Chainsaw Bluegrass

Well, I have to admit that I have been lax in the postings here. My last post, arguably the pinnocle of my literary attainment, has footnote numbers without corresponding footnotes, and somebody out in Sunnydale California has been logging in for like 3 seconds looking for them, so I guess I better trot out the excuses before hand and then report on my new personna as lumberjack and brush-buster.

First of all, there has been so much death and destruction to deal with all at once around here that it's left me a little distracted, you might say. My brother and childhood Fred has left this world and begun his travels; I'm not worried about him, because he always did beat me to the good seats. Bastadge! And another childhood kinda close chum cashed it in because his epi-pen was out of date. Nobody ever said that the most profound tradgedy couldn't also be incredibly simple, sometimes even stupid.* That's not to mention floods, torrential rains that make me think I am living in the frikkin' horse latitudes, and muggy buggy weather that caused me to break out in a rash.

contact dermetitis, that's what that was. Bastadge!

But I'll save the sad details of all this for another post or maybe just throw in a few shreds of truth in here later on, if it serves the purpose. This is how I was voted into office as log-humper and brush-buster.

First of all, the developers up here--I can't mention any names, but anybody how lives up here knows the "Big One"--slap up housing tracts on land only a nitwit would build on, then the poor city folk, freaked out by all that green shit, pave most of it, so when we get a gully-washer, it turns bad quick. So when we had like 8 inches of rain in 12 hours because our citiot friends decide that driving a freakin' SUV that gets 6 miles a gallon 200 miles a day is a good idea and global warming has reduced the frequency of the 100 year storm to about 87 days, things got kind of dicey here in East Stroudsburg.

Four trailors up the street at the Buttonwood Court were destroyed, bulldozed by the borough because they were within an ace of being washed downstream and taking out the interborough bridge when they went.

And a 100 year old red oak ame down out in Cherry Valley, buried my wellhouse in brush and left me with a new afternoon job for the month of July. Seems the royal old oak just couldn't keep a grip on the mountain, whose limestone was chock-full of water. So when the second day of summer school was preceded by a 6 am phone call, I was giddy as a school girl thinking that all that rain was prolly gonna be another flood, our third in 20 months, and I was thinking I was getting a "rain chain" call.

I was wrong. It was my tenant, and he said, "About 4:30 that big ash took out the transformer, and it exploded for about ten minutes and fried all the electrical appliances, and then we lost power. So we were sitting on the couch in the dark when we heard the loudest, scariest sucking sound we ever heard, and then it sounded like the mountain was coming down on us."

I got up and drove out there, and sure enough, this tree, almost four feet in diameter, had come down somehow without squashing any cars, buildings or even deer, although I bet it scared the pellets out of a few and caused more than one bird to wake up fast and fly. The root-mass was probably ten feet tall and twice that wide, and the hole where it had been was full of water to within an inch of the top.

Getting back to school was no picnic either. I watched a dump-truck full of gravel just barely make it through some water, and decided to take another way, and got to school a couple minutes late and wondering what the *((@^ $# to do with this tree.

But with the aide of some very dear friends who prolly don't want to be named, we had a 4th of July chainsaw party, and the sound of 5 (or with my baby Stihl, more like 4.3) chainsaws going was something special, and we had very nice grilled steak and turkey BBQ for lunch, all of us with fingers and toes at the end of a muggy buggy day with rain, and I have about 1200 board feet of sweet red oak--beautiful stuff, about 5 cords of wood, almost half split, and a nice piece of ash,** about 25 feet, straight clear log right next to the road.

Well, I did my duty and got this news out; I'm apposed to be working on my literature review and I have to clean the basement.***

And it's almost midnight. So I guess I'll declare victory and sign off.****





*Pronounced "Stoo-Pit!" by most teens these days. Use it and be cool!
**some wanker has been monitoring my references to derrieres, so I have been trying to moderate. Who knows? Maybe they have a point. But here in this column we call a spade a spade and an ash and ash.
***I found cans from 19-freakin 84. Mushroom buttons in water. What the hell was I thinking?
****See you later!