December 24th and 25th-- How we trimmed our trees

I began the afternoon by taking the chainsaw down from off the hook on which it lives. It had been some time since I last showed it any love, and it was apparent. There was slack in the chain; the teeth were dull and glazed with dark patches of burned-on resin and what-not. The air filter held a thick yellowed encrustation of sawdust that must surely have been choking it something fierce...

I filled it with fuel and oil, then marked two ‘index’ teeth on the chain with marker, one cutter on each side. These let me know when I’ve finished with the sharpening. It takes me just a little over six-hundred strokes of the file to sharpen the saw; five for each gullet, five for each top plate, times 61 cutting teeth; three-hundred, more or less with the round file, then three hundred, more or less, with the flat file. Check the bar for burrs, adjust the tension, we are ready to go.

The day of Christmas Eve was of a part with the few preceding days and many of the following days: monochromatic, damp, leaden, and warm beyond all reason. We took our tools and went into the grey woods for some trail work, the type of work you can only really do when the leaves are off the trees and the vines and stickers are more subdued than in spring or summer. Mary has been working for some time on a new trail connecting the switchback to the cleared areas along the power line right-of-way on the east flank of our little hillside. She has taken many of the vines and more treacherous undergrowth down to the ground; what had been simply a chaotic tangle of brush now looks more like a mature forest.

I begin with some marginally unrelated business, the cleaning up of broken rotting trees dropped in bad places when the power line crew came through a few years back. I’m dismayed to think it’s taken me this long to get around to cleaning up after them, but there it is. I crab down the steep, viney slope sideways, pausing every few steps to make another cut. Overcut; undercut; lock the sawbrake; move on down the line with the idling saw. The moldering oak trunk that had been propped up on the big rock is now in contact with the dirt along its whole length and can finally become one with the rocky soil. To my surprise, we are serenaded by the calls of spring peepers roused from their winter drowsiness by the incongruous weather. It feels and smells like April here in the woods on Christmas Eve afternoon.

There are a handful of different tree trunks splayed across the right-of-way just north off the switchback. Some, by now, are merely rich red humus impersonating a log; others are fresher, stronger, harder, almost worth keeping as firewood if it weren’t so far to haul them up the hill. I take my time and clear the junction so we can move easily from the old trail onto the new trails we have begun.

Some of the work is clearing the fallen trees, and some is felling the dead and broken trees that shamble through this little grove. Not sure why it took such a hard hit a few years back, but all of our cedars are marked by the snows of 2009-2010, and not a one stands true in here. The pines fared better, but they’re just not meant to have long lives. I fell the bent and broken, then limb them with loppers or the small power saw or the chainsaw when necessary, then buck them to manageable lengths we can use to stabilize and mark the trail’s edges.

Mary places the freshly cut logs to suit her plan, carrying those she can lift and flipping those she can’t end-over-end to their appointed resting spot. With luck, they’ll trap debris moving down the hillside and make the trail more stable and obvious. The pines will rot away in a couple of years; the cedars, if we’re lucky, may stay there for five or six years before all that will remain is their gnarly heartwood core stripped of all its softer, fragrant bright pink outer wood. And yeah, they're not really 'cedars,' they're Eastern junipers.

The vines and stickers fight us every inch of the way. This particular part of our hillside is replete with greenbrier, a nasty vine of unbelievable tensile strength equipped with vicious thorns which clearly inspired barbed wire. Greenbrier is nearly impossible to break once it exceeds a diameter of about 3/16”, and can hardly be pulled from the crown of a tree or uprooted from the earth once established. Greenbrier will shred your clothes and rip your skin bloody, trip you without a second glance. On the bright side, according to some old mountain man in one of the Foxfire Books, eating greenbrier shoots will help you live forever. Though I’m not convinced that’s a reasonable trade for the nuisance they pose.

I work my way up the nascent trail to where Mary is working, and have mostly given up the chainsaw for hand tools at this point. But I find a few annoying stumps and stubs of things we cut in the summer that are nasty trip hazards, so I fire it up and take them down as close to ground level as I can without trashing the chain. Then I remember the large autumn olive I had pruned back to a single twelve foot stem during the fall. I had been meaning to finish it off the next time I had the saw out, so why not. Three or four cuts, and it is no more. Then there are the rotting pine trunks, the remnants of a couple of trees that Hurricane Sandy dropped across the trailhead a few years back. They are about a foot and a half in diameter where we want them cut, and my fatigue and poor judgment gets the better of me; I manage to get the saw pinched in the kerf at the very moment it runs out of fuel.

