4:18 AM… (beep) “I’m here.” (parked in front of my house)
4:19 AM… (beep) “One sec.”
And so started another day, and another trip to Michigan. My friend, Tom has an ambitious plan to turn fallen oak trees into flooring for the townhouse that he is renovating. He has a source for the trees locally, but he has to transport them to a sawmill in Michigan for the first stage in their reappropriation. Tom has a trailer, and he can take up to 3 logs at a time, but he will need at least 11 or 12 logs to get enough lumber for the job.
It will take multiple trips to get the logs from Chicago to the Michigan sawmill where they will be cut into boards. Once cut they will be transported to Indiana where the greenwood will be dried into finished boards. It is quite the process.
Tom asked me if I wanted to go along with him on these trips, and I said, “Yes.” Why you may ask? For a few reasons:
-I travel well with Tom, and I enjoy going on adventures with him.
-We are both individuals who are filled with wonderment over simple things. We like to explore.
-I felt that it would be safer if he had a co-pilot to keep him company.
I got into Tom’s dually and we started our journey to the Michigan sawmill. And so our adventures began.
I know that a lot of people are going a bit stir crazy with pandemic isolation, so I thought that I would share parts of our adventure with you via photos that I took along the way. The photos are from our first 4 trips.
These logs are huge.At 4:30 AM it is dark, but the highways are busy with truck traffic.Welcoming dawn.The leaves are turning earlier in Michigan than in Illinois. The colors have been spectacular.I thought that these dried stalks of corn looked like soldiers guarding their master’s field.The country roads were peaceful and serene. Mini side trips revealed hidden treasures, like this lake.We found random antique cars sitting in a field.The country roads were littered with fruit and vegetable stands. I scored some tomatoes, cucumbers, acorn squash, and apples.All road trips include “pit stops”… at least when I’m traveling. Here we stopped in Indiana on our way back from one of the trips. Migrant workers help harvest the region’s produce. Small stores offer limited and expensive grocery shopping.Deisel fuel was much cheaper at this rural gas station.Here I am with just one of our loads. Including the trailer, Tom truck was pulling around 14,000 pounds!Some of the logs that we transported. Sawmill buildings in the background.Moving into position to dump the logs at the sawmill.The rear doors of the trailer secured. Ready to dump!Dumping logs at the sawmill.The trailer empty, time to go back to Chicago.The sawyer planing a board from one of Tom’s logs. The heater and kilns at the sawmill. Tom will not be using these as the process would take at least 4 months to dry his lumber. Instead, we will drive the cut boards to Indiana where they can be dried via a faster vacuum method.I noticed that one of the trailer’s tires looked like it was losing air. It turns out that it took on a roofing nail. We were very lucky that the tire didn’t blow while the trailer was carrying three huge logs.Tom was prepared for emergencies, and he even had a tire repair kit.What good is a tire repair kit if you don’t have a compressor to refill the tire, and what good is a compressor if you don’t have a portable generator to power it? Yep, we had both.
