Shovelling Water

Weather here in the Northeast is approximately as predictable as weather anywhere else in the country at this season -- in this particular season! -- Terrifying!

For some folks the matter of "terror"-ible weather has some substance to it -- a lot of substance: 25 feet in diameter boulders, 40 meter waves, 16 foot cresting fluvia of rivers that are usually hardly existent or mere slip streams of drainage. In my case the terror is, to date, reserved to the weight of the snow: my lower back is twisted in an eternal sprain from being cow-kicked as a toddler and, to boot, I did significant damage to my right shoulder during the fall. Concentrated shovelling is out of the question -- not because of the back (I can always brace that and set to) but owing to the inability of the shoulder to take the strain of lifting, throwing.

Fortunately, I have an ATV with plow that until yesterday had managed to scrape off and push back the bulk of snow thus far deposited on the driveway of the old homestead. Yesterday we awakened to three inches of not yet running off slush. Three inches: not really enough to justify plowing, but with a breath of warm air promised, to be followed by icing and sub-zero chill, it was clear that what lay there had to be encouraged to disappear as run off, right down to pavement, rather than freeze in mini-moguls to skid and skitter on that might last the rest of the winter.

I chose a push shovel, for the obvious reasons, and got to work -- lots of work. Still, occasionally one must lift and throw, despite the purpose for which the shovel of choice was designed. This joy resulted in some satisfactions, much laughable splashing spillage that became less amusing as I porceeded with the work, and a whole Village of pain in my right shoulder and upper arm.

Why is any of this worth noting: because it stuck with me throughout the day, throughout the night, and sticks with me as I sit keyboarding. Also, it is worth noting for the opportunity to register my dissatisfaction with (so so much) modern design: e.g., that the push shovel I used might easily have been formed to include sides that would hold whatever is being shovelled, from mineral to water contents, instead of providing bowling alley runways -- left and right -- for spillage. (The design I have at my disposal is truly so-so.)

Each of us might profit from noting the designs we encounter, especially those which we are forced to use by requirements of the workplace or those we actually purchase for personal use, that are incompetent for the purpose/s to which they are supposed to be put. This, doubtless, results from the inexperience of the designing engineer for the work s/he is presumably striving to a) make possible and b) easier. It is the difference between the Roman plow and the Jefferson mouldboard plow that led to the Seth Thomas (Middlebury, Vermont) iron plow that led to the variety of plows available at this date. Instead, it seems that the inexperience of our engineers is dragging us backward into near stupidity: hardly a cook outside of the classically trained chef knows the purpose of any knife in the kitchen and so uses paring knives to cut vegetables and French knives to cut meat and pare potatoes and thinks that every knife that is serrated is a good knife and any that are not must be inferior; and none know about, are conscious of, or competent to the task of sharpening knives.

Instead, left to their own deivces in their designer kitchens, they shovel water. Stick with it!

Sense of Snow...and Ice

There is no place quite like a woods -- a big woods, a small wood -- for spiritual experience. Not only the sense of God but the actual experience of being as of a part of the mysterium within while participating in the small mysteries without -- mice gnawing inside a stump -- and without which everything might collapse into meaninglessness. My experience of autumn into early winter was like that: I helped build a bunkhouse onto a seculded cabin and mostly worked alone to repair significant portions of a washed out wood road to that cabin -- a road that had lost soil and become aggressively daunting ledge (emphasis on "-edge"); and then went on toward the end of the hunting season (the rmore comprehendable reason for all this activity) to mark out the passage of a newly proposed road across a quarter mile of forest that would make certain of our passages to and fro shorter, easier, readier. Yet most of this work and contemplation went forward under a cloud of weather and thought during my several four, five, and seven day sojourns.

The visible and felt weather went fairly smoothly throughout, despite a line of mercury that intermittently dropped like a stone, discouraging the most hardy among us, or passing rain that made mud where one walked or rode, and on several occasions I found it better to retreat into the seclusion of the cabin and read while the lamp wick flickered and the wood stove crackled than to brave the elements. Not so hardy.

Yet, this time gave me opportunities to focus on what was running through my head like a long and fast, thus burning, ribbon of worry: that whereas our host landowner/friend and we once hunted or otherwise recreated across almost 1,000 acres of tumbling land at the very nexus of Washington County flatlands and Adirondack foothills, we are now constrained to about 480 acres that, while most pleasant to visit, begin to feel as if they approach the postage stamp restrictions of open land in places like Albany County, or almost anywhere in what is commonly thought of as New England (I say "commonly thought of" because it is my considered opinion that Eastern New York State -- the borderlands -- are New England, which I think is proven by the shared history, mechanic industry and yeoman agriculture, and broken only -- and then only in slight -- by the barrier posed by Lake Champlain from Whitehall nearly to the Canadian border).

Why is this so? Because we were contented to participate in a Qualtiy Deer Management Program that put bounds on us through participant land ownership sections? Yes. And no. Because one of the participants is a person locally known as a "flatlander" -- a person who behaves sweetly on the street and in meeetings, but who -- like Robert Frost's farmer in his poem "The Code" -- does not comprehend the courtesies among persons who come to agreement through agency of a firmly shaken hand or verbal consent. This person builds gates and fells trees across common roads and footpaths time out of memory. The truth is that this person hates the rifle, perhaps the firearm, although family does hunt the possessed land, most especially hates the snowmobile and the all terrain vehicle, and means to have a preserve, a safe harbor for the possessed animals.

Usufruct is lost on such persons for the strictness with which the concept is held in their minds, whereas persons of long acquaintance may share a more reasonable understanding of it as a matter of use meaning changes will be inevitable. Preservationists share this difficulty in general, thinking that building codes that limit architectural possibilities will perform all that it is they seek: changelessness, image, aura.

While I may think all this an amusing lie that some may tell themselves, nonetheless I am the one among my friends who massages their sometimes exposed angers that their innocent behaviors might be offensive to this (or any) landowner, for -- I am quick to point out -- it is their land and we owe it to ourselves to respect that ownership, no matter the ignorant blasphemies leveled against our activities, no matter the oppression of traditional activities in the area imposed by an uninformed newcomer, because to do otherwise would offend our self-respect and put us actually outside the law we would maintain.

All this is quite frustrating and I have on three occasions approached the person in question to request only slightly more liberal use -- the mere passing across the land to move from point to point with less effort, in less time -- without hunting. These encounters are like having tea with a stranger. Stands cold the cup when you finally stand up. We do not speak the same language although we both use educated English, that person being a writer from New York City living out a hobby farm dream. Our partings are too sweet and I sorrow.

Now, following the encouragement of our host landowner and friend, I am posed to build a new road, avoiding possible closer proximity to the running western boundary of that person's lands, to permit for a traditional winter recreation practiced in that community and region, and selfishly to make for readier passage from point A to point B for an activity our host landowner and our company of friends practice only three of four weeks of a year.

This is a fishbone stuck sideways in my craw: I do not wish to more cut up the forest and, truth be told, to do so is not necessary: we have roundabout access to where the new road would go or our neighbor might cut away her laughably, wholly unnecessary felled blockages of her roads and allow us passage ... from point A to very near point B, where her line runs out. I pray for it ... I cry for it.