At this point I take notice of the western sky. It is slate grey and moody. But all day the weather has been a weird mix of things. Fog, mist, brief respites, then sprinkles, rain, basically just water randomly shifting among phases. The greyness moves steadily towards the east, overtaking half the sky. But around sunset and into twilight, it briefly clears and I think I see some stars. At darkness, the clouds have returned, and when the full moon rises featureless through the skeletal trees the white sky seems brighter than it was all day long.

Thinking of Clement Moore, I awake in the night and look out over the lawn. There was no new-fallen snow, but the luminous sky allowed me to see every little detail in the yard as though it were ‘day-for-night.’ I stood for some time with the back door open and the warm night air flowing gently around me. It was silent save for the occasional dripping off the eaves, and the teasing caress of the night breeze ebbing and flowing into the room finally raised the goosebumps on my skin. I slide the door closed and try to defy the glowing sky and go back to sleep.

The afternoon of Christmas Day plays out similarly. We go back to work on the trail, picking up where we left off, and make good progress. I was able to brute-force the saw free from its trap, and reduce the remnants of the fallen pines to manageable chunks that Mary can incorporate to the stump designs already in place. By the end of several hours of woods work, it has finally settled on raining steadily and seriously. Our jeans and t-shirts are long past soaked through, yet our gentle exertions have kept us comfortable, even breaking an honest sweat. And while being soaked in the woods in December for hours generally means hypothermia, we are eager for a hot shower when we get up to the house, if only to get clean and get the stink off.

Again at twilight, day and night, light and dark exchange places uncertainly and ineffectually in a feckless pas-de-deux. The light never quite seems to go away; the dark never quite seems to come in full. The glowing night just splits the difference with the glowing moon hiding behind the wall of cloud. Only the water, every changing its capricious form, remains constant.

Dog mischief

The other morning I looked out the window at a strange and unidentifiable object outside on the driveway. On closer inspection, it turned out to be one of my sneakers, which last I recalled, had been on the porch. When I mentioned this to Mary, she said that she had picked up the other sneaker earlier from the sidewalk a few yards from the porch and had thrown it back there, assuming I had flung it off in a fit of drunken exuberance.

Today on her way into town, Mary stopped in the pines (a hundred yards or so from the house) to retrieve one of my Red Wing boots. It's mate was apparently still on the porch, encrusted with sawdust from our stint in the woods recently.

So it seems like the new dog in the neighborhood has a mischievous habit, similar to a greyhound we knew, of sneaking off with stuff he covets. So the porches and anywhere outside is apparently off limits for shoes, et cetera, for the immediate future. Thanks, Dobby.

Add to the list: A wonderful, wonderful package of vacuum cleaner leavings! Mmmmm!! It must be important because look how securely it's tied up! NomNomNomNom!

Civic Engagement

I have voted in every election since I became eligible but one. I have both of my Senators and my Representative on speed dial. I regularly write letters to the editor to my various local papers. I have served on the jury in a criminal trial. I have worked going house to house as a census enumerator.

But I think the most profound and momentous civic milestone I have participated in was the naturalization ceremony for a dear friend. About five-hundred new American Citizens, representing eighty countries from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe sundered their ties to their homelands and swore allegiance to their new home. It was both humbling and ennobling, mundane and magnificent.

I defy any of the legion of small-minded bigots currently prancing across our national stage to look into the face of any one of those five hundred and say we are not better off bringing them into the fold than we are casting them into the cold. Wankers.

I highly recommend that if you ever have the opportunity to participate in a naturalization ceremony, you do so. It stirs and rouses the latent patriot within us all, no matter how discouraged and disheartened that patriot may be.

Germane Holiday Cards

Here's a couple of cards from back in the day. The Santa one is all mine; I used to have some talent. The B&W cards were my concepts, executed by one of our very talented riders.

Those characters correspond to actual people, but I'll never tell...

Probably not physically possible, but a great visual. The carrying the tree part; of course an  R69 could make haste in the snow.

My fave. Theoretically, that's my old house, the house my wife grew up in and where we raised our kids. Never did have a K100RS though. 

