When the first lid came off, I felt as if the proverbial billion polecats had sprayed me all at once. It didn’t even feel like a smell but rather like I had been struck in the face with a solid object, like a board or brick. My eyes began to involuntarily twitch and water, my lips curled back from my teeth like those of a neighing horse, and a coppery tang filled my mouth as my throat seized and my knees turned to rubber. I must have wobbled a little, because Sue called out, “Hey, Mike, you OK? You can’t smell the methane, but that ammonia gets your attention, doesn’t it? And the hydrogen sulfide can knock you right on your patootie!”
When I replied, unconvincingly, that I was fine, Sue handed me a long metal rod with a flattened piece of steel welded to its end. “Time for the fun part, Mike. You get to stir!” she said, enthusiastically. I stood frozen, gazing up at her in disbelief. “Come on, Sugar, dip that paddle in the soup! Easy-peasy. Just like a milk shake. Gotta stir first so you don’t leave delicious chunks of fruit on the bottom when you start sucking through that straw. You want to get it all!” I continued to stare at her blankly. “You like milk shakes, Mike?”
In that milk shake moment, I made up my mind that I no longer gave a shit what Jimmy might think of my misadventure. I felt an instinctive urge to bail on this stinkfest before gray matter began to ooze out of my earholes. Never mind polite terms like pungent. I was now withering in the full olfactory blast of a skeevy, blechish, frowsty, purulent, fetid, barfled, mephitic, pustular, feculent, nastified funk stew beyond human imagining. It took only that moment for me to learn what was worse than losing the septic tank: finding it.
Then, just as I was about to climb out of that hole for good, Sue made one final observation. “Well, Mike,” she said in a tone of genuine sympathy, “I know this isn’t a ton of fun, but look at it this way: you made it.” She was smiling the whole time, and there was not a hint of sarcasm in her voice.
Even in that moment of my greatest trial, the simple words you made it left me without a legitimate counterargument. We teach Hannah and Caroline to clean up after themselves, to be self-sufficient, to take responsibility for their own messes, both literal and figurative. What then was my option in this moment? Make an old lady climb into a putrid hole and stir a tank full of feces not of her own making? I might have handled this situation as do her other customers, by rationalizing that she gets paid to do this work—that she deserves the shitty end of the deal because she agreed to trade some of her time for some of my money.
To my way of thinking, the virtue of dwelling in this remote desert place is that it so often brings us into unmediated contact with visceral realities that are obscured by other modes of living. In choosing to make a life here on Ranting Hill I also chose to remove, to the degree possible, what stands between myself and nature—between myself and reality, my own body, and the physical demands of this hard, beautiful place. And even if I didn’t fully understand what I was signing up for at the time, I don’t intend to ask for my money back now.
“Ain’t that the truth, Sue,” I choked out, as I began to stir. “Ain’t that the truth.”
WHY AM I, a confirmed desert rat, about to offer a paean to cutting trees—to cutting them first down and then up? The answer may be found in the intimate relationship between this desiccated, largely treeless arid landscape and the nearby Sierra Nevada Mountains, whose eastern slope is carpeted with conifer forests comprised of a variety of lovely tree species, among them white, red, and Douglas fir, incense cedar and western juniper, and ponderosa, Jeffrey, lodgepole, and sugar pine. One of the many advantages of our proximity to the Sierra is that it makes it possible for us to augment the warmth produced by our highly efficient passive-solar home with heat generated by burning beetle-killed, sun-dried trees.
I have always loved to fell, limb, buck, split, haul, and stack wood, and I have been heating with wood most of my adult life. There is something deeply satisfying about making a pilgrimage into the forest and returning with a fruit so precious that it flowers a year later in the gentle, blossoming flames that warm my daughters as they play or read by the hearth. Think of it as the thermal equivalent of preparing and eating vegetables grown in your own garden. That may be a sentimental take on a backbreaking form of labor that is performed amid the roar of a chainsaw and the smell of diesel fuel and sawdust. But I truly love cutting, so much so that I do it not only to heat our home but also to avoid doing pretty much anything else I ought to be doing instead. The expansive woodpiles strewn along the half-mile-long driveway up to Ranting Hill make plain how wonderfully I have succeeded in using cutting to evade the pesky, endless round of adult responsibilities.
