Used to be, in the spring, we\u2019d haul our firewood in.\u00a0 The winter storms blew part down and we\u2019d cut the rest.\u00a0 The slash, we\u2019d stack up and burn.\u00a0 Sometimes for a couple of days, sometimes for nearly a week.\u00a0 Keep dragging the downfall over to a bed of coals so deep it\u2019d catch the root systems of the long-gone old growth firs on fire and they\u2019d smolder for weeks, spreading along 500 year old tributaries of pitch, sort of an underground river of fire.<\/p>\n
We knew every square inch of our nettle forest.\u00a0 The places where the bleeding hearts had gotten established.\u00a0 The gullies where nothing but ferns grew beneath the cedars.\u00a0 The salmonberry savannahs and the nettle jungles.\u00a0 We found the old shelter where Yazel\u2019s kids had made a fort and built a temple with homemade idolatrous animal gods.\u00a0 We discovered the pioneers\u2019 dumps with the old dishes and the linament bottles.\u00a0 We knew what their favorite whisky was and when they got lightbulbs.<\/p>\n
You explore your woods and you discover the past.\u00a0 The stumps of those giant Doug firs with the gash still there where the loggers shoved a springboard so they could saw above the rock hard wood at the base — you still see em.\u00a0 You find the barbed wire strangling a maple, then finally it\u2019s swallowed inside where the fence line kept the cows.\u00a0 Cedar snags charred from the fire of the 1890\u2019s when the entire South End burned.<\/p>\n
Some of the past is too far gone.\u00a0 The old barn didn\u2019t have good timber left.\u00a0 The pig pen barely did.\u00a0 Some of my own shelters and outbuildings are long gone now, leaving not a clue for the next folks.\u00a0 The woods is a history book.\u00a0 It\u2019s a museum going to ruin.\u00a0 It\u2019s a lesson to me every year that what we do will be swallowed and lost and forgotten.\u00a0 Something about that I find a comfort, I guess.\u00a0 Knowing that we\u2019ll disappear back into the rot and the rust as surely as the trees will fall — something humbling about this.\u00a0 Something part of something relentlessly ongoing.<\/p>\n
Every year we go back in there.\u00a0 And some day we won\u2019t come out.\u00a0 Someone else will burn the tree that grows on me.\u00a0 Someone else can warm themselves on that\u2026\u00a0 I just hope they pay a small respect.\u00a0 We aren\u2019t the first.\u00a0 We sure aren\u2019t the last\u2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Used to be, in the spring, we\u2019d haul our firewood in.\u00a0 The winter storms blew part down and we\u2019d cut the rest.\u00a0 The slash, we\u2019d stack up and burn.\u00a0 Sometimes for a couple of days, sometimes for nearly a week.\u00a0 Keep dragging the downfall over to a bed of coals so deep it\u2019d catch the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[4351,4349,4350],"class_list":["post-14924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings","tag-bottle-dump-in-the-woods","tag-history-behind-the-barn","tag-where-weve-been"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14924"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14927,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14924\/revisions\/14927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}