Carrie

We had Carrie killed, just a few days after her 14th birthday.

She had been faltering for the last few months, increasingly so in the last few weeks. But around her birthday, she rallied and enjoyed having the company of family around. But the day came when she finally could no longer stand on her own and would not eat.

We knew her time had come, but still we debated. In the end, we called the local veterinarian who would make a house call. But the earliest she could come was in the afternoon, leaving us with an emotionally exhausting and trying wait.

We use the time to dig a grave for her in the slight meadow, near the gnarled pitch pine. Our rocky hilltop begrudged her enough loose orange clay and feeble rock to make a decent dog-sized hole in the cold ground.

At the end, Carrie lay on her favorite pillows surrounded by family and the veterinarian and the vet’s assistant. Schroeder sat nearby on the couch. She got one shot of a relaxant to put her at ease, followed by the lethal dose. One moment she was there, and the next she wasn’t

I tucked her in a curled sleeping pose, and wrapped her in a clean cotton sheet. She felt remarkably heavy; we needed the wheelbarrow to move her with any ease. We placed her in the hole, and each one of us laid upon her a few stalks and stems of dry plants from the backyard. They were a memento of her curious hobby, deadheading the spent flowers and shrubs with her teeth. Then we all took turns shoveling the rocky dirt into the hole, and finally placed a large chunk of rough white quartz on top to mark the grave.

The holidays and the presence of family and friends served to keep emotion at bay, and I could not see clear to grieve the loss of my first dog for a time. But some days later, on a blustery, misty gray morning, I took down the green lead and collar from its peg, and began to walk the path through the pines, down to the river, along the meadows of the river, and up the stream valley.

I had barely begun when the weight of the empty lead in my hands was too great to bear. I could hardly walk, and the grief washed over me again and again. I felt so keenly both Carrie’s presence and her absence with every step and at every point at which she would have always paused. It took a long time.

A few days later, we went into town for some errands. I walked into the feed store, and standing at the register was a woman with a dog on a green lead—a Saluki, the only saluki I have ever seen.

A Saluki is a sighthound, related to greyhounds but closer in appearance to a Borzoi but smaller. Timid, pure white, with long hair, elegant bearing and sweeping lines, the sight of the dog rendered me speechless. I explained to the woman I had just put my greyhound to sleep…but didn’t complete my thought that this dog looked like an “Angel Carrie”—a perfected vision of our little rescue, free from the scars of her racing career and the infirmities of a long greyhound life. It was a remarkable chance encounter that left me speechless and somehow comforted.

I feel a little better now, having wrung out some grief and coming to a measure of peace. She was a good dog, a great dog, and had a pretty full life—certainly a long life for a retired racer. I would like to imagine her in a perfected form, something like that sweet saluki but with Carrie’s wry sense of mischief.

We will miss her for a long time, no doubt about that.

Snowglobe addendum

In case you were wondering, the futile search referenced in 'Snowglobe' can be revisited simply by taking U.S. 50 through Winchester to Capon Bridge, West Virginia, and continuing westward until you start worrying about running out of gas.

12-2-2012

We knelt together on the cool damp ground as the afternoon sun fell behind the forest, diminishing light slanting long shadows across the garden rows. With fork and hand we delved the dark row, groping blindly through the dirt for the few tubers hiding there un-mole-sted. For every root, a rock; for every rock, a root. And we slowly picked clod-by-clod and morsel-by-morsel, tossing away the weeds, dried stalks and tendrils. By the time we reached the end of the tiny little furrow, we had both a greatly increased pile of freshly liberated rocks and a bucket piled high with potatoes of all sizes and colors. Red, white, blue and green, the size of a pea to the size of an Irishman's clenched fist.

With our early winter prize gathered, we scrubbed the clinging dirt from our hands and from beneath our nails, then returned to the garden table to sit and share perhaps the last glass of wine there for the season. When the sun was gone and the long December twilight was faded, we took our bucket of potatoes and scrubbed them, then sorted the best to keep for later. We supped on a peasant's feast of freshly dug multicolored potatoes, boiled with a little salt and served with simple leftover turkey gravy.

Not bad; not bad at all.

