Coach Kevin Ransom of Paul Smith’s College has 10 more days until the 62nd annual spring woodsmen’s meet, but he is already fretting about the weather. If the sun shines, his lumberjacks, who won the men’s Spring Meet title in 2007, will relax, have fun, and maybe keep the trophy, which the college held for nine consecutive years in the 1950s and 60s. If it rains, Mr. Ransom knows from 17 years’ experience, spirits will drop, and the meet could be “a requiem in drudgery.”
Lobbing a steel ax, sawing a 19-inch-diameter log, and chopping wood may not seem like collegiate sports, but they are among the events at popular college competitions in four regions of the United States. The meets in the Northeast culminate in the Spring Meet, this year at the University of New Hampshire. The event draws an odd assemblage of colleges: One from Canada, Fleming College, and one from the Ivy League, Dartmouth, compete alongside Colby and Unity Colleges, several major public universities, and Finger Lakes Community College. And for 11 of the past 19 years, Finger Lakes, the only two-year college among them, has taken the men’s trophy home.
The Finger Lakes coach, Marty Dodge, has been competing even longer than Coach Ransom. The colleges are archrivals.
Meet day is sunny and warm. At a UNH reservoir, Mr. Ransom is hopeful. He plays down his team’s strengths — any event with a saw or an ax — and worries about their weaknesses, like canoeing. He has let his men’s team, replete with the wisdom and experience of college juniors and seniors, take charge of the canoe races, and he watches them paddle a relay, with a dicey handoff that almost ends in a plunge. Teammates shout “Paddle together!” and “Paddle harder!” until Curt Karboski, the captain, strokes his relay team to second place. One UNH canoeist makes a tight turn and takes in water, a lot of water, and the crowd cheers as his green canoe slowly sinks beneath him. No matter. It is New England’s first warm April day, and the cold water feels good.
Paul Smith’s, a 920-student college named for an Adirondack entrepreneur, flanks the shore of Lower St. Regis Lake, where Smith’s Adirondack resort once stood. With 14,000 acres, the campus lies as deep in the North Woods as an institution gets. “This time of year we’re still pushing four feet of snow,” says Mr. Ransom, whose handlebar mustache makes him look like the lumberjack competitor he still is. “All these teams to the south of us” — he means the Universities of New Hampshire and Connecticut — had weeks to practice canoeing. The ice began to melt on Lower St. Regis only four days ago.
Paul Smith’s fields six-member men’s A and B teams, a women’s team, and a “jack and jill” team (women, or “lumberjills,” have competed in the Northeast since 1973). The coach is not a forestry professor, like other coaches here, teaching the students to, “in a sense, play God,” as the Paul Smith’s freshman Jared (Pookie) Booth puts it, deciding “which trees stay and which trees go.” Mr. Ransom is a forester himself, managing his own 300-acre woodlot and shipping timber to a mill in Canada. After a day in the woods, he comes home for a quick meal and then, three days a week, heads to the college’s forestry cabin, up the lake. In winter the cabin can be deep in snow, but he holds two hours of practice even at 20 below.
At the UNH reservoir, Paul Smith’s tries to rack up points with “pulp toss.” The “pulp” is a 10-pound log that the teams must throw 20 feet, to land between two posts set four feet apart.
Tired from canoeing, the teams heave the logs in a relay until each team has landed 24 logs. Landing them correctly is tough, and Paul Smith’s jacks and jills are not particularly fast. Assistant Coach Brett McLeod calls the event the CliffsNotes version of pulp toss. At home they practiced it with 48 logs, which were bigger.
With no certifying authority in lumberjack sports, events vary. That can be bad news for some teams. Zachariah Brown, of Paul Smith’s, is a star pole climber, among the fastest in the country. Wearing spiked toe gaffs that he fashioned himself, he can run straight up a 35-foot-high pole. But there will be no pole climbing at this meet; the hydraulic lift that raises the pole is in use somewhere else.
“People are surprised that there’s no sanctioning body for the sport,” says Donald W. Quigley, the Spring Meet’s chief judge and a forest-technology professor at New Hampshire. “That speaks volumes to the spirit of the games. These people emulate the skills of woodsmen and the lives of woodsmen. We’re handshake deals and fair play,” he says. “It’s just a spirit of a tradition that’s been powerful enough to maintain itself all these years.”
