How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?

In my case, the question is actually, "How much wood could a wood-nurse stack?" And the answer is "It all depends on her work crew!"

At camp, we take one day each session as a work day and a day to do car wash to raise money for Chop Point's sister camp in Nicaragua. This session, I took a team of 3 counselors and 3 campers to the director Jean's house to stack firewood that they will burn during the winter. The pile was huge and at lunch time, we were not even halfway done. I did some recruiting and we started again in the afternoon with the addition of 2 more campers, namely a lad named Helon.


I will write about other campers before the summer is over, but Helon stands out as having the best attitude I've ever encountered in a teen. He will do any job or activity you throw in front of him and he will do it with a big smile on his face. I have never heard him complain and I have never had him refuse to help with anything. He holds doors for me, carries things for me, saves seats for me, and laughs the whole way through. On our wood stacking day, Helon had already been hard at work with other jobs all morning, so he jokingly acted tired, but he worked nonstop. When we paused for a water break, he waved a hand, "You guys take a breather. I'm going to keep going," and proceeded to throw wood down the basement stairs like a machine.




I didn't think we would have time to finish the whole enormous pile, but with a contagiously positive attitude like Helon's, how could we stop? We stacked every single piece of wood. I even had time to treat the kids to ice cream afterwards. And when the director thanked us later, she told us that we had moved and stacked 6 full cords of wood. Wow!