Eggnog

6 eggs separated (for best results, they should be separated by at least 2-3 feet)
3/4 C. Confectioner's Sugar
2 C. Cream
2 C. Milk
2 C. Liquor (1½ C. whiskey / ½ C. dark rum--adjust to personal preferences and availability)
3/4 tsp. Vanilla
Nutmeg for garnish
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Beat egg yolks until creamy. Add sugar and beat until smooth, scraping bowl occasionally. Gradually (in a thin stream) add cream, then milk, then liquor, then vanilla, beating constantly. Refrigerate for 2-3 hours.
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Beat egg whites until stiff but not dry. Gently fold beaten whites into eggnog mixture. Top with grated nutmeg if desired. Made this with fresh eggs, raw milk, raw cream, dark rum and Wasmund's single malt whiskey. Pretty damn fine beverage, it was.

A Long Ago Christmas Party

The rare men clustered near the glow of the fireplace—solid, beefy, upright masses, ruddy-faced prime rib well-marbled in bespoke suits. To a man, their freshly-shaven necks bulged over starched white collars bound tightly with ties, tradition and decorum defying the warm festivity of the carpeted living room. Thick hairy paws exited their french cuffs; one paw each held a squat cylindrical glass, formless icebergs tinkling within miniature amber seas. The other paw casually held a cigarette—the men murmured and laughed, each cocooned within the self-perpetuating cloud of his own making.

Their women clustered musically at the far side of the room. They were freshly-baked confections, delicate crusts browned in just the right places, frosted and iced and dusted and topped with sprinkles, redolent of cinnamon and citrus and vanilla. They held pale pastel drinks in crystal glasses that served as exclamation points at the end of their tiny delicate hands.

Warm side, cool side. The children look on, mystified.

Snowglobe

I don’t know if the snow globe still exists or not, nor do I know whether what I remember is a memory of a real time and place or a conflation, a confabulation of remembrance and imagination.

I think it was a gift to me in what—third or fourth grade?—perhaps from a teacher. A cheap trinket from the five-and-dime, but the memory has such greater gravity and significance associated with it than had it come from one of those meaningless children who are so long forgotten to me.

However, what I can say with great surety is when I think of the snow globe, what I am remembering is looking out the window of that ancient red stone school into a cold dark sky that is both woolen grey and deep cobalt blue. It is me, looking out at a snowing and snow-covered place, from within that plastic world.

Now I find myself seeking the snow sky, driving in vain towards it, sniffing it out, searching in a most animal way, traversing hill after hill until I lose track of how far I have come, wondering if it is possible to ever find that twilight blue world out there again. I seek but cannot find—there are ten-thousand intervening steps that distract and deflect, and only serve to misdirect me from that elusive place. I know it is there, but cannot seem to find it.

At next daybreak the snow finds me. And at twilight, for a fleeting instant, I catch a glimpse of that cobalt blue snow globe world behind me, the heavy sky drawing its muffling dome close down over the pines.

The Little Book of Shattered Expectations

I think anyone aspiring to creative writing would do well to get themselves on the mailing list of the Vermont Country Store. Their catalog starts showing up in our mailbox around the same time as the stinkbugs, and continues appearing as frequently and predictably. The VCS catalog is a staple—nay, a ritual—of bathroom reading from early fall to mid-winter, about the point when it slips its staples and finally falls apart.

It is a paragon of tautly-crafted manipulative prose, each product description a compact haiku-length dissertation cleverly crafted to push buttons you didn't know you had.

Each item in the catalog is worthy of a massive piling-on of scientifically selected adjectives and adverbs, each one specifically designed to trigger the release of repressed memories of a common idyllic childhood we never shared. The house was bigger, the windows frostier, the rooms cheerier, the beds both higher and cozier, the breakfasts heartier, the hot chocolate richer, the sledding swifter, our parents wiser, kinder, happier and more beautiful, the Christmas Tree taller, the tinsel brighter, the goose crispier and the presents more wonderful than we could ever have hoped.

I will confess we receive this epistle regularly because we purchased items from this land of make-believe in the past. And the thing is, once the goods arrive on this side of the catalog—reality chasm, they're just...stuff. Stuff like you could buy pretty much anywhere.

Sure, a lot of it is hard to find—but most of the time that's because people stopped buying it years ago and people stopped making it years ago because, hey, in truth back then it was crap, and by golly, it's still crap now.

