Securing Lumber Stores (Deleted Scene) | Life Below Zero

It's too hot out here. First t-shirt day of the year. Word is the river's been moving upstream of me, so I'm expecting today, sometime today, maybe as late as early tomorrow morning. But not a lot of time to get the last finishing touches done here. It's kind of nice to know that it is moving; it has put some urgency into what I'm doing.

I know there's still some projects that need to get done, and I got a kick butt and get them done right now because I know it's coming. So the job at hand right now is to get these logs all tied together. This is about two weeks' worth of cutting trees and hauling trees in, and this will all be raw materials for use with my sawmill.

The big fear I have is I got a little hell of a lot of work invested in these logs, and I don't want them to float away. So I think what I want to try and do is get some nails driven into these, run rope around them, connect them all up, get them tied off to a tree or something so they can't float away. Then I'll do the same with that pile over there.

In 2009, I had enough logs to build a house, and they all went away in about 12 hours. That was a hard lesson learned, so I don't want to lose these. It's pretty hard to put a value on stuff like this, but you know this is thousands of dollars' worth of lumber. I know that for me it's the time I put into it—time and calories.

So I need to do now is just take a line, staple it onto all the logs, go back over, staple it up the other way—that should tie them together. One of the projects I have for this summer, in addition to finishing this house, is putting up a couple of yurts. One of them will be one that'll be for my clients, but the other one will be basically a workshop—a 24-foot diameter workshop—so I have a good place to work in the winter.

You don't usually get trees this big; I had to hunt around quite a while to find trees this big around here. Pretty valuable—these big guys right here are pretty valuable to me. I don't want to lose them. I don't know if that'll stop it from floating away or not, but maybe there's a little bit of peace of mind that it might slow it down anyway.

I think if I fled to the point where all these logs are floating and all this material here is floating, I'm in big trouble. I'll probably have a lot bigger worries than a few logs floating away at that point. I think that's good.