My most vivid memories of the house-building come sweeping back when I smell the exotic pungency of newly split western red cedar. It took more than four thousand cedar shakes to cover the roof The Big Cabin, and each was split out of blocks of wood with a long steel blade fixed to a vertical wood handle; when the blade was positioned and struck with a wooden mallet, a cedar shake would spring away from the block.

Father found the wood he wanted in the black mud of a shallow swamp a half-mile up the mountainside behind the house. Cedar trunks up to four feet in diameter, knot-free for thirty or forty feet, had lain in that mud for a long time--perhaps a century or more. In all those years a little of the outermost layer of sapwood might have rotted, but all the rest was solid, redolent, springy, straight-grained wood that seemed to be waiting impatiently to be opened and set free by the blade and mallet.

After all the sweat and strain and bruises of the walls, the brute labour of heaving obstinate timber into place, of chopping out the notches, of boring holes with a brace-and-bit and countersinking great spikes and escaping the odd log that might jump the wedges and rumble back down the skids, my father reveled in the sensuous challenge of splitting out those aromatic shingles.

Each day that he worked up there at the edge of the swamp, in amongst tall standing timber, Mother and sister Sally and I would walk up with a picnic lunch, and Father would almost reluctantly put down the saw or the mallet and help get a little fire going to make a pot of strong of tea and hot water for cocoa. On the first autumn day that rain threatened, he built a little lean-to of sticks, roofed with long, overlapping strips of cedar bark. When it was cold or wet we would sit inside the lean-to, facing the fire, munching thick sandwiches, and I believe each of us thought it was as snug and delightful as a shelter can possibly be.

So today when I split some cedar kindling or cut a piece of cedar lumber I see the dark forest and the big, muddy blocks, and the one block used to hold the others for splitting, and the pile of small, discarded outer slabs of cedar, and the neat bundles of shingles, tied with binder twine. I see again my parents' faces in the glow of the fire, and I hear a thrush singing its spiraling song in among the shadowy trees, and there is the vague patter of rain on a roof of bark. And there is the smell of a new home rising, there on the shore of Adams Lake, its essence drifting across a lifetime. The smell of cedar. Always the smell of home.

Tony Eberts is a columnist and environmentalist whose fourty years with The Vancouver Province helped shape a consciousness of BC's wildlife issues.