Concrete and Culture
Concrete and Culture is a collection of personal essays. It’s about 400 pages long. My original intention was to write down everything I knew worth knowing. I got this idea when our kids were young and we were homeschooling them. Midway into the school year it occurred to me that regardless of whether they went to a public school or were home-schooled, their education was my responsibility. The 49 essays vary widely in length and topic so it is hard to pick one that is representative of the book as a whole. Below is a good example. Here are some links to me reading excerpts from Concrete and Culture.
Chapter 1, Concrete and Culture
3- The Dignity of Not Hanging Trees
Jim Bornemeier was a friend of my parents. He worked at the newspaper with my father and, like a lot of Bill’s friends, he occasionally came over to our house and hung out. Hanging out meant drinking beer and doing whatever my dad was doing, and one fall it meant going up in the woods to cut firewood.
Bornemeier, as Bill always called him, had a flare for language and he and my mother liked to talk about books. I noticed that when he spoke, he looked for the right word, not in the way of a taciturn Vermonter looking for the most economical version of a sentence, but in the way, I suppose, of a poet, a person who wants just the right word and is always reaching into a corner of the grab bag of language, hoping for an unused word. This quality and his general demeanor gave Bornemeier a certain dignity. He always seemed poised and thoughtful.
On my parent’s woodlot, at the top of the main hemlock stand, the hemlocks start to thin out and the hardwoods take over. Right on this periphery, my dad cut a dead beech, which fell downhill and got all tangled in a hemlock. The beech was light because it was dead and the bushy hemlock held it tightly. My father’s solution was to pick another beech tree and fell it into the first one, hoping to dislodge it.
When you’re logging, every tree is different, every skid is different, and there are continually opportunities for things to go wrong. You are constantly judging the skid road, the mudholes, the direction gravity wants a tree to fall against the direction you want it to fall. Things usually go along quite well until you misjudge a tree and hang it in another tree.
These errors all start with a misjudgment or downright self-delusion. You think to yourself, “It’ll slide between those two trees” or “It’ll roll off that tree” or “It’ll break through those dead branches,” and it doesn’t. Then you’re left trying to fix a mistake.
Whatever your attempted solution, it is bound to be more dangerous and much more time consuming than simply getting it right in the beginning. And getting it right in the beginning is usually a matter of taking a few more seconds of preparation. Cut the other trees first, see if it is possible to take your tree in a different direction, some little choice that takes a hundredth of the time you eventually put into unhanging the tree, but you don’t make that choice because you err on the side of thinking things will work out. Optimism is not your friend when you are cutting trees.
My dad’s hopes were ill-founded, and although the second tree succeeded in lowering the first tree, it didn’t bring it all the way down. Now the second beech tree was leaning on the first beech, which was itself still caught in the hemlock.
He examined the cut on the first beech and determined that while it was still propped on its stump, it was broken completely through, and he concluded that we could bring the whole mess down if we could just dislodge it from its stump.
If we had had a winch in those days, we would have simply winched it off the stump. Instead, he put a wedge in the cut and started tapping on it with a sledgehammer. This was not best forestry practice since, if it was successful, it would mean that as the first beech fell, the second one would come down on his head. Naturally, he planned to run at the first sign of movement, and after several false alarms it looked as though the beech was ready to pop off the stump. On one of these false alarms, my dad ran a little distance and Bornemeier, with manly courage and the instinctual camaraderie of men doing stupid, dangerous things, reached out his hand for the sledgehammer.
He and my dad then took turns. One of them would walk in and take a swing at the wedge and then turn and run. Each hit moved the tree a fraction of an inch closer to the edge of the stump. Finally, Bornemeier took his swing and the tree slid off the stump. Just as Bornemeier started to run, he tripped. The trees started to fall with an enormous cracking and rearranging of branches, and Bornemeier started speed crawling through the leaves and forest litter. Crawling was the right choice. Taking the time to get up could have been fatal. A second or two of crawling, palms open, fingers grasping whatever traction he could get from the leaves and the soft ground of the woods, and Bornemeier threw himself in a headlong plunge and lay on the ground looking back at the trees, which had settled somewhat lower but had not come all the way down.
It was the first time I had ever seen a man, a dignified man, stripped of his pride and reduced to a dog in sheer desperation to keep himself alive. The lesson is that it is safer and more dignified to avoid hanging trees in the first place.