There was a man who played the chain saw. People sometimes mistook him for a cross cut saw player. Sometimes they thought he was a chain saw carver, making bad renditions of bears on their back legs lunging at drivers on the tourist highways, but no. He produced music from his chain saw. A thirty six inch Husqvarna with many a downed Doug fir to its name.
After he got injured logging he'd had a lot of time on his hands. One day he wandered into a used book shop and found a book of Strauss waltzes in the free rack.
``What do you play?'' the store owner asked just to be pleasant - she was all ready to direct him to Stephen King or Louis L'Amor.
``Well I play the chain saw,'' he said. He meant it for a joke but the woman took him seriously.
``Dammit,'' he thought, ``I could play the chain saw!'' And he went home and he started practicing. It cost him two chain saws, a wife and a year of his life before he began to sound good. He got the book of waltzes down, and was seriously considering Ravel's Bolero when he got his first invitation. It was to play at a family reunion.
There was great skill to it. You couldn't improvise. You had to look down the music so you could play your way in then play your way out. You had to disable the safety switch. He didn't take requests.
Someone did a bit in the paper about him. They called him a grizzled old logger. He was offended. He was forty five. Grizzled? Not hardly. Old? Surely not yet.
He put up a web site and was surprised to find that all over America there were groups of people who wanted to hear him play, and he became a minor celebrity, criss crossing the country in his GMC, sleeping on the bench seat and eating truck stop burritos.
A woman named Mamie joined him for a while, and he shared the front seat with her, but she soon realized there wasn't room for both of them and he wouldn't get a motel room for nothing so she was gone one day and he missed her for a while.
It was somewhere in the Carolinas where he was playing hard wood which he wasn't used to when the saw flew up and killed him. In front of a hundred and seventy people including young children. It was bloody. The county cremated him, and the few people who might have mourned him - a son, two daughters, two ex-wives - did not know he was gone until years later.