Hone the Blade
The Turning Feral Journal - Day 20
Day 20: Knowing how to take care of your tools is something I had to learn the hard way. This ran the gamut from keeping up with my vehicles, cleaning wood stoves, to de-rusting traps, and most importantly… sharpening axes.
You would think the importance of keeping a sharp axe and chainsaw in the backcountry would have been obvious… but, it definitely wasn’t for this woodsman gringo a few years ago. Heck, you go to spotify and type in “sharp axes,” and you're going to get at least one hundred hits of country songs dedicated to this topic alone. So, when I started swinging a dull axe at rounds of cord wood and got shockwaves of pain rattled up through my radius and ulna, I knew it was time to take all those song lyrics to heart – I had to take care of my tools and learn to sharpen them.
When I got my first sharpening stone and ran my husky axe blade across it, it sounded like squeaky train wheels trying to come to an abrupt stop on a track. The chips and small dents I had rendered it over months of unloved use were there and glaringly apparent. I had to work through them with a lot of patience to return my axe to its former glory. It took a lot of practice and youtube reference, but now that I know the technique I am less like Ernest in the clip below, and more like a samurai from Kill Bill.
The point is, you can have all of the tools at your disposal in this world, but if you don’t take care of them they will eventually become useless. The same goes for mental tools as well. If you aren’t spending time “sharpening the blade” of your mental toughness and overall mindset, that too will deteriorate over time. Stay sharp.
Daily Prompt: As you think about what it may take to live a more sustainable and feral lifestyle, what tools in your current tool belt need sharpening? Is it your resilience? Your openness to change? Think about a few ways you can get apply a “wet stone” to those areas and plan that change here:
Motivational Passage:
“ Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax. ”
-Abraham Lincoln
Rewilding Action: In keeping with the theme of sharp axes… if you plan to move off grid or even venture into the woods more often, you will need a chainsaw. I have a collection of Stihl’s and Husqvarna’s and ran through the same issue that I did with my axes on figuring out how to keep them sharp. I tried the tooth-by-tooth sharpening method with a file, but found it too laborious in the field. So, now I have a dremel-brand cordless tool with a 7/32 round file attachment. One of my neighbors showed me this technique and the file fits right in the opening of the tooth… You can quickly zap it after each use and it keeps your blade sharp… Granted, you do go through more chains than if you hand filed, but for me, this has been the best solution!