I guess I should explain the woodpiles. I have 21 of them. I counted them today, taking as one pile one stack of firewood piled 3 to 4 feet high on rails with cribbing at both ends, that is, with towers of half-round, cross-piled logs to bookend each pile. Each stack contains one-third to one-half cord of wood, so I figure that I have at least 8 cords on hand. That is what I should have: 4 to burn this winter and 4 to season for next year.

Last week I visited the man who grew up on the farm of which these 23.5 acres were a modest part. In his boyhood (be was born in 1925) this land, now mostly woodland, was pasture for sheep and cows. The woodlot was elsewhere on the property, and they took 30 cords of firewood out of it each year: 10 for the family house, 10 for his grandfather’s house across the road, and 10 for sugaring. His father always had it stacked a year ahead of time, too. He would have had nearly 60 cords laid up at this time of year, which puts my 8 cords in perspective. All that wood would have been cut before chain-saws and splitters, moreover. I do split with a maul myself, but my woodpiles are child’s play compared to the cords of the past.

I am not much of a quant, but let me do a little arithmetic. My woodbox holds roughly 40 pieces of firewood. It’s 10 or so cubic feet. That works out to 500 pieces of firewood per cord. That means I have cut, split (as needed), and stacked around 4000 pieces of firewood since October of last year. I had to cut most of those trees down anyway, and the biggest ones, an oak, a black birch, a red maple, and two beeches, had outgrown their welcome in the backyard.

I have come to know my wood well during these encounters. When a cord and a half gets stacked on my front porch over Christmas (I am expecting the help of elves), I imagine playing the 16-foot-long pile like a xylophone, according to the day’s needs: selecting a fanfare of split red maple for the first fire of the morning, then variations on the theme of heat with maple rounders or pieces of black birch, giving way to well-seasoned oak or (depending on the temperature outside) a riff of hot-burning hornbeam, and then in late afternoon, when the fire has died down, a piece of popple or paper birch to quickly reignite it for the evening burn.

Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection.  I love to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. 

Everyone who heats with wood knows who wrote those words. The guy had a small house by a pond, and an open hearth instead of a stove. And he too used his wood strategically:

Hard green wood just cut, though I used but little of that, answered my purpose better than any other.  I sometimes left a good fire when I went to take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when I returned three or four hours afterward, it would be still alive and glowing.  My house was not empty though I was gone.  It was as if I had a cheerful housekeeper behind.  It was I and Fire that lived there.

I too can see, and smile at, some of my piles out the kitchen window, but I haven’t developed that same intimacy with this not-yet-arrived winter’s god of fire yet, especially during the sweet, mild December days we’ve been having lately. It is 6 pm, and the biscuit fire I laid this morning has long gone out. I may or may not light another one this evening. But I remember how close I felt to Fire last February. That was more like survival than housekeeping, though. I am ready!

 

These were not the first snowflakes. Those fell briefly at the peak of autumn foliage. Even these did not accumulate: it turned out to be just a dusting. Delicate flakes dropped from a cloud that was enveloping the mountain and seeping through the woods. I watched them fall through the frame of an eastern window, with the bare-limbed trees behind them. They descended gently in straight lines at a modest diagonal in the soft wind. The flakes were heavy enough to fall, not drift, but slow enough that the eye could ride a single flake from the top of the window to the bottom: Zen skiing. The lines bent and straightened as the breeze rose and fell.

At the same time, a fire was burning in the woodstove at half the distance to the window. My old Resolute has a stove-glass fanlight across the upper portion of its doors, with iron ribs like rays and curving elements festooned between their terminations. The orange of the fire through the frosted glass was the orange of the rainbow, bright and warm. Pieces of the sun were burning slowly in my woodstove: What is the energy in wood but the light of the sun in organic form? The fire breathed and glowed in the fanlight while the snowflakes fell steadily in the window.