Nostalgia does not by and of itself validate things; in most cases it's just stuff, like it was back then when we didn't buy it the first go-round. The items are, for the most part, things you have probably walked past in your regular rounds of shopping time and again, with good reason. (Creamed Chipped Beef, anyone?) Yet from their testimonial copy, each item means something special to someone out there, enough for them to resurrect it or recommission it in some cases and to make an effort to stock it at least for a little while. As they say, there's no accounting for taste.

I don't think I have ever gotten something from the VCS that didn't come packaged with its own certain tiny measure of disappointment. It may be that the VCS catalog's greatest value lies in its ability to gently teach children how to gracefully accept disappointment, how to read between the lines of artfully crafted marketing prose, and to understand in a simple way that things aren't always what they seem.

But I gotta say, the catalog itself never disappoints. I love the writing—the unrelenting Rockwellian optimism, the naive cheer, the three or four coats of bright shiny adjectives, the perky and artfully dated design sense, the creation of a whole world within the slick covers. The arrival of the first catalog marks the beginning of the imaginary season they taught us about back in second grade.

Get on their mailing list, if you aren't already. Read the catalog. Throw 'em a bone from time to time, just to prop that imaginary world up a little while longer. There's no harm in playing along.

Addendum: If you're ever in Vermont, you owe it to yourself to check out the brick-and-mortar VCS, which is actually made of wood & stuff. It's the real-life version of the catalog, and as I recall, there are at least two or three of them salted throughout the state. Visited the one in Weston on the grand Vermont tour of 2001, and it was worth the side trip.

Holiday Spirits

Yesterday, in a fit of industry, Mary and I bottled two of the last three batches of this year's cider. One was a full-batch blend, and the other was a half-batch of Arkansas Black varietal. Both hold great promise, and I find the idea of varietal ciders increasingly appealing after years of pressing grab-bag blends. We did not fine either batch, accepting a certain amount of haze in exchange for the fuller flavor the extra tannins provide.

They are nestled all snug in their bottles, waiting to make a grand entrance with the new year, if all goes well. I'm looking forward to their debuts.

To top things off, in the evening we set to work on a full batch of welsh ginger beer, a modified version of this summer's hit, "Rat Shandy."

White and brown sugar, a little extra lemon peel and juice; peel, raisins and fresh ginger all chewed up to bits in the food processor (so the raisins don't end up looking like those hideous bloated, swollen ticks--which they tend to do when left whole) and powdered ginger added for good measure.

At one point, the dry ingredients looked like a good basis for a baked holiday confection; some flour and shortening (instead of boiling water) might have taken it in a spectacularly different direction. But this morning I pitched the yeast and so it's on the way to being a fantastic and potent libation for a certain celebration we will be having in about six weeks.

Yum. Can't wait. Slainte!

A good day

I decided to get out early this morning and get some chores done while it was still cold. Remembering back to how I used to do it in the old days, I layered up plenty and left it to my bare hands to keep things in equilibrium.

By the time I stepped outside, it had warmed up to 22° and the early morning sun was driving the frost off the grass. I tinkered a bit with the chainsaw, checking the tension on the blade and topping off the tanks, and got down to business by bucking a pile of miscellaneous logs we had stacked near the house.

This year I have been experimenting with bucking felled trees into four-foot sections and letting those season in place. When I need stove wood, two quick cuts give me three perfect lengths of ready-to-burn wood. It seems to work pretty well as far as I can tell--at least today it did.

Once that little pile was bucked, split and stacked, I started on the mass of fungus-encrusted oak my brother and I hauled up from alongside the lane last weekend. Some bucking, a whole lot of splitting, and then some more bucking. All in all, by late afternoon I had bucked, split, moved and stacked about 3/10 cord of mostly hardwood--about 38 cubic feet or so.

The split wood fascinates me. The texture of freshly split oak often looks like white meat of a chicken, and today, it smelled richly of wintergreen. Often split oak smells unbelievable fruity, like ripe peaches or oranges--so strongly you want to taste it just to see how that can be. Other times it smells, well, oaky--the rich smell associated with chardonnay. It's the smell of chardonnay without the grapes.

