INTERESTING TIMES

Some of the trees up here been playing havoc with our way of life, and folks 'round these parts won't stand for it, nosir.

For example there's the big chunk of incipient firewood from the gargantuoak a few hundred meters above here whose monstrous branch was lowverhanging the road and was cut down a couple of months ago before it could crush somebody, its superbulk then being rolled over the roadside edge into the bamboo and down toward the stream before the cutters knew that I was a firewood type person and would want it, so later I found out it was ok for me to take it away, but now I'll have to stand on that steep slope as if beside a nervous elephant and chainsaw the mass into half-meter segments weighing about 300 k each that I'll have to stay out of the way of, then have to split and quarter in situ so as to render them liftable to the road above. Love those kinds of tasks...

After that I can tackle the big oak on a transverse road thereabove that the recent hurricane blew over onto some power wires, causing a multihour blackout up there until the power company cut it down in big sections and shoved it into the woods where it now belongs to me but I won't get to that for a week or two beyond the first cache, though whats the hurry, since no way will it ever be dry in time to use this winter, even with the impossible miracle of constant sunlight during the rainy season plus the worst of global warming. It's warmth for the winter of 2012-13, if we're still here then, given the ongoing govern/mental revelations of Fukushima, but even so I'm going to try to leave the split wood out in the sunniest, breeziest place...

Then I'll have Azuma-san fell those three big crowdy oaks that our upmountain neighbor girded because they need the sunlight on their house, so when that's done I should have enough firewood to last until the world economy has successfully collapsed and everyone has gotten used to bottom line frugality so we can hopefully move on to essential changes.

We do live in interesting times, do we not...

EXALTATION

Yesterday morning I was over on the other land clearing up the last of the new firewood, my eyes looking at the maul and wedge, the grain of the oak sections I was manhandling or among the downed branches for limbs of worthwhile size, hunched over and gazing downward all the time, without thought, rapt in the mu of continuous and autofocused labor, when for a break while edging my way through downed branches I stretched, looked up and there beheld, rising into the blue, all the gold of the tall old ginkgo tree that stands beside the pond, arms spread wide as though reaching to embrace the sky, reveling in existence like an exulting dancer covered in golden feathers tingling in the air--

All that bright and sudden yellow alone amid the evergreens-- it stopped me in my tracks, snatched my emptied mind from mundane tasks and filled it to the brim with things that made me reach for understanding, comprehensions beyond the brackets of my life and its reaches, it was splendid to stand there, as if new, before such living beauty, beauty offered without reward. This was a wild ginkgo, in its native autumnal costume.

Perhaps the most anciently originating tree species surviving today - a living fossil in fact - ginkgo [from the Japanese gin (silver) + kyo (apricot)] must have been showing their gold to empty air, in the eons before we humans came along with our burgeoning capacity to enjoy-- and that's where it hit me, right in that capacity. It wasn't art, it wasn't scenery, it was just a tree but more, arms reaching for heaven just as ours still do in the reflex of high emotion, an ancient stance for both tree and man-- I just stood there and looked at it long where it stood, a single yellow tree against the dark green mountains, but what a gift to a tired man, a break from labor, an opening of mind, an exchange of languages ancient before my time...

It was almost as though the ginkgo had been standing there quietly all along, holding its pose, waiting-- somebody's gonna look up any minute-- wait-- wait--- now: there, he's turning: ta-DA!! It was like that, it was a communication that happened, I don't know why or how, and likely never will, but the ginkgo was telling me in unmistakable terms about humans, color, dance, trees, art, time, knowledge, thought, communication, history, life, patience, it's a long list, and just days from now that golden gift of leaves will all be fallen. I have to go back again. Why does this tree want to tell me so much?

NATURAL CEREMONIES

Salt offering
after removal of dying tree

LUMBERJACK

This was lumberjacking weekend. There were a couple of teetering cedars right out front, leaning over the house and just waiting for a hurricane; a dead cedar right out back that was about 30 meters tall and slowly degrading, also just waiting for a hurricane, and an unbalanced oak that had to be professionally trimmed so that a reasonable amount of sunlight can fall on the garden when I figure out the sci-fi plans for my new anti-monkey fencing.

We called the local hub for such matters, and contracted for a crew who came on Saturday. The crew was a small bent-over man going on 80 years old! Echo and I stood there filling with doubt as he got out of his truck, sat down on the stone wall to put on his work boots and then asked for some salt to use in the purification ceremony before starting work.

Our doubts lasted until Mr. Azuma – that was his name – climbed smoothly from the upper end of his high ladder way to the tippy-top of the 25-meter oak and began pruning away, alternating handsaw and chainsaw while just holding on with his toes, moving around among the limbs with the grace of one who has done this sort of thing for a long, long time, until the oak looked very slim and stylish; he said it would grow into a nice shape henceforth and not grow any taller. We were reassured.

While he was preparing his solo felling of the huge dead cedar that stood only one meter from our new tile roof waiting for a hurricane, we asked him about the questionable chestnut tree that stands in the garden a few meters from said roof. He gave the tree a brief glance, said it had insect problems, would last maybe another 5-7 years, then would fall, but no immediate worry.

Then he revved up his chainsaw (a Shindaiwa 380), made some delicate surgical cuts in the big multi-ton dead cedar tree, now and then sighting along the intended path like a baseball pitcher, made a wedge out of a piece of my oak firewood, used a sledgehammer to drive it into the final cut, added another wider wedge a bit further over as he aimed some more and the tree wiggled at the top, rocked, tilted -- tilted more, then gave way with a crack and fell straight away from the house WHOOMP right between my rosemary and basil, which were stirred by the timber wind.

We talked while he ate his newspaper-wrapped simple bento lunch seated crosslegged on the deck, smiling and laughing at his own words, in a dialect I had to cut with a mental chainsaw. He'd been doing this work since he was young; lived alone, married twice, long ago, but it didn't take; cooks his own meals, grows his own rice, grows his own vegetables (why do otherwise, he said), makes his own sake, makes his own charcoal for cooking and heating, gave me the best intense course on chainsaw maintenance I ever had, then cut down the trees close in front of the house, felling them right where he aimed, sectioned them to the desired lengths and drove away.

What a guy.