Today I sorted nails and screws in the cellar. Also nuts and bolts and washers, hooks and hinges and picture hangers, brads and tacks and hardware for the screens and windows. The nails were of two kinds, galvanized and ‘bright common’: framing nails, roofing nails, box nails, drywall, finishing, 8d, 10d, 16d, and the ‘d’ stands for ‘denarius’, in English ‘penny’, as you may know, and the screws were brass or steel, Phillips-head or slotted, in I would say more than forty sizes and designs. Each nail or screw went in and out of boxes and jars and cans to be with its fellows, the 8-penny finishing nails tumbling and flashing like a school of minnows, with a stray 20-penny spike like a barracuda making havoc with lesser nails in the miscellaneous jar.

Miscellaneous jar, because I did not sort every last nail (that’s for the obsessive-compulsive personality, and I am only a household handyman who needs to find the right fastener from time to time). Besides, not all nails need be sorted for jobs when you need just one or two, perhaps of an odd size or function, viz. nailing into cement or brick. I threw, for example, after a brief caress, half a dozen of those tough, short cement nails with the twisted shank into that jar. And then there was the decorated tin box of old brass screws from Holly’s grandfather, and coffee cans marked 8d and 16d by my father on masking tape stuck to the side, heirloom nails and screws which stand apart in my mind, and now on my shelves, and which I would not hesitate to use if I needed them.

“L’artiste doit régler sa vie,” wrote Erik Satie in “La Journée du musicien.” Of course, his daily schedule as he reports it may also be looked at as a series of impulsive and irregular acts:

Get up: 7:18 am; be inspired 10:23 to 11:47 am.

Take lunch: 12:11 pm; leave table at 12:14 pm.

Healthy horse-riding out on the grounds: 1:19 to 2:53 pm

Order or disorder? “Important or unimportant?” as the King asks in Alice. My nails are ordered, what of my books? What of my papers, what of my thoughts? Open any drawer, or box, or lobe, and you will find evidence of an ordered and disordered life and mind.

Perhaps you have visited a small-engine shop, not the front desk but where the work is done? Tools and parts are spread from wall to floor like a cubist collage. The effect of disorder is oppressive. And yet the repairman may play that space like a piano, with a feel for every nut and bolt. Or he may search for ten minutes for the right wrench. I suspect it is something in between; it is for me. Wasn’t it Montaigne who said we think and act with a staggering motion? But ask me now for an eyebolt or a bugle-head screw to stiffen a railing and I can go downstairs and find one for you promptly.

 

As I dug down into the lowest edge of the immense pile, shoveling the rich, crumbly clumps of dark brown manure near the Van der Werken’s horse barn two miles down the road, emptying shovelfuls into my nine buckets, I saw myself as one of those toiling gold miners in South Africa, mining along the terraces of the deep pit, toting buckets of ore up by hand. I myself was shoveling black gold, and I was lugging my buckets up into the back of my car, then dumping them all over my vegetable gardens, which are in need of some more nitrogen and organic matter.
I got four loads in at half an hour a load. It’s free for the taking, though I had a jar of my hardy kiwi jam to offer if I had seen the owner, who lets people come and take as much manure they want. He has neither the time nor an interest in composting and selling it, he told me last weekend. As I dug deeper, I opened up galleries in the pile, chasing veins of the blackest material. When I picked up my two-handled, rubberized plastic tote-buckets, carrying them against one hip, I thought of Walafrid Strabo in his 9th-century monastery garden on Lake Constance. In his Hortulus, the Latin poem he composed about his garden, he recommended adding “whole basketfuls of dung” to the soil. That phrase from a translation read 40 years ago stuck in my memory and foretold this day. It was warm enough to work without a jacket, and the low sun kept the  landscape lit up. To the south was the valley of Bennington and Mt. Anthony, our humble Mt. Fuji, its wooded top (which I have never climbed) flooded in clear light.  I spread the last loads of manure on the main garden as the sun dropped down behind West Mountain.

I wrote the previous post a month ago, but only posted it today. I’ve been writing this one (much too long — only my children will read all of it) for the past week or so.

The field must have been pasture once, and it’s bordered on the south side by a stone wall. Not long after moving onto this land, we removed old barbed wire from along the wall and from along the trees (often swallowed up in their trunks) that used to frame the high end of the pasture to the west. There was a time when the woods themselves were pasture quite high up the mountain, where I have come across barbed wire that now runs through the center of large trees. There were probably Merino sheep here during Vermont’s wool boom in the early 19^th century. Before that time, my field had been cleared of stones so that it could be planted or hayed. Did oxen drag a plow though my field?