A bunch of what I split today was well-aged cedar. It's beautiful in its own way. When you cut it, it send showers of bright pink confetti all over the place; the color can be so vivid as to defy belief. The interplay of colors on the split face of a chunk of cedar is fantastic, and what it so often calls to mind above all else is the unnaturally fluorescent shade of port-wine cheese. Again, the resemblance is so uncanny one is tempted to taste it just to see...

It seems to make perfect sense to me to describe these pieces of wood in terms of foods; it is a reasonable simile. This wood, in a short while, will be taken into the house. It will warm us and sustain us, cheer us and bring us together, give us energy and help us through the bright days and the cold dark nights. We will consume it as surely as we consume our meals, though not internally. But as food is to sustaining our bodies and spirits, so these pieces of cord wood are to sustaining and nourishing our hearth and home.

For all my troubles, I am very stiff and sore. My back hurts. By shoulders and elbows ache from hefting the 8-lb splitting maul again and again, crashing it down on log after log, reaching, lifting, twisting, throwing, bending, stacking the countless sticks of firewood.

Maybe I'll find a glass of nice, oaky chardonnay. I think it's time to go sit by the fire.

Snow!

We had some pretty raw weather yesterday. Harsh, cold and blustery, it rained hard most of the day, a lot of it fairly sideways, and it never got more than a few degrees above freezing. The roof leaked like a sieve as it usually does when tested like that, but all in all, the woodstove did a valiant job in keeping the house cozy in the evening.

We basked in the warmth of each other's company, did our various tasks, and enjoyed a glass or two of red wine. All night long, the rain came and went in waves, washing over the house and tapping away at the skylights.

Then this morning, I saw snow on the mountains!

Now, our mountains are very, very old. Nowhere do we have anything that even approaches having a 'treeline' as you might find out west or up north; all our gentle mountains have wooded summits. And our snow, when we get it, tends to be very feeble. So saying we have 'snow on the mountains' may create a false impression of alpinity.

But when there is snow on our mountains, it is very special. Their background, normally a dull canvas of grey-brown, becomes a luminous light grey; their countless sloping ridgelines stand out against this background, the brush-like fur of trees standing in silhouette. They become sketches of themselves, limned out in tiny little cross-hatched lines, delicate but defined. Subtle, sublime, brooding in their grand repose.

There is hardly another time when they are so beautiful.

"...He moves in darkness as it seems to me..."

I didn't spend any significant time outside the suburbs until I was a young teenager. When I was exposed to real fields for the first time (unlike, say, the fields in a battlefield park) I wasn't quite sure what to make of them.

When you grow up in quasi-urban areas, a fence pretty much serves one purpose: to divide this from that. Fences represent boundaries of possession and ownership, of rightfulness and trespass. You are on your side; they are on their side, and never the twain shall mingle, much less meet.

But fences also serve the function of constraining things, and as a suburban kid it took me a long time to realize that out in the country, fences and boundaries were not synonymous. There were boundaries that were not marked by fences; there were fences that did not represent boundaries, only constraints. And sure enough, there were fences that also happened to be boundaries.

I can still remember the first frisson of delight in crossing a fence into a boundless field, realizing at that instant I was not the thing to be constrained. The world became a much larger, grander place in that moment.

An attenuated world

The other morning around sunrise I walked out of the house into a bitingly cold, still world. It was silent but for my boots creaking on the paving stones, and it was a few moments before my eyes adjusted to seeing the world around me.

I say that my eyes adjusted, but the truth is, my mind had a very hard time parsing what I was looking at. I stood in a world of attenuated color, one so unsaturated that contrast failed and distinctions among objects were dramatically diminished.

The sun was up, and it was not cloudy. It was not the crisp and harsh glazing of ice. It was not foggy—I could see clearly to the far horizon, and every detail stood out from foreground to the distance.

As far as I could see, everything—every last surface and object—was coated with frost. Trees and earth, walls and roofs, grass and stone, everything touched with the same even-handed and egalitarian coating that was just enough to seem like a wash applied to the world. All was evenly muted, reduced to gray scale, toned down a few points.

As I left through the cathedral of the lowlands, the effect was spectacular and eerie. The world around me was luminous and ghostly, light where it is usually dark, yet grey where it is usually bold. The world was filtered for just these few moments. The rising sun promptly reset the palette with a gentle brush, driving off the ephemeral frost in instants, and drawing the underlying color to the fore once again.

If that instant before the sun shone had a sound, it would be one long note, played on a cello.