In addition to offering an escape from the scurrying of grown-up life, woodcutting also has the advantage of being ridiculously gear intensive. It isn’t just the pickup truck, dump trailer, chainsaws, bars, chains, gas, oil, screnches, wedges, field axes, and files but also the stylish safety apparel. To begin with, there is the standard-issue, head-to-toe Carhartt in the classic, monkey-poop brown. I have graduated from ordinary work gloves to gel-palmed chainsaw gloves, with wraparound Velcro wrist straps; whenever I put them on, I feel like I am about to win the Indy 500. I have also traded in my steel-toed work boots for titanium-toed boots, which provide the same protection but are lighter and, more important, sound cool. I’m now considering “Titanium Toed” (or “Titanium Toad”?) for the name of my next band.
In the area of eye protection, I have improved my look over time, from the boxy, safety goggles of a high-school chemistry student to the reflector shades of an undercover cop to the tinted wraparounds of the professional bass fisherman. My final step has been to go for the full headgear: a bright orange hard hat, with attached ear protection and stylish nylon mesh visor, which makes me look like a blaze orange medieval knight. Whenever I am wearing this helmet, I am transformed into Sir Rantsalot, the brave, saw wielding knight-errant who can flip his visor up and deliver a cool, witty line every time. Unfortunately, I sometimes forget that I have the fancy headgear on and spit heartily without first raising the visor, a very gross bush-league move that I try to hide from anyone who might be in a position to comment on my mistake.
But the pièce de résistance of any chainsawing getup must be the chaps. You can’t help but feel studly as a bronc buster once you have strapped these bad boys on, and I speak from experience when I say that being wrapped in Kevlar is a good idea when wielding a tool with razor-sharp teeth that are moving inches from your body at ninety feet per second (around sixty miles per hour). That manly valorization notwithstanding, it is a plain fact that chaps are essentially assless pants.
Several years ago, on Christmas Eve, Eryn let slip that Santa had brought me a new pair of chaps. (I had nicked the old ones, which, like a climbing rope that has sustained a fall, may have saved your life but should not be reused.) I was so excited that I snuck to the Christmas tree later that night—wearing only green, elf-themed boxer shorts—just to try on the new gear. The chaps fit so perfectly that I decided to treat myself to a celebratory nightcap. I was bent over, reaching into the fridge for a Black Butte porter, when I heard someone behind me. I spun around to see my father-in-law, who was then visiting from California for the holidays. This guy is an ex-cop, and he has always seemed to me like he is eight feet tall. There he stood, towering silently over me. I had to think fast, so I opened the beer, extended it toward him, and said, “Remember how you felled a tree in the wrong direction and knocked out power to half of Oakland during a Raiders game? I won’t mention that, if you won’t mention this.” He took the beer and went back to bed with nothing more said, either then or since.
I do most of my woodcutting with my buddy Steve, who is so good with a saw that when we cut together I call him “the good feller.” He just refers to me as “the other feller.” Steve will take on trees twice the size I am willing to wrangle, and he’ll do it even in rough terrain or in situations where the drop must be perfect. Before S
teve fells a tree, he engages in a mysterious, elaborate ritual that appears entirely unscientific. He first breaks a branch, measures it against the length of his arm, and then backs away from the tree that is to be cut, holding the branch up in the air like a witch doctor and squinting at it with his head cocked to one side like a parrot. Then, he stares around the canopy of the forest, as if searching for celestial signs. After this period of inscrutable meditation, he sticks the branch into the ground and pronounces calmly that this is the exact spot where the tip of the tree’s crown will strike on the drop. This is a little like Babe Ruth pointing to the spot in the bleachers where he will smack the dinger, and about as difficult to make good on.