In the 1920s or 30s, perhaps as a CCC project during the Depression, our 1.5 acre field was planted to red pines, in long, regular rows. Those are the trees that ended up in our log cabin (they gave us the idea) up the slope on this shelf of land where I am writing in this house. We had the pines that remained logged off for pulp, and the area was then bulldozed and the stumps buried or pushed into a heavyweight brush pile in the center. The area was then planted with ‘conservation mix’ grasses, which grew into a pretty field. We hit a baseball down there once or twice. I tried a row of sunflowers, but drought and deer did them in. Blackberries sprang up, but we let them grow in exchange for the berries. Then we left for Greece and old field succession has been in progress ever since. On at least one occasion, on a flying landlord visit from Greece, I took my chainsaw to the biggest white pines and some of the hardwoods that had come in along the driveway, but I had to watch the other trees – poplar, ash, pignut hickory, black cherry, white birch, red oak, buckthorn, sumac – grow tall and the vines climb up them and take over in much of the field.

The stones were probably piled in the wall around 1800 or a bit later, when the land around here had been settled (very sparsely at first) for only 35 or 40 years. The forest might have even been burned for coke. But all that clearing! Giants in the Earth! I look upon myself like that now when I think that I cut down those towering red pines and built the cabin with Holly, a crew of Bennington students, and on a few occasions with the help of friends and my father. But the stones: I have been dragging brush in the footsteps of those who dragged the stones – or rather, who stepped alongside the horse or ox dragging the stones in a stone boat. Men work together, says Frost. I added a couple of good-sized stones to the wall myself last week. I rolled them to my car and up and down a board ramp onto the wall.

The field was not the most urgent matter when I returned last fall, but I managed one foray, knocking down some large poplars and a few birches and oaks. I scythed a wide path along the west side of the field at the end of June this year to make it possible to venture in (and along that path the fringed gentians grew), but the enormity of the work of clearing weighed on me. It would have been an expensive proposition to call in the landscapers with their chainsaws, chippers, mowers and men. Some of the trees that had been growing for 20 years were 30 feet tall or more, and were covered in twisting, grasping swaths of grape vines, tough, shrubby honeysuckle, strangling bittersweet, buckthorn studded with nails, and Japanese barberry with its vicious canes of clinging, piercing, ripping thorns. But three weeks ago I put on my Kevlar chaps and waded in to wage war on woody vegetation and vines, with Stihl saw in hand and fierce countenance. If you go through one tank a day for a week, things begin to look different. Then it’s just a matter of cleanup: hand to hand combat until I could call in the machine, a field mower that you drive like a tiller and that makes a beautiful sound as it cuts and chops with one powerful rotary blade. In short, I won the battle for the field. It was larger than I remembered it, but two thirds of it has now been cleared to stubble.

I should mention that in August the Bennington County Forester came (at my invitation) and told me that my field was full of invasive species and that transporting bittersweet across state lines (or anywhere?) is against Vermont law. I had had visions of a lucrative bittersweet plantation, since the berries are prized in wreaths and as harvest decorations. I imagined supervising tables manned by women (so to speak) processing my bittersweet for the New York market. I could have packed my wagon (my station-wagon-style Subaru, that is) with wreaths and sprays and driven to the city (at night), running fresh Vermont Asiatic bittersweet to an immense garden shop in Yonkers or a street corner in Brooklyn for big money.

