East Pole Journal V. II, Episode 11: Inventory

Cut vertically and ready to split

As I sat on an upended chunk of a tree trunk I had cut for firewood enjoying a boketto moment
an answer came to me. I think, that’s what I do. I think. The most common question I hear about living out here amounts to “what do you do all day?” I usually say “I live” and if I have to I point out that everything takes longer in the Bush even the most mundane of household chores. If pressed I go down a list ending in I write sometimes and that usually satisfies the questioner as I have given him something of an acceptable productive effort in my existence that he can understand. As far as thinking goes, it races from subject to subject: failed loves to future loves, fantasies about the ATT girl, past failures, past successes, past arguments argued all over again; sometimes I even argue with Henry David Thoreau. I have 75 years of life to reflect on, you understand.

So there I was today in Boketto mode not thinking about much when I started taking a firewood inventory. This grew very complicated as you will see. To begin with, this chunk I sat on stood among 19 others like it that had been cut into sections ready for splitting. These from the lower trunk are so thick and heavy I can’t split them even with an 18-pound splitting maul, so nine of them already have a vertical cut in them about halfway down. That allows me to make it split with the first crack at it. But, hold on, this is the middle of the story.

First split, easy peasy with the cut 

Firewood makes up the biggest chore of the winter. When I came out I had two cords of birch stacked from last year plus three-fourths of a cord of spruce that I cut for kindling and fire starting. That gave me half a cord a month for the winter. A cord is two rows of split wood cut to wood stove lengths (18-20 inches in my case) and the stacked rows are 8 feet long and 4 feet high.

That’s where I started and once I got settled in the effort to cut firewood began. I point out what I think is the futility of a life spent cutting enough firewood for the next winter so you can be warm while you cut wood for the year after that., and on and on. 

One chunk split
           almost fills a sled

I got that spruce cut down and sectioned and then took down this huge birch I was sitting on. Then disaster. I made a mistake and accidentally took my chainsaw out. Simply imagine what 5/8-inch poly rope would do if it is chewed up by a chainsaw and strands of it crammed though moving machinery as it melts in the heat. Done. I drove more than 100 miles round trip to buy a new saw. Then. Get this, I could not get it started. And, get this: the little bit I had been able to run it, it didn’t seem to be big enough to handle the huge birch I am sitting on. Near the base the trunk is 18 to 20 inches in diameter. The saw bar is 18 inches. I had to make that drive again, in the back of my mind thinking maybe they’d let me trade it in on a bigger one, but, no, they got it running. Back home, I spent the better part of a week but still couldn’t start it. Frustrated, I went to a more local dealer who sells the same brand of saw and I went there and bought a bigger one. Got it home, and guess what, I couldn’t get this one to start either. So I took it back. This time only 30-miles round trip plus the 14 on the snowmachine.

With some advice and some demonstration from these new people I finally got it started, though not without flooding it a couple of times. I decided enough was enough dedicated last Sunday to starting both saws before I did anything else and by 1 p.m. I had them both running.

Mind you, the pressure to get firewood in for next winter had consumed my mind and actions for weeks. If I couldn’t do that it might end the adventure. I even considered bugging out, but there’s this. I have nowhere to go.

Then, with the saws running, Monday, I started in earnest and have made great progress since
.

Long way to go, even some under
the snow up toward the stump.

But, there has been other pressure, too. We have had a cold snap for almost three weeks now and temperatures constantly flirting with zero. As a result my firewood consumption increased considerably and I used up my February ration almost a week ahead of time. Normally at this time of year as most days the temperature gets up into the 20s I stoke the fire up in the morning and then let it go out over the course of the day. That’s five or six hours when I am not burning wood. Now, I was going to be able to fill up for next year but it looked seriously like I might run out this year. To top it off, that beetle-killed spruce I cut earlier still showed 16% moisture despite being dead for at least three years and would not burn. That was supposed to be my backup.

So today while I am splitting big chunks of birch and taking it to the stack, I found another half a stack of last year’s. Then I tried some more of that spruce on a going fire and darned if it didn’t flame up.

If at this point someone had come along and encountered me, he would have seen a totally satisfied man in a boketto trance with a big smile on my face. Then I had this thought: I sympathize with those folks in Texas, they really aren’t prepared for what amounts to a day in the life for an Alaskan. Still I would love to tell one of them that I just stopped working in mid-20s weather because I was sweating too much. The last thought before I stood up and began the trek pulling a sled full of split wood to the house was that solving a problem so seemingly insignificant as starting a chainsaw could change a whole outlook on life.

 

Oh, yeah. “Boketto.” It’s a Japanese word that loosely means staring off into the distance blankly with nothing on your mind. I do that a lot.