Once Steve begins to wedge the bole and then notch the hinge—which, on a big tree, he does using a massive Stihl with a forty-two-inch bar (take a moment to visualize this)—it is impossible not to admire the guy’s sheer gumption. And when he cuts the engine on his saw and begins driving wedges into the notch with the head of his field axe, that is my cue to spring into action. I coolly raise the visor on my helmet, spit heartily, and holler, “I’m here for you if you need anything, buddy!” Then I hastily retreat, until I am about a quarter-mile from the tree, perfectly safe and of no possible use to anyone save my bartender, who cannot afford to lose me. Steve’s hammering echoes through the forest and is followed by the slow-motion sound of the holding wood cracking, the tree crashing through the canopy, and the resounding thud as it meets the earth—a heavy vibration that I feel in the titanium toes of my boots, despite my cowardly distance from the site. Reapproaching, I inevitably find that the tree has been dropped on a dime, with Steve’s stick marking accurately the crown’s position on the ground.
In addition to tackling trees well over 100 feet tall, including dead giants that threaten to destroy buildings were they to become windfall or be felled imprecisely, Steve is also capable of making beautiful objects with them once they are on the ground. Using his Alaska mill, a portable frame that guides a chainsaw, allowing its bar to move smoothly while cross-sectioning a length of log, he creates immense slabs that he later crafts into a variety of lovely things. The entry hall of our home on Ranting Hill is graced by a gorgeous bench that Steve fashioned from part of an eighty-five-foot-tall incense cedar that he felled. The bench is six feet long, but the entire piece is crafted from the same slab, so the grain wraps beautifully from the bench’s surface around to its legs.
I have been a dedicated environmentalist for more than three decades, but it is my experience that fellow enviros are not always warm to my passion for woodcutting. I do understand that, intuitively, my hobby might appear to be the opposite of tree hugging, especially to folks who hold the reasonable view that we humans should quit messing with nature and just let it do its thing. But the problem is that one of the things nature does extremely well is burn stuff down, which has prompted massive fire suppression efforts along the Sierra front—efforts that have led to forests that are unnaturally dense, combustible, and vulnerable to die-off caused by the stress of drought and beetle kill. When John Muir wrote of walking through park-like Sierra forests reminiscent of a cathedral, he was describing an open, fire-scoured landscape that no longer exists in most parts of this range.
The trees I cut are already dead, and even then I am careful not to fell all standing dead trees in an area, leaving for wildlife habitat at least the number of snags per acre recommended by conservation biologists. I also try to cut in a way that mimics the thinning effects of a low-intensity ground fire, removing ladder saplings, jackstrawed ground fuels, and trees that have fallen victim to invasion by beetles. In doing so, I not only try to make a patch of forest a bit more like it would have been under a natural fire regime; I also use the environmentalist tool of the chainsaw to help create a forest that is a little less likely to be incinerated by the kind of catastrophic, stand-replacing canopy fire that can occur in areas where fire suppression has caused fuel densities to become unnaturally extreme.
The dead and downed wood I cut will burn, but in our woodstove rather than in the forest, which raises the question, “Is heating with wood an environmentally responsible choice?” As with most good questions, the answer to this one is, “It depends.” In many parts of the world, the unsustainable overharvesting of fuelwood is decimating forests, but that is certainly not the case in the eastern Sierra. In many instances, wood is burned in stoves that are inefficient; however, we use an extraordinarily effective appliance that employs a catalytic converter and emits less than three grams of particulate per hour. Even this tiny amount of particulate means that wood burning is generally not a good choice in urban settings, a concern that does not apply here in this remote, sparsely populated desert. In some circumstances, wood is burned to heat houses that are thermally inefficient, but our passive-solar home is so capable of capturing and holding heat that we burn approximately half the wood that would be needed in a conventionally designed home. If one burns sustainably harvested, well-seasoned wood in a properly sized, EPA-certified stove, this form of heating has a lot to recommend it.
But, my fellow enviros persist, “Doesn’t the gasoline burned in trucks and chainsaws mean that woodcutting depends upon fossil fuels and thus contributes to CO2 emissions?” The long answer is, “Yes, but each BTU of fossil fuel consumed to harvest wood produces twenty-five BTUs of heat, which is an impressive ratio. And, given that the trees I cut are already dead and that the carbon sequestered in them will be released into the atmosphere through controlled burn, wildfire, or rotting, the fact that the wood’s combustion occurs in my stove limits both greenhouse gas emissions and the open release of particulate pollutants, not to mention that it also warms my family.”