I don’t know what I will do with the field when I am done except keep out the forest and get rid of the invasive vines. Then: a hardwood plantation? A hickory grove, for instance? The soil is fertile and there is water underneath it. Spring runoff from the brook flows in two channels through it and in underground channels as well. If not hardwoods, fruit trees? An apple orchard? Plums, pears, cherries? Kiwis! A hardy kiwi plantation started with cuttings from my prolific vines beyond the garden (“put up ten quarts this year and gave quantities away”). I would train the kiwi vines on wires to have all the fruit at easy harvest height and become the Kiwi King. Alternatively, I could just keep harvesting my no-maintenance two vines out back and forget about the whole idea – it sounds like a lot of work. Or perhaps I should just try to grow fringed gentians, which love wet meadows, for their beauty, their memories (Holly discovered them on the high side of the driveway long ago), and their good name in poetry:

Thou waitest late and com’st alone,

When woods are bare and birds are flown,

And frosts and shortening days portend

The aged year is near his end.

Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye

Look through its fringes to the sky…

— Bryant

I walked the field again this afternoon. Even now there are more impenetrable nests of vines and thick sprays of invasive shrubs in the declivities and around the ancient brush piles, now rotted and mossy and covered with vines, and impossible to mow. There will still be patches of chaos even if I win a second and third round in my struggle. I must prepare the way of the bush hog (not mine, the one I will hire annually once the initial subduing is done), then never return!

Here are two pictures from the action. The colors temporarily arrested my attack.

I harvested the grapes and will feed them to wildlife this winter. I’ll still leave some in the new field. Besides, the owls will have wonderful hunting, and they are my year-round companions in these woods. Hawks too pass overhead; we used to have to have a tent-like chicken-wire roof over our chicken yard to protect against their raids. The Redtails will hunt the field by day, the Barred Owls by night. We top predators stick together.

I have walked the woods with two County Foresters, the first in 1985, the second in 2015. I remember the first, Jim White, telling me of the fertility of the soil here and encouraging me to treat the woods “like a garden.” Of course, I have been able to do almost no proper forest management – the weeding out of undesirable trees, for example – and have simply watched the garden grow, or rather, been struck by how much it has grown since 1983, when I first beheld it as middle-aged second-growth woods.

I was recently reading a 2007 lecture by Richard Smith on Thoreau’s first year at Walden Pond, which contains the following:

After purchasing about fourteen acres of land at the Pond in 1844, Emerson became quite attached to his new holdings.  He called the woodlot “my Garden” and wrote to Thomas Carlyle that his new land holding was “the best plaything I ever had.”  Emerson, along with his family, made frequent, almost daily excursions to the woodlot… Historian Barksdale Maynard says that the woodlot was “a central feature of Emerson’s life.”

[Emerson permitted Thoreau to build a small house on this land]. Maynard continues:

That first year, Thoreau was expected to make some improvements while at the Pond, the main chore being to clear the land of overgrown shrubs and brambles.  Ellery Channing called the land Thoreau lived on “The Briars,” and the place where Thoreau planned to plant his beans was a fairly wild, tangled area.  In exchange for rent, Thoreau set to work clearing some of the land about a month before moving into his house on July 4, 1845.

Thoreau was in his 20s, and I am in my 60s, but I see we have both been clearers of brambles. Thoreau cleared an area of about two and a half acres. My field is about one and a half acres. My house clearing higher up is one acre or so. I’m not going to clear every last bramble and vine in my field, and I do not expect to be planting beans. Or collecting the briar canes, either, charming though the lines from Herrick on his house are:

Some brittle sticks of thorn or briar

Make me a fire,

Close by whose living coal I sit,

And glow like it.

I do sit by my own woodstove, however, and glow in the orange glow from its fanlight glass. What for Herrick was fuel barely passes for kindling in Vermont, but I have burned a thorny dry cane or two on occasion to start a fire.

I have been reading A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers lately, which was Thoreau’s first book and the one he went to Walden to write. One passage near the beginning rallied me to my field project. Thoreau is ruminating about the sights he and his brother (his companion on this trip) will see, and Thoreau imagines the men whom they will see waterfowling, or working outdoors, as they pass by in their boat, “men fuller of talk and rare adventure in the sun and wind and rain than a chestnut is of meat,” veterans of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 who “have been out every day of their lives” and are “greater than Homer or Chaucer or Shakespeare, only they never got time to say so. They never took to the way of writing.” But they did not lack for material, says Thoreau. “Look at their fields, and imagine what they might write.” Like Virgil’s farmers unaware of their good fortune, these men don’t know the epics they would have written had they taken to writing instead of wringing their living heroically from the land. The next step follows: “What have they not written on the face of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and scratching, and harrowing, and plowing…” The fruits of their labors as settlers and farmers constitute their collected works.

