Plato's Parable of the Chainsaw

A podgy middle-age man turned the corner of the Home Depot lighting department and pulled up short where Kyle Bliss was unloading a dolly of fluorescent, overhead fixtures. "Where can I find chainsaws?"

Kyle led the way several aisles over to seasonal tools. "Gas or electric?" The fellow seemed stymied. "Why do you need the tool?" he rephrased the question.

The man pushed the wire-rimmed glasses up on the bridge of his nose. "An ice storm knocked limbs off a pine tree this past December, and I want to tidy my yard."

Kyle reached for a fourteen-inch Poulan electric model. "You won't be cutting down any old-growth redwoods with this little tiger, but it can tackle pretty everything else." He demonstrated how the safety trigger worked and where to add high viscosity bar oil to lubricate the chain. The customer held the chainsaw limply with his fingertips and stared at the formidable array of hooked teeth staggered over the length of the black bar. In response to everything Kyle told him the squat man replied, "Yes, I see."

A willowy blonde with straw colored hair and fair skin came up beside the older man. "Did you find what you're looking for?" Before he could think to reply, the woman, who looked to be on the front side of thirty, turned to Kyle. "I tried to convince my father to call a tree service, but he's intent on tackling the job himself." She relieved him of the tool, grabbing the guide bar with her left hand while wrapping her slender fingers around the handle. The blonde made several vertical passes over an imaginary log, slicing the airy wood into neat, negotiable chunks. Unlike her father, the woman seemed perfectly at ease with the tool. "Seems fairly basic."

Kyle suddenly felt depressed. Two people - one homicidally over-confident - who knew next to nothing about power tools, constituted a veritable bloodbath! "You just have to be very careful."

“Yes, I see.” A slightly dazed expression - was it joy or abject terror? - crept over the man's doughy features. "'I’ll also need an extension cord and quart of that lubricating oil."

Kyle pulled a green and black box from the storage bin directly below the display, handing it to the customer. "Read the instruction manual before you operate the tool," he counseled, "and always set both feet firmly on the ground before pressing the trigger."

"What was that?" the daughter asked. She was so insufferably pretty with those pale blue eyes, creamy skin and flaxen hair tightly woven in a French braid - a classic Scandinavian beauty!

"When you're cutting limbs, debris can pile up in a hurry. You wouldn't want to lose your balance in the middle of a cut."

* * * * *

A week later Kyle was stocking finished lumber at the far end of the store and caught sight of a lithe woman with a smattering of light freckles sauntering toward him. "Nice wood."

Kyle leaned a smooth board against a vertical pile. "Red oak."

“And the lighter ones?” She indicated a row of alabaster boards shot through with coffee-colored highlights. "That’s maple. The darker wood with the greenish flecks in the next bin over is poplar."

Kyle picked at a painful lump in the fleshy underside of his thumb. The oak boards were, far and away, the worse for needle-like splinters that protruded from the milled edges. The woman ran her fingertips over a narrow length of pine trimmed in Roman ogee profile. "I need a favor." She was standing so close, he could feel her sweet breath on his cheek. "My father's not mechanically inclined. He hasn't even taken the chainsaw out of the box and may be feeling a bit overwhelmed." She brushed a strand of straw colored hair out of her eyes before assuming a more persuasive tone. "I was wondering if you could stop by over the weekend and give him a few pointers… demonstrate how the saw works." Her thin lips relaxed in a toothy smile. "Forgive my rudeness… I didn't even bother to introduce myself. I'm Miranda Rasmussen." She extended a hand.

Most red-blooded males who bought similar tools would be ripping the packaging apart before they even made it home in the car! He could still picture Mr. Rasmussen holding the chainsaw at arm’s length as though he was grappling with a venomous snake. Kyle couldn't teach tool safety to a middle-age man possessing no ability to bond with the saw - master his innate fears and make it his own. "It's not like removing the training wheels and teaching a youngster to ride a bike."

The woman seemed nonplussed. She just smiled that infuriatingly winsome smile and inched a step closer. Thirty feet up near the ceiling a golden finch was flitting about the metal trusses. Birds got in though the eaves and fluttered about until they eventually found their way out again. Miranda watched the tiny bird as it skittered among the crossbeams. "My mother past away a year ago last Christmas. It would weigh on my conscience if, God forbid, if my father did something foolish… regrettable."

A contractor wearing steel-toed work boots trudged by pushing a flatbed heaped high with pink Owens-Corning fiberglass insulation. "I'm free Saturday morning," Kyle muttered.

"You're a peach!" Miranda scribbled an address on a slip of paper and, impulsively leaning forward, gave him a quick hug before rushing off.

* * * * *

The Rasmussens lived on Evans Drive near the center of town. Saturday morning, Kyle grabbed a pair of safety glasses, screwdriver and half-inch wrench before driving over to the blue house with the gambrel roof. He found Miranda waiting for him in the back yard among a pile of fallen tree limbs. The Poulan chain saw was resting on a picnic table. "Where's your father?"

"Got called into work on short notice," she replied blithely. "You can show me."

It was a ruse. The father probably got cold feet on the ride home from Home Depot that same night and was trying to decide which tree service to call in order to remove the messy limbs. But not so quick! Rising to the occasion, Little Miss Perfect would tackle the burly lumberjack’s job. Kyle placed his tools on the table. "I can come back next week."

"And in the interim," she deftly parried the remark, "something else might come up."