The real question is not whether burning wood is carbon neutral and zero emission but whether it is better than the alternatives practically available to me. I could heat with oil or gas, whose extraction and combustion are major contributors to the global climate change crisis; or, I could choose electricity, knowing that half of the megawatts produced in the United States are generated by burning coal, which is no improvement. Once active solar is within our financial reach, that will be our choice. In the meantime, I would rather harvest the BTUs I need with my own hands from the beautiful tinderbox of a Sierra forest than buy them from an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, a fracking well in North Dakota, or an open-pit coal mine in Wyoming.
The greatest pleasure offered by my woodcutting occurs around the hearth, which is the center of our home up on Ranting Hill. Here, my family gathers to enjoy each other’s company and to savor that deeply satisfying, bone-warming radiant heat that is unique to wood. It is amazing how often, while adding fuel to the stove, I will recognize an individual log and remember its small story: not only what species of tree but precisely where it stood or fell, if it was snowing or shining the day I hauled it back to the desert, whether I bucked it from the trunk of a tree surgically dropped by that good feller, Steve.
A Zen proverb offers this guidance: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” There is something nourishing and elemental in this harvest. Gathering this wood from the high Sierra has warmed me more than twice, for, in addition to warming me through work and by fire, it has kindled my imagination in a way that no turning of a thermostat dial ever could.
I RECENTLY RECEIVED a phone call with the bad news that I have been given what my neighbors here in Silver Hills refer to as a “redneck promotion.” I have been promoted from plain member and citizen to Road Captain, which is a position no sensible person would covet. Despite the cool title and apparently elevated rank, the job is without compensation or administrative support, is unelected, and descends upon you by fiat when the current Road Captain declares that you are it.
The road to Ranting Hill is 2.3 miles long and has eight houses scattered along it. It is a terrible road that degenerates to pure caliche mud in winter and bone-rattling, dust-choked wa
shboard in summer. There have been times when it was so dry and abused as to be barren of gravel; at other times, it has been impassible because flash floodwaters flowed across it in an unbroken sheet. Many seasons it is so muddy that we Silver Hillbillies must resort to hanging around in town drinking beer after work just to kill enough time for the mud to freeze up so we can cross it to reach our homes. The road’s ditches are full of silt, what few culverts there are have crushed heads, and if there were ever any road signs they have long since blown away in the Washoe Zephyr or been hung on a horseshoe nail in somebody’s pole barn. (Our mailboxes are all crooked, and our addresses are out of numerical order, too, but that’s another story.) This is a private road, which means that, while the county will not maintain it, no one else wants to either. So who, by default, is in charge of stewarding this mess? The Road Captain.
Many years ago, we had a neighborhood association out here, to which we paid modest annual dues that were used only for road work and snow removal. Since most Silver Hillbillies are by nature unsociable, misanthropic, and share a worldview that tilts toward conspiracy theories and radical libertarianism, an overwhelming majority of my neighbors voted to rid themselves of the association—in the spirit of oppressed peasants ousting an occupying foreign army. The theory seemed to be that anyone who would collect association dues would soon come for our shotguns, bird dogs, and sour mash.
Since the demise of the association our bad roads have become worse, and some roads have descended into social chaos. On one nearby road that has only four houses, each neighbor has adopted the same strategy of trying to outwait the other three to see who will find the road so intolerable that they give in and fix it themselves. So far, nobody has relented, even when, for weeks at a time, they were all forced by deep mud to park at the paved road and slog the long haul up to their homes. On another road, a guy who is especially entrepreneurial bought an expensive grader in hopes he would have a field day. But, because he was once seen meeting with our local real estate developer, nobody would hire him, and, before long, the bank repossessed his shiny grader. On a third road, a guy who had repaired the roadbed at his own expense threatened to install a toll gate if his skinflint neighbors would not pony up their share.
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