I asked a friend of mine from Norwich, Vermont, who settled on a piece of woodland forty years ago, ten years before we did, if he had been doing anything creative lately. He said he had been working on his property, which includes his homestead, outbuildings, a sugar house, gardens, orchards, clearings, woods, trails, and chickens. This was his poetry, and it is (in part) mine as well. Most people, most Vermonters, anyway, find creative outlets in gardening, landscaping, or in any number of outdoor hobbies and projects on their property.

For Thoreau himself, manual labor and written reflection sustain each other. In fact, he says, the former even exercises a salutary influence on prose style:

“If he has worked hard from morning till night, though he may have grieved that he could not be watching the train of his thoughts during that time, yet the few hasty lines which at evening record his day’s experience will be more musical and true than his freest but idle fancy could have furnished.” He writes “the tougher truth for the calluses on his hands.” The scholar should emulate the farmer’s call to his team “and confess that if it were written it would surpass his labored sentences.” Thoreau elaborates and extends this idea for a full page; for all his hoeing and wood chopping, his own style is not always as direct and unadorned as he imagines when he compares the pen to the plow. But his idea that it is the energy of the body that stimulates the mind may help to explain how the man who cleared brush and raised seven miles of beans and took vigorous walks all over Concord managed to write several books and two million words in his journal in less than twenty years.

I mentioned Mount Greylock in a previous post. I have a view of the summit from an elevated point near my house, thanks to some recent clearing. I drove to the top of the mountain many years ago, but I don’t remember much of anything. I have seen the view of the summit from Melville’s north-facing piazza at Arrowhead, but now I have a new view of the mountain, and it is of young Thoreau bushwhacking up the side of it in July, 1844, and spending the night on the summit using some boards for a covering (quite comfortable, said the Spartan adventurer). There were already trails in those days, but Thoreau chose a more direct but unpathed route through the woods, despite a warning from the man who saw him begin his ascent. He reflects that travellers often exaggerate the difficulties of the way, which he says are largely imaginary:

“For what’s the hurry? If a person lost would conclude that after all he is not lost, but standing in his own old shoes on the very spot where he is, and that for the time being he will live there; but the places that have known him, they are lost—how much anxiety and danger would vanish… Who knows where in space this globe is rolling? Yet we will not give ourselves up for lost, let it go where it will.”

In other words, live where you find yourself, and think of the world, not yourself, as lost. This passage prefigures a better known but more abstract one from Walden, also about getting lost in the woods, or perhaps the cosmos:

“Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”

Thoreau carried no water and no tent up Mount Greylock, but he had a compass, and used it to get to the summit of the mountain at dusk. There was a crude observatory at the top, the source of the stray boards that Thoreau bedded down on, in, and under, since he seems to have improvised a sort of coffin-like pod for himself:

“But as it grew colder towards midnight, I at length encased myself in boards, managing even to put a board on top of me, with a large stone on it, to keep it down, and so slept comfortably.”

It seems he rested in peace (complete with stone to mark his place). The charm of Thoreau is in the “so” of “and so slept comfortably.” Of course he slept comfortably, as any man would, lying on a board under another board, the top board held down with a stone, without a blanket on a mountaintop at night. And yet now when I look south from this spot I will indeed think of him as sleeping comfortably, in his way – and what he says about the pleasure of moderate weight on the body is very true – think of the pleasure of the lead vest at the dentist’s – up there, or greeting the dawn above the clouds, as he does on waking, the next time I view the summit of Mount Greylock.

Thoreau! You thought of your house by the Pond as a mountain house.

http://www.walden.org/documents/file/Library/Thoreau/writings/Writings1906/07Journal01/Chapter7.pdf

And to conclude with one of Henry’s stranger reflections: “Toward evening, as the world waxes darker, I am permitted to see the woodchuck stealing across my path, and tempted to seize and devour it. The wildest, most desolate scenes are strangely familiar to me.”