The first Spring Meet, held at Dartmouth in 1947, started the tradition of collegiate contests to celebrate hand-logging skills. In an event called “super Swede,” for example, a woodsman uses a Swede saw, named for the thin-bladed, fine-toothed Swedish bow saws first imported by American lumbermen after World War I. Sawyers race to cut four “cookies,” or slices, from an eight-inch-square “cant,” or log. Loggers in the 1800s were paid by the number of four-foot logs they delivered; the Swede saw, with its four-foot frame, allowed a single sawyer to both measure and cut. Timber barons could pay one sawyer instead of two.
“Axes and saws are no longer used in the timber industry,” says Coach Dodge, of Finger Lakes, who has worked hard over the years to elevate the sport from club to collegiate level. “It’s all tractors and tree chompers.” College meets, he says, are “an attempt to keep history alive.”
If history, gender equality, and fair play are alive in the sport, so is a sense of humor. To express “girl power,” Dartmouth’s female crosscut sawyers wear silver tiaras, and Dartmouth jacks and jills both wear skirts. A Colby lumberjack competes in a hot-pink shirt and flowered turquoise shorts. T-shirts communicate an attitude: “Hey, nice ax.”
Stihl, the chain-saw company, turns a more serious eye on the contest, giving money and prizes to support the meet. With 12 colleges from the Northeast and mid-Atlantic assembled here, Stihl offers its own competition at day’s end, while judges tally the Spring Meet scores. Matt Bolton, a Paul Smith’s senior from Batavia, N.Y., has a shot at winning. If he does, he’ll compete in the company’s Timbersports Collegiate Championships next month, in Columbus, Ga. The winner of that goes on to Stihl’s Timbersports Series, the pro league for woodsmen.
When Assistant Coach McLeod was on Paul Smith’s team in 2000, he recalls, his teammates “were naturals; they grew up on farms, they were strong.” But the team lacked the money to buy the best saws and axes, like those of the winning teams. He wrote to Stihl explaining that woodsmen’s competitions were “the biggest sport on our campus,” but the team couldn’t excel without better equipment. The company sent $2,000, enough for a hand-sharpened ax and bow saw, and the woodsmen’s corporate sponsorship was born.
This year Paul Smith’s bought six new Tuatahi racing axes from New Zealand, for $2,500.
On Day 2, swinging lighter axes, Teresa (Tree) Troy, Megan Veely, and Jacqueline June compete in the “underhand chop.” Protected by chain-mail “socks” under her sneakers, the first axwoman stands on a pine log and chops a “vee” between her feet. Halfway through the log, she jumps completely around, turning her back on the crowd to chop the other side, never losing her footing. She cuts through, the log falls apart, and the crowd whoops as the next lumberjill starts chopping. Pine chips fly, and the team finishes 25.39 seconds ahead of Finger Lakes, its closest competitor.
With all heats now in chopping or sawing, the meet starts to swing in Paul Smith’s favor. The men’s team members, some in muttonchops and others in Mohawks — shaving heads for Spring Meet is a team tradition — slap high fives after every win: “super Swede, “vertical chop,” “crosscut.”
“We’re really good sawyers,” says Ms. Troy, captain of the women’s team. Sawing is “what we do.” In the crowd, a young man in a University of Maine T-shirt jokes that there’s nothing to do at Paul Smith’s all winter except chop and saw. Blades glint, sawdust flies, and Coach Ransom is beaming. Marty Dodge, of Finger Lakes, admits that, according to the posted standings, his archrival has won.
At college basketball games, fans yell “You suck!” at the opposing team and cheer if a player stumbles. But at woodsmen’s meets, says Raymond J. Braun, father of a Paul Smith’s sophomore, “the last guy is up there chopping, and everybody starts cheering” long after other athletes have won. “It’s not a competition against each other as much as it is a competition against the wood. It’s about being successful.”
In the end, however, not everyone can be successful. Paul Smith’s Mr. Bolton completes the “single buck” in 16.81 seconds to win the Stihl qualifier and a chance at the company’s collegiate title. The State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry takes home the women’s trophy.
And when all of the heats are tallied, the 2008 men’s trophy goes to Finger Lakes Community College, which beats Paul Smith’s by two points.
http://chronicle.com Section: Notes From Academe Volume 54, Issue 36, Page A8
