This is one of those situations that just kind of happened...and ended up being a real "God Thing"...so I decided to write about it. It all started back in the fall when we had our wood cutters work days here at SBC. I ask two of our regular volunteers if they would take on a special project of dropping some problem "poplar" (aspen) trees that border our Lease Campground. One of these trees had sheared off a few years back and speared right thru the roof of a lease trailer, and all the lease campers along the edge of that woods have not been sleeping well since then. Walter Pettifor has been coming out to assist us with tree situations for the past...I don't know how many years...because he has been coming out since before I was here (which is now 20 years). So Walter is my "go-to-guy" when I have trees that need dropping, that I don't want "just anybody" dealing with. So, he and his friend Johnny Coontz lit into these 6-8 problem aspen that I ask him to deal with on our first wood cutter's day. On our second wood cutter's day, we found a few more trees in this same grove of poplar that looked like they were soon to be causing us problems, so we decided to keep them on this same project again. Well, Walter and Johnny ended up coming out here at least 5 times in all...and ended up dropping over 50 aspen trees. This was really nice to have done...but now what do we do with all these trees?
This became the question and eventual mission that Walter continued to pursue. It was an awful lot of firewood to have to deal with, and poplar wood is really not all that great for firewood anyway, and will practically rot if you don't burn it within a year or so. With this in mind, and with the orchestration God worked out, Mert Arvidson and Walter sat at the same table at our donor appreciation dinner in November. In their conversation that night, they both decided to start a search for buyers of poplar wood...which incidentally, I had done a few years earlier with no success. I was not real hopeful, but really appreciated their interest in the project, and really hoped they might turn up a buyer.
After a couple weeks and no prospective buyers, enter the picture...Craig's List! I had just recently become aquainted with Craig's List as I started selling garage sale leftovers from our "Huge SBC Garage Sale". I decided to list our poplar logs and see if I got any bites...and what do you know...I did...from 2 separate parties. One guy was a smaller outfit and one guy was a buyer for a logging company. They both came out and looked at the logs, and gave me the exact same figure on what the camp could expect to make on these 50 logs...which of the 50, they would probably only be interested in about 35 or so. The figure was $200, after they paid for their loading and trucking and time. But, even at $200, that was worth it to me, just to have them out of here. The buyer from the logging company though, threw in a little more food for thought...which takes us to the rest of the story. He said that it would be much more worth his while, and much more profitable for both he and the camp if we could find some "money logs" in our woods to go along with these aspen. So...we went looking.
Initially, we found 13 trees in the same neck of the woods as the aspen...and they were all walnut. Come to find out...the price of walnut is really high right now and so they are much more in demand than the other hardwoods. This particular buyer was also very excited about having us sign a contract right then and there. That alone was somewhat "interesting", so we decided to wait...and also ask for references. This ended up being a very good decision especially since we had somebody within our own church and camp constituents that was into the logging business, and we didn't even know it.
Walter had contacted Todd Holton, knowing that Todd had been involved with logging efforts on his own property before...and maybe he could give us some wise advice. Todd not only had been involved with logging efforts, but he actually served as a middle man in logging efforts as somewhat of a side business. He agreed to come out and look things over and see what we had going. The timing here really ended up being another "God Thing", because Todd came along right at the perfect time, before we were able to make a deal with any other company.
Todd and his partner, Josh Morlock came out, along with Walter and Johnny,and we all spent several hours tramping through the woods looking for hardwoods. We learned that Josh had been in this business most of his life, and knew his trees pretty well. He and Todd sized up 28 walnut trees in all, and 3 additional hardwoods and said they would be calling us and letting us know what they thought we could expect to make out of the deal.
Their figure was significantly higher than the other bid we had received, and they would be making their share also, due to them doing the cutting and hauling out of the wood. We agreed to let them go for it. We were excited about the deal...and they were too, as they planned to use their cut of the money for an upcoming missions trip to Haiti.
Both Todd and Josh spent several days cutting and hauling logs out of the woods, and before long they had a rather impressive spread of logs laid out in our main field (see picture). Soon after that, they had arranged for 3 different buyers to come out and bid on all the logs. This is the best way to deal with logs, since you are then able to make the most by taking the highest bid.
In the end, our highest bidder came out and we signed a contract. We ended up making almost 3 times as much as we would have made...had we gone with the very first logging company to give us a bid. Obviously, we will be doing business with Todd Holton again when it comes time to sell some more logs...about 5 years from now or so. I just can't help but see God's hand in all of this...and hope you are able to also.