Resigned to the inevitable, Kyle loosened the two retaining nuts on the metal bar. "First thing is to adjust any slack in the blade." Miranda watched as he squeezed a chain sprocket between a thumb and forefinger then tugged gently away from the bar. Inserting the flat blade of the screwdriver in the tension screw, he rotated the handle a half turn to the right and retightened the nuts. "See how the chain lies flat on the bar. It's not sloppy-loose or so overly tight that the blade might seize and kick back during a cut." He filled the plastic container with chain oil, replaced the cap and pressed down a half dozen times on the primer cover. The tacky oil ebbed into the bottom compartment, welling up around the chain. "The blade revolves clockwise, pulling the wood toward your body during the cut." Kyle pressed the trigger and the chain raced about the metal bar at a furious pace. "Learn to cut with your ears as much as the tool."

"How's that?"

"Get used to the sound that the saw makes when it’s operating properly." He squeezed the trigger a second time and held it for a good ten seconds before releasing pressure. "That's what the tool is supposed to sound like. If it doesn’t, you shut it down and figure out, through a process of elimination, what's wrong."

Kyle showed her how to limb branches trimming from the thickest portion of the wood. Miranda proved a quick study. There was nothing diffident in the way she pared away the outer growth from the fat limbs. Angling the blade over a hefty, six-inch branch, she deftly lopped off a respectable log. "How's that?"

An hour later, the entire yard was cleared of debris with a pile of logs stacked near the storage shed. Kyle showed her how to clean the blade and recheck the lubricant. "A week ago, I wouldn't have known which end of a chainsaw to hold, and now I'm a regular Paul Bunyan minus Babe the Blue Ox." Her normally pale cheeks were flushed from the physical activity. After Miranda scrubbed the last of the pine sap from her hands with paint thinner, she disappeared into the house and returned with cups and a pitcher of lemonade.

“Every spring my mother planted a rock garden.” She gestured toward a profusion of wild flowers and cultivated plants on the far side of the yard. “After she died, I continued the tradition as a memorial... a way of keeping her memory alive.” There were orangey dahlias, gladiolus and dwarf sorbet lilies.

“My mother grew those calla blossoms from seed the year she took sick,” she said, indicating lipstick-red plants shaped like papery-thin goblet. “The purple clematis with the frothy white stamens is a new edition.” Seated at the picnic table, Kyle was finally beginning to relax, and now with the wood cut, was in no great hurry to leave. Seeing the leggy blonde wielding the chain saw, chopping pine logs like so many oversized toothpicks was an erotic image he would take to his grave.

"My father teaches philosophy over at the junior college,” she said shifting gears. “The other day I was thumbing through a textbook in the den and stumbled across Plato's Parable of the Cave." “Are you familiar with the story?” Kyle shook his head. She explained how a group of people live chained in a darkened cave, facing a blank wall. All they ever saw of the world was the fleeting shadows thrown on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them."

"So they never actually got to see what created the images."

"No, never. Colorless shadows were the closest they got to reality." "But then, a prisoner is freed and forcibly dragged out of the cave into the sunlight. At first he can't make any sense of his new reality. Much later, when he finally returns to the cave, his former friends become resentful and suspicious because nothing he tells them about the outside world makes any sense."

"An intriguing story."

Miranda stood up now. She shook her head and stretched as though breaking a spell. "I'm sure you've got better things to do than listen to my idle nattering." She couldn't thank him enough for teaching her how to use the saw and even stood on the sidewalk waving as he drove away.

* * * * *

“Need any help?” On Monday morning, Kyle spotted a tall black man with a young boy hovering around a Ryobi band saw.

“What’s the resaw capacity?”

“Four inches, but you won’t get that on hardwoods like ash or maple.”

The Negro scowled, cocking his head at an angle. “I don’t follow you.”

“The tool can crosscut pretty much anything up to maximum depth, but things get dicey when you try to rip with the grain. Even with a half-inch blade, the 2.5-amp motor isn’t strong enough to handle heavy-duty, production work.”

Kyle gestured with his eyes toward a larger tool with an orange housing. “The Rigid fourteen-inch has a three-quarter horse power motor plus graphite blade guides for free-hand cuts.”

“Yeah, I noticed.” the black man’s expression softened. His son kept glancing back and forth between his father and the salesman. The man ran a finger over the small, induction motor. “Blade might wander with the grain, if the saw is underpowered.”

Kyle smiled at the boy, who promptly grabbed his father’s hand. “The Ryobi’s a great tool for hobbyists and weekend warriors; the Rigid is a commercial-quality workhorse.”

“What about blades?”

“You’re better off with thin kerf, silicon steel,… quarter-inch blades for general purpose cuts… wider diameters when ripping stock.”

* * * * *

Kyle took early coffee break. He got a cup of coffee and took it out back, even though an intermittant light rain was coating the asphalt with a slick, glossy sheen. He went and stood in the rear of the store near the dumpsters where no one would bother him and he could put his fractured thoughts in order. When he first arrived at the Rasmussen's property and learned that the old man wasn't there, Kyle assumed that the daughter wanted to seduce him. While Miranda was chopping logs and showing him her mother’s flowery memorial, he was undressing her with his eyes, imagining all sorts of lewd and lascivious trysts. But there was no hidden agenda, and he was no better than the ignorant dolts cloistered away in Plato's murky cave. Too caught up in adolescent fantasies, all he got for his trouble was a glass of fresh-made lemonade, tour of the rock garden and smattering of Greek philosophy.

Reaching for his cell phone, he dialed information and requested the number for the Rasmussens at forty-one Evans Drive. “Hi, Miranda?... Yeah, Kyle from Home Depot, that's right. How did your father like the way you cleaned up the yard?” He took a deep breath and let the air out of his lungs in a single, uninterrupted stream. “Say, I was wondering...”