East Pole Journal

 

Eastpole Journal V. II Episode 10: Close encounters of the moose kind

Two trails converged in the wood …

I had to go out yesterday trying still to get my chainsaw problems under control. Trail conditions
allowed quite a speed, up to 20 mph much of the time, as good as it gets around here. There’s one spot on the trail, no matter how good it is where I slow down to a crawl. If there’s ever an accident on this trail that‘s where it will happen. Going out you climb a short but steep hill out of a creek bed. A lot of people speed up there to make the hill but I slow down, because it’s a blind spot. You have no idea who could be coming toward you. I go slow and crowd the right side of the trail in hopes no one is approaching. So I crawled up to the top and once I reached it with no one in the way as I looked down at the trail I hit the throttle to speed up again. I should have looked up into the woods. Just as I was hitting some speed I looked up and saw the moose standing right next to the trail about as surprised to see me as I was to see him. A quick mental search for how to handle it went through my mind and I decided to hit the throttle and go faster, hoping to get past it as fast as I could while it was still sorting out fight or flight. Mind you this all happened within less than 20 feet of trail. The moose didn’t move until I had almost passed it and in my peripheral vision I caught some movement of his front legs away from the trail and I roared past. I swear I passed under its chin and could have reached out and swatted it on the nose. I didn’t even stop until I was well down the trail to make sure he wasn’t chasing me, but when I did I could see him moving slowly into the woods, stopping to look in my direction a couple of times. Shaking a little I went on down the trail a little slower.

 Later, on the way back, I stopped to look at the tracks. He definitely had one hoof in the trail when I passed. Whew, even closer than I thought.

     But that was yesterday. This morning when I first walked out onto the deck with the temperature at minus 8, I looked up the hill and saw new moose tracks. Later when I looked closer they showed it was moving uphill. Most often I see tracks heading down the hill. I followed them a little and saw where a second set of tracks joined the first and confirmed they were both heading uphill. The first set of tracks came within about 10 feet of the deck.

    A week or so ago I had noticed tracks crossing my trail down the hill. For a couple of days before that I had heard something crashing around in the woods up the hill, probably a moose but I never saw it. Then I came on these tracks and noticed a second set, these much smaller. It’s early but getting close to the time and I’m betting that was a calf she birthed on the hillside. Given the early arrival and the colder temperatures lately I’m guessing the calf won’t survive.  The second set of tracks today had been put down by another adult.

     Then there's this too. During the week I heard a radio announcer introducing a talk with a some kind of nature expert. It was the announcer who said this, not the expert (I sure hope). What he said was something like " in the area with moose and pelicans." Now I ask you, where in the world would moose and pelicans abide together? Maybe he was referring to the town of Pelican in Southeast Alaska, and there's that book I read years ago where the author put pelicans on the deck of an Alaska fishing boat in the Bering sea. Not likely. Maybe a zoo?

Pelicans? Really?

East Pole Journal V II, Episode 9: Strange snow

          A strange kind of snow has been falling here almost constantly for three days now. At first tiny flakes came down, frozen so solidly they made a sound when they hit an exposed hard surface, like wood or the arms of my deck chair, even the fabric of my Carhartts coveralls. Tick, tick tick … Later in the week still small but softer, they landed without a sound. At first it was crystallin and showed the patterns usually associated with regular snow, later the patterns showed but sort of melted somehow, softer. So far we’ve had maybe six inches covering a firmer level of packed snow with a light fluffy comforter. I get most of my water from thawing snow. I have a couple of 5-gallon stainless steel pots for that purpose. Generally if I pack one full the first time it melts to between a third and a half and then I fill it again and that tops it off. I’ve made five trips out into this snow, packed it as tightly as I can and I still don’t have even have half a kettle-full.

 I’m not the only one bothered by this unusual snow, either. Normally the chickadees who weigh only a couple of ounces land on the surface and hop around on it with no problem. Today I watched one land and immediately sink up to its neck. For a moment while it struggled, I thought I was going to have to go to the rescue, But, with a lot of major panicked wing flapping it managed to swim back to the surface until it had enough space between its wings and the snow to sort of leap up and fly away. Can you imagine a world covered in something you can’t even stand on?

    The only break I saw came last evening when with no wind, some larger flakes came down, though they were so light with nothing to push them, they floated in odd directions, not always down, just sort of drifted around aimlessly.

     Supposedly Americans Native to the Arctic have 40-some words for snow. Over the years as I’ve observed the weather I’ve noticed different kinds of snow, doubtful it was 40, though, and wondered what the Native word for that one is. This snow was different from any I’ve seen before. Forty-one?

East Pole Journal

East Pole Journal V. II, Episode 8: The hill is alive …

They're a bit shy.

When I took the first blurry look out the window without my glasses this morning, it looked like the ground was moving. A second look with the aid of lenses told me the redpolls had returned. All winter I hadn’t seen one, not confirmed anyway. Several flocks of small birds flew over now and then but I couldn’t be sure what they were. Just in the past couple of days I had seen one at a time poking around among the chickadees. Then this morning I realized the East Pole had been discovered yet again. There must have been 20 or 30 of them flitting around, coming to the feeder, watching from the trees and, yes, poking around in the snow. Fortunately I had just opened a new 40-pound bag of sunflower seeds.

What's a chic like you doing in a place like this?

 

On another note

Frustration cure #8372: After more than two months of sliding on this damned hill, and the other day being dragged down it on my belly by an overloaded sled, today I carved steps about 40 feet down from the house. Can a Stairway to Heaven be far behind? I would have made a picture but everything is white and there are no shadows so the camera can’t even see them.

The following morning tracks in the new snow showed a larger bird had walked the length of the deck and then even hopped down the stairs. Feet about magpie size, I think.

 East Pole Journal

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