On the 12th of April, 2023, the rain began around midnight. The sound was amazingly loud. Sleep had to be abandoned, so I got up, checked the radar, and a deep red splotch of clouds hovered directly over my area and nowhere else. The rain came down in a roar.
The next morning the pond had overflowed, and the Live Oak in the backyard that had a serious lean was creaking. It fell before I could get my phone, and in the next couple of months, I was able to get most of the larger limbs cut.
The next two years brought hurricanes, more rain, more flooding, and eventually, trees died from their roots being submerged for too long.
About six months ago, the water began to recede. I was able to get the fence back up, my compost pile has emerged from the ocean, and I’ve been able to assess how bad things are.
I also had two dead trees close to the house taken down. One very close to the house, a gum tree, was still alive, but it had a growth near the top that caused the top to break off. Considering the size of the tree and its proximity to the house, I had it taken down, too.
I have spent the last couple of days moving logs over to the Live Oak that fell, and setting things on fire. I’m usually a let nature take Her course, but I’ve got a lot, and I do mean a lot, of dead trees. Dozens of them have died, some have fallen, but at the time of this writing I’ve got four piles of dead stuff that if they catch on fire, it’s going to get weird. Two are so close together their blaze will be visible from the moon.
The Live Oak blocks the path from the house to the woods, and it is large. I would like to leave some of it to return to the earth as all thing should, but I have to reduce it. I have made good progress in this endeavor.
I began the process of moving parts of the Gum Tree to help burn the Live Oak. I used rollers, levers, and manual labor to get this done. If you know Physics, you can take an eight foot long log that is two feet in diameter, and move it one hundred yards without breaking a sweat. Push, move a roller, push, move a roller, push, move a roller, push, use a roller as a pivot, reset rollers, push, pivot, burn.
All the wonders of the ancient world were built by people who knew how to apply force in a manner consistent with the laws of physics. It’s not difficult once you understand how. Aliens were not needed and are not needed to build, to move, to create an environment where humans can get things done without machines.
I’m alone in the woods and can move logs some machines might struggle with. I used pieces of trees to move trees.
Take Care,
Mike
I was *this* close to paraphrasing your subject line with “hugely, bigly”
Beautiful.
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Do they still teach that sort of thing as School?
When I was at School we had to move a pallet with a ton of cement on it, the cement bags had got wet and had cured. All we had were some steel scaffold poles. And the knowledge handed down over the years.
Rikkichet, I’m a really weird type of autodidact. I had something that needed to be done, and all I had was the stuff around me and time to figure it out. But I can move just about anything to anywhere with the right sized limbs and round pieces of wood.
It’s great that you are able to MacGyver things.
I tend to like the adage: everything is solvable by the correct application of the right explosives.
But using what’s around you is more satisfying–usually.
Tim, it’s easier than it looks, usually. I moved a log that was about eight feet long, twenty inches in diameter, and as heavy as it was, rollers took most of the work out of it. The rollers are pine so they’re light, and easy to move. It’s slow going, but once you get into a groove it’s pretty much done. I think anything that takes time baffles people who want things to happen quickly. Quickly is how you get hurt.
Mike, though we had knowledge from the past, we were not actually taught a great deal of it, instead we were taught to learn and to dig out the information ourselves.
I was taught how to run lathes and milling machines, but I had to teach myself how to use a micrometer and Vernier gauge.
Back then, if somebody asked how something worked we were told to figure it out and describe how we thought it worked.
These days pupils seem to be told “because it does, that’s why.”