Cliff and Steve Frazee - Cedar Farmers, Transcript
- [Father] The sound is like a whispering sound. The wind blows through the cedars and reminds me of a whispering. I don't know how else to describe it. This type of soil that it grows in, it's been probably millions of years accumulating from rotten logs and vegetation. That's the only place cedar will grow, so I would call it harvesting cedar. It's just like harvesting cranberries, or anything else. You're cutting the logs and sawing 'em up to produce lumber, so I would call it harvesting. I work with my son. He runs the mill, and I help him get the logs and the heavy work.
- [Son] Going down or not?
- [Father] And then he takes it from there.
- [Son] Well, we do most our logging in the North Branch Fork and River. Most of your swamps in New Jersey have been gutted from the outsides. People come in, they grab a load here, 50 foot, 100 feet, in the woods. But if your swamp is 6-, 800 foot wide, that leaves your strip down the middle 400 foot. You put a a road down the middle of that, you got 200 foot on each side. It's pretty handy, and it's...
- [Father] It's called a crossway. I don't know of any other names that could be used. It's another name for a road across the swamp. Some of the crossways do have names, especially the ones that are permanent. They used them years ago to haul wood and charcoal across the swamp, and they would have names like, Frankie's Crossway and Collin's Crossway. Where the roads that I make are just temporary, strictly to get the logs out, and then they are abandoned.
- [Son] We work with the wind, you know. It's a little advantage. You try to push 'em against the wind, and you gotta work twice as hard. We cut so much on the side and then we shut down, and trim 'em up with an axe. If they're close by, I'll measure 'em up, and dad'd cut 'em off.
- [Father] My son uses the measuring stick to measure the logs, so they can be cut up into different lengths.
- [Son] Go ahead!
- [Son] It'll make you old fast, out there in the woods. It's like you're walking on a mattress, brushes up and down. And you go out there and you work a day, you're tired when you come home.
- [Father] They used oxen and they used horses to get the cedar out. Of course, they used the wagons. I use the old method, and I just use one piece of equipment to get the cedar out.
- [Son] It's an old army truck. He bought it pretty close to 30 years ago. I was about seven years old, I think, when I started helping out working with the winch.
- [Father] Move it up. We use a winch to winch the logs up on the truck. We can load three or four at a time with a winch.
- That up enough?
- [Father] It saves a lot of work to do it that way.
- [Son] See with our truck, it's one move. Good right there, let it down dad! We go in there with a truck, and then the next time we drop the logs off, it's right at the mill, right on the skids.
- [Father] The saw mill is approximately six miles from the cedar swamp, and that's all rough wood groves. So it takes us almost an hour to get there.
- [Son] It's an old timer. He picked up the the motor. It used to run the hanger in Lakehurst. And the mill's even older yet. The mill was built around 1900. I guess it was new. I don't think anybody else could run it. Just the way you gotta push it, it's a hard thing to operate. It takes a touch now. I saw the butts for boat lumber, maybe decoy wood, or something that people, carve or they can't use knots in. But usually the top part of the tree gets small, so I'll cut a four by four or something like that.
- [Father] This is the regeneration of another forest, another Cedar stand, and it takes so much sunlight and so much moisture for these to germinate. And the conditions are just right for the tree to grow. So this is the beginning of another Cedar stand. In a hundred years, another a hundred years, we'll cut it off.
- [Son] It's nice when you turn the chainsaws off and get the axe out; it's the old-fashioned way. You know, you got the axe, and you don't hear anything that was made the last 50 years.
- [Father] What I like about it is it's a lot of fresh air, and I'm just an outdoors person. I just don't like four walls.
