Splitting Wood With A Maul Is My New Anger Management Technique

Up here in the woods of Maine, it’s every man for himself. If you suddenly feel the urge to break a window because your girlfriend is consulting the Scrabble word dictionary on her phone before she plays the word, you have to find another outlet to channel that anger. For me, that’s lining up logs and splitting them right down the pipe.

Growing up, I would watch my dad split wood for winter with tremendous admiration. I longed for the day when I finally came of age to hold the maul. He’d let me stack the logs, which I enjoyed because I’ve always been tremendously tidy. Stacking those logs was what led me to become so adept at loading a dishwasher. You can’t just throw bowls next to wine glasses; you have to know that certain dishes require their own space. And of course, all glasses must be loaded facing down, or you’ll open up that steaming hot load to a bevy of upright glasses filled with brackish, circulated dish water. Don’t be an imbecile.

I can’t remember exactly how old I was when he finally let me swing, but I do know that from the moment I cleaved my first ash log, I was hooked. There is something immensely satisfying about splitting a log with a clean blow right on target. It’s like flushing a drive on the screws. So much of it is about the way you set the log up. You learn to land your blows away from the knots that keep logs together. From a safety perspective, you have to keep your legs wide—as though you’re being frisked by a lady cop whose father never came to her softball games. Private schoolers and socialists will tell you to wear gloves and goggles, but that will prevent those manly calluses from forming, which women love except during foreplay.

You should wear boots though. They probably won’t do much to stop an errant swing from severing your dorsalis pedis artery, but they’ll do better than Nike’s flyknit technology, which is basically mosquito netting. A guy on twitter called me out for wearing sneakers, and he’s not wrong; I just didn’t have the time or space to pack my work boots when we fled Manhattan a few weeks back. It was between bags of frozen peas and my wood-mauling boots, and the peas won.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to ensure you avoid injury. As you can see from my video, log #3 had no intention of going quietly. It exploded and a shard gouged the knuckle on my primary fiddling hand.

That’ll take a while.

In any case, give it a try if you have the tools. It’s a great way to let off some steam. Just know that if you chop your toes off, they won’t go to the market, stay home, have roast beef, or go wee-wee-wee all the way home; they’ll go to the hospital on a bag of ice, and it’s a pretty bad time for that right now.