The other day, out of curiosity, I walked up into the grove of trees south of this rundown little house. As soon as I had secured my footing I started pulling out nicely-weathered and naturally-dried fallen poplar branches and throwing them down onto the lawn. Once I had collected a good number of limbs, I gathered them up by the armful and dragged them over to the barn for further processing. During the last few mornings' work sessions I have sawed these limbs down to usable lengths and stacked them on the previously-looted pile directly under the barn's overhang, rebuilding my stock of stove-burning wood that I will soon cover with a tarpaulin in order to protect it from errant rainfall and casual theft.
Just a few years ago I would have looked upon these poplar limbs as nuisances, things to be thrown deeper into the woods and ignored until they had rotted themselves down to long, low mounds of earth. Now, however, with my newfound understanding of wood as a most efficient and portable vehicle for storing solar energy, and considering my growing appreciation for the many acres of forest that cover this little valley of ours, I look upon these limbs as blessings from the universe. While exploring the southern slope I also came across a number of dead trees that I had hastily and sloppily sawed down a few years ago (using – gasp – a gasoline-burning chainsaw), lumber I shall now move and cut and stack and split, the dense walnut a preferred burning wood because of its density and weight. I am fascinated about how much I have learned from the few organic gardening magazines and self-sufficiency guides I have read over the summer, and just how perfectly-suited this land is for making a go at off-the-grid living.
The next step in my lumber-processing career is to decide whether I should make it my business to sell the wood on this property for cash or if I should just use the wood myself and convert larger portions of the grounds into arable land fit for the cultivation of crops. Given the amount of wood on the property and a glaring lack of industrial wood-processing machinery I think I shall just cut lumber for my own use and grow as much of my sustenance as I can in the cleared spaces. There is something fulfilling about getting out the bow saw and crashing through the underbrush in search of burnable wood; the more I do it, the more I enjoy it. It is also the perfect fitness, since it targets the body's primary muscle-groups while working out the stabilizer muscles in the calves and the gripping muscles in the forearms, combining the acquisition of one form of energy with the expenditure of another. Now is the time to do these things – when the leaves are falling and the morning frosts sting the cheeks – and with any luck I shall have enough fuel to see me through to springtime. I gather wood today for next winter and the winter after that, hard labor that pays off in the end. Mahalo.
© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)
No comments:
Post a Comment