He had a treadle powered grindstone, which must have been as old as the cabin. He took a seat at it and gave me a quick lesson at sharpening. He had put some pants on, but I was still naked as a jaybird, and when I went to sit and sharpen my axe, the spinning grindstone, so near to my crotch and the inside of my thighs had me as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. He took pity on me after about a minute of near disastrous effort and within a minute had the edge of the axe gleaming.
I took my tool, found my pants and boots in the carport and partially dressed. I headed up the road away from the cabin and within a few hundred yards I knew we were in trouble. The backside of the hill was soaked and the road was thick with mud and puddles. A large branch crossed the road just a little ways further, and I got off the bike and carefully walked around it in the dense woods and heavy underbrush. Back on the bike I made it another 5 minutes before I hit a real doozy. A larger tree had been uprooted, with the entire root ball showing, and was leaning across the trail, the upper part of the tree tangled in another one across the way. The only good news was that ahead I could see the turn in the road, where it met the wider, better tended gravel road.
I had my work cut out for me.
Call me a freak, but I like physical labor. Maybe because my earliest jobs in high school and college were all hard labor. Now that I spent most of my days behind a desk, I liked getting out and getting dirty. Swinging the axe, trying to cut my way through a tree a good two feet in diameter, feeling the intense impact, watching chunks of wood explode away from my precise blows, I loved it all. I enjoyed the feel of the wooden handle in my hands, the flexing of my shoulder muscles, the tension in my back. I worked hard, cutting through the tree, and chopping it up into sections less than three feet long. I got good and filthy, stacking the logs at the side of the road, and even trimming the large branches down and cutting them into more usable pieces. My arms and chest were scraped up from handling the rough bark on the heavy logs, and by the end my hands were starting to feel like hamburger. I don’t know how long I was at it, but I was surprised when I saw Jill roll up on her husband’s Road King.
“Damn, Alex! You’re filthy! What have you been up to for the last few hours?” She asked, stepping off the bike. She was wearing her remarkably tight pants, and someone’s t-shirt that was way too big. I wanted to rip it off of her. Instead I nodded toward the stacks of wood on the side of the road.
“There was a tree blocking the road,” I explained, leaning my axe to one side and wiping my forehead where the sweat was dripping into my eyes.
She walked to me slowly. “You done yet?”
“Yeah. I think this is good enough. I was just going to cut up a few more for fireplace wood, but I think a rest might do me good.” Now that I had stopped working, I could feel the ache in my forearms, shoulders and back, and my legs were almost quivering. I’d overdone it, but that was pretty typical for me. Once I got going, I rarely had the good sense to know when to take a break.