At the stop sign, I caught a whiff of the distinctive smell of fresh cut elm wood. Hanging heavily in the sultry early autumn air, the wood's odor is akin to a fully occupied cow barn — an aroma most people don't particularly like. But to me the smell has a nostalgic tang that takes me back to an earlier time in my life. So instead of heading for Brunswick's Maine Street, I turned up the side street where the sweating arborist and his crew were working.

"You can take all of it for all I care," the arborist said when I asked if I could throw a chunk of Ulmus americanus in the back of my pickup."Nobody wants this stuff."

"Unless you need a splitting block," I replied.

"Yeah, I guess it's good for that," the arborist allowed.

Indeed it is. In fact, picking up my eighteen-by-eighteen-inch log of elm took me back to a nearly identical scene played out in Washington County some twenty-five years ago. Back then, my wife and I had purchased our first house in the remote coastal town of Addison. The property included seven towering elm trees along the borders of our three acres at the edge of the Pleasant River's salt marshes. Admiring them as they began to leaf out during our first spring in residence, I felt as if I had been painted into some sort of Currier & Ives scene.

Soon enough, I discovered most of my neighbors also had a special affection for elms. And it wasn't just because "Centennial" elms had been planted a hundred years earlier all over the four streets that constituted downtown Addison. As far back as Maine's late eighteenth-century settlers, elms would have been called Liberty Trees — and for good reason.

In Colonial Boston, native elms were planted on town greens to provide shade for casual strollers and loiterers. Their tall, vase-like shape grew readily even in the hard-packed, parched roadside soils. One such specimen had been growing for more than 100 years on the common at the corner of Washington and Essex streets. Local patriots used the huge tree as a rallying point — until British soldiers chopped it down in the middle of the night. Infuriated, activists vowed to plant hundreds of new "Liberty Trees" all over colonial Massachusetts, which then included Maine. The new trees, they promised, would be watered with British blood. In 1876, Addison residents planted more in memory of the Revolution.

Learning all this marginally useful information was of little comfort when, during that first summer in Addison, I noticed the leaves near the top of one of our elms began to yellow. Other elm trees around town had earlier succumbed to what eventually came to be called Dutch elm disease. Still, once I knew one of our trees also had the disease — which had stripped thousands of Maine streets of their finest arboreal assets — I started making frantic phone calls.

The news was not good. A state entomologist told me the disease is actually a fungus carried by the non-native European elm bark beetle. Although silvacultural scientists in Holland had worked on a means of controlling the beetle — and were rewarded with the "Dutch elm disease" moniker for their efforts — the only working solution at the time was an expensive, hit-or-miss fungicide treatment. Living frugally Down East, I had neither the means nor easy access to an arborist who might or might not be able to save my tree. So, reluctantly, I sharpened my chainsaw and took the tree down, hoping that would end the beetles' activities.

News of my downtown tree cutting efforts soon spread around Addison and resulted in some unexpected visits while I attempted to convert the downed tree into useful firewood. Many were in search of that perfect splitting stump. And most were mildly amused that I actually planned to split up lengths of elm into firewood. "Too stringy," said one visitor. "Burns cold," said another. "It'll beat you," said a third.

Being relatively young and decidedly stubborn, I continued on anyway. The wood was indeed monstrously hard to split with maul and wedges alone — but not impossible. And as more of our elms began to die, I developed strategies for dealing with the fallen trunks, some of which were three feet in diameter. One of the best strategies was suggested by local farmer Carlton Norton.

"Just take it slow," he advised. "If you can wait until winter, they'll split better then." Sure enough, when the thermometer approached zero, elm logs split more easily. Better yet, the cold weather turned an otherwise sweat-drenched operation into an exercise in economical personal warmth. Patience with the seasons paid nice dividends.

My thrifty nature was also piqued when local jack-of-all-trades Donny Grant stopped by one day, shortly after I downed another elm and was contemplating its twenty-foot-long trunk. "Why don't you get some planks out of it?" he asked. Fine idea, I said, but how the heck would we get this two-ton behemoth to the sawyer? "No problem," said the son of a lumberjack. Grant's father used to spend entire winters cutting and delivering saw logs using just a two-man saw and a team of horses. "No problem at all," Donny assured me. With ramps, wedges, come-alongs, and pulleys, we soon had that trunk loaded on Donny's pickup, bound for the nearby sawyer.

"That stuff will make great ribs for a boat," advised Lenny Lemon, a local carpenter. "You can steam it and bend it into pretzels and it won't split." Sure enough, those elms planks eventually went into three small open boats that are still in service today. And they did bend quite easily, which led a couple of paying customers to trust emphatically in my blossoming boatbuilding abilities.

But best of all, when we moved out of Washington County and built a new house farther up the coast, that elm lumber led to a new life. In addition to providing all the boards we needed for our new kitchen cabinets, the uniqueness of using elm wood brought all sorts of new customers to our door. The general response was, "I've never seen this before. What else can you do with it?"

So today, that elm log I picked up in Brunswick serves as a bit more than just a new splitting block. It gave me back a little of my past, too.