Beauty and the ax

Versatile N.H. woman moves easily between worlds of pageants and wood-chopping contests

Lumberjack Christiann Unger competes in the "double buck" event at the Warner, N.H., Fall Foliage Fest with teammate Eric Radlof. (Meg Bujnowski)

She wears logging boots. Pink ones. Her evening gowns have a little extra room in the lats. Her competition ax - shiny, sharp, and with a handle that she ground down herself on a belt sander - is trimmed with a painted heart.

You'll always find a bubblegum-pink ribbon - and sometimes a bit of sawdust - in her hair.

Paul Bunyan she's not - but then, no one ever mistook the bearded, plaid-flannel-shirt-wearing, ox-befriending lumberjack for a beauty queen.

"They're two completely different things - I know that," said 21-year-old Christiann Unger, the outgoing Miss Gate City (Nashua), who juxtaposes beauty pageants with ax-slinging as a member of the University of New Hampshire Woodsmen Team.

"I like both of them," said the sandy-blond, blue-eyed, freckled beauty, never without dangly rhinestone earrings or manicured fingernails dipped in pink, with a shrug. "Both are part of my life."

She's a Jekyll and Hyde of testosterone and estrogen. Her favorite color, unabashedly, is pink. But then: Chain-mail socks are at the top of her Christmas list.

She can sharpen a blade - and tap dance. Strut unflinchingly before scrutinizing judges in a one-piece bathing suit - and hurl a warrior-like, double-bladed ax at a bull's eye.

With both passions, she loves the competition, the thrill; and ultimately, each allows her the opportunity to deflate long-held stereotypes. You can be graceful and have a cannon for a throwing arm; a pageant contestant without being vacuous, cutthroat, or catty.

In the end, "I'm stronger from both of them," said the Danville, N.H., native, casually dressed for a recent interview in coral-pink sweatshirt over light-wash jeans, a pink Dell laptop tucked into a pink-plaid JanSport backpack at her sneakered feet.

No one can say she isn't well-rounded. The biology major/history minor is also a ski instructor, a camp counselor, and a promotion model. (One recent gig was for Godiva chocolates.)

She's "representative of the very diverse set of young ladies who participate in competitions," said Brenda Keith, president of the nonprofit Miss New Hampshire organization.

Still, for this muscular stunner, the runway came before the chopping block.

Since age 17, Unger has participated in roughly 40 Granite State pageants, from Miss Winnipesaukee to Miss Greater Plaistow - and, just last year, the big showcase, Miss New Hampshire.

If you've ever watched Miss America pageants, you'll recognize the judging categories: interviews, evening wear, bathing suits, and talent. For her segment, Unger either tap dances - another longtime hobby, which she choreographs herself - or plays the violin, generally bowing a piece from Bond, a modern string quartet whose members look more like supermodels than classical musicians.

So far, the Miss Gate City 2008 title is the lone rhinestone tiara to her name.

But there's been a notch in Unger's ax, too: She placed third for a cross-cut women's event - imagine two lumberjacks heaving back and forth on an oversized saw with exaggerated jagged teeth - at this year's Warner Fall Foliage Festival.

Ambidextrous as she is with her two personas, though, brawn has occasionally collided with beauty. Her back muscles are so defined that once, an evening gown barely zipped up on the eve of a pageant; another time, she singed her eyebrows in a fire-building event and took to the stage trailed by the aroma of burnt hair.

Still, she'd ultimately like to peacefully unite the two: A fantasy is to perform chopping as her pageant talent, she says.

But like immiscible compounds, they'll probably stay separate. The Miss America organization would undoubtedly prohibit chopping, along with swords or fire batons, Keith said.

"That smacks of something that could endanger the audience," she said, adding that she has, however, seen talents as unusual as comedic dialog and charcoal drawing. Also, "I don't think it would be conducive to being a performing art."

Unger might disagree. She said although she was terrified at first and thought the equipment looked like "torture weapons," she's been awed by the intricacies and techniques of the sport ever since chopping her first block in fall 2007.

It isn't just brawny men slinging their axes willy-nilly. The best woodsmen calculate their chops based on the type, age, and moisture of the wood.

"You're not competing against other people," said Woodsmen Team assistant coach Chris Robarge. "It's just you and the wood."

More students have become attracted to that challenge: The team roster has grown from 18 to 38 in a year, he said. Women have also become less of a minority, increasing from one to close to a dozen. New members have quickly become adept at hacking and sawing; the team places often - albeit typically at the lower end - at college meets around New England and occasionally at county fairs alongside grizzled - and sometimes record-holding - lumberjacks.

Unger, for her part, boasts this gladiator woman cachet: burling (a test of balance while standing on a giant floating rolling pin); log rolling through an obstacle course; bow sawing; cross-cutting; pulp tossing (throwing wood at a target); survivalist-like fire building; and vertical or horizontal chopping.

To demonstrate, she recently strapped medieval-like armor plates to her shins and feet - aptly called clinkers, on account of the racket. ("In case I miss," she said with a smirk.)

Then, she hopped onto a block of white pine - 2 feet long and 8 inches wide by 8 inches thick - and marked an imaginary target with her finger.

She raised the ax. The blade sliced down, piercing into the wood's white flesh.

WHACK!

Chips spit into the air, spraying the grass.

Then, a series of quick cuts: two to the left; two to the right; another to the left; three to the right.

CRACK!

Unger hopped off as the block collapsed. In the end, it's been triangulated, like a beaver's leftovers.

"You want to try to get down to as few cuts as you can," she said, running her fingers over the edges of the block. Also, good choppers leave behind hearty chunks.

"When you have small pieces like this," she said, holding out a handful of chips, some as thin as sawdust, "you're making too many hits."

No doubt she'll have many more years to tame her ax. Her tiara, on the other hand, will get an early retirement, as pageant contestants typically age out after 24.

When that happens, Unger says, she'll be sad to leave the stage. But she looks forward to chopping up the future, Paul Bunyan style.

"I'm going to be the grandma up there," she said. "I want to be one of those people" of whom others will say, "Watch out for her."

But for now, she'll settle for a pair of chain mail socks for Christmas.

Preferably in pink.

Taryn Plumb can be reached at tarynplumb1@gmail.com.