Of Free Will and Graders
We live along a dirt road, and the big news this week was the town arriving to grade it. This happens once in the spring and once in the fall. Sitting outside on our porch, we can usually hear the machine coming from where it turns off the state road about a mile away. It makes the usual sound of heavy equipment, coming slowly, doing the best it can in a high gear that is asking it to hit notes out of its range. This time, the giant grader was accompanied by two dump trucks, which hurried back and forth to the public works shed, fetching loads of dirt and gravel for renewing the road’s surface. They were putting finishing touches on the job this morning when I walked past with Huckleberry on a leash. It is hard to carry on a conversation with a heavy equipment operator with diesel engines running, and him, in this case, high up in the cab, but I think he said they had put down somewhere between four and five hundred tons of new material, on a road not even a mile long.
It has been years since they have gone to that trouble, at least longer than we have been living here full-time. So, I wonder how long four to five hundred tons of crushed stone and dirt will last before regular grading is no longer adequate for filling in potholes. Six months out of the year there are only two houses that use the road, ours being one of them. A total of four cars that drive up and down, maybe twice each day. Snow, ice and rain are the real actors in road drama, particularly dirt road drama. Four to five hundred tons of earth sounds like a lot to me on a short road. To snow, ice, and rain, it may sound like breakfast cereal going into a bowl.
Autumn in New England is one of nature’s big moments. The woods are thick with hardwoods such as birch, maple, and oak. And now, their lush foliage is being slowly strangled as sap is cut off to the leaves to deprive them of vital nutrients, scheduling them to die, and drop to the ground. Gruesome, in respects. But in fact, it is a miracle of evolution that will allow the tree to divert those nutrients to its roots for winter, while releasing the leaves to carpet the forest floor to feed and shelter animals that will till it back into the earth over time.
Free will has its detractors when attached to the idea of a Creator. I just think of free will as evolution, and evolution as the Creator’s plan—the plan being, give life time, and it will find the answers. Like today’s trees, which knocked out the answer in about thirty-five million years. This is how I will be saved when I need to start collecting the leaves that fall on the lawn (where I do not wish the forest to populate). The answer will be my gasoline-powered, blower backpack. Did you know that the average mature hardwood tree of the maple, or oak variety will yield, conservatively, 100,000 leaves? We have scores of those trees bordering our green spaces. As I write, a light breeze is sending baskets-full of the earliest, yellow ones floating past my window—maybe fifty to sixty thousand since yesterday. I plan to mow the lawn tomorrow, then power up the blower to sweep them into the woods, where they can achieve results for the crickets, spiders, centipedes, and whatever else is happy and profitable under the leaf bed.
We have the wood stacked that, we hope, will heat the cabin through March. We made it only to President’s Day weekend last year, so I got busy earlier this year harvesting timber from around the property. It takes me a minimum of a week to dispense with a tree, start to finish—felling, cutting up, dragging brush, splitting and stacking. My wife and I budget about two hours a day to tend the property, but on any day, those two hours might be required for other work besides logging. So, it’s a slow but methodical process. In all, I’ve put up about three and a half cords. Small house, two stoves, only one of which we will have going at a time until the temperature outside drops below twenty degrees. At that point, it really requires both stoves working to keep the cabin above sixty-five, throughout.
There are few things in life more satisfying than piles of well stacked firewood. I am surrounded by them right now. I lean against them, and smell their sweet fragrance. You can compare it to the satisfaction of having a room of well-stocked bookshelves. But imagine removing books from the shelf, one after the other, and burning them, until no books are left. You can compare that to the sense of loss we feel as our woodpiles get smaller over the winter.
Fortunately, the woods have a plan to help with that. They are experts at renewal. We’re getting better at it, too, thanks to the evolution of dump trucks and graders.