So this post is probably going to be the most smug and braggish I’ve been on these forums, but I don’t care cause I haven’t done ANYTHING like this for at least two years.
We have some people working on cutting/baleing our fields, and the short grass really reveals how many trees I’ve let grow up around the property. That really got to bothering me, so I got the axe, machete, and a nalgene half-full of water and went out to do something about all these trees.
I picked a solitary walnut tree that looked about 20-30 feet tall, with a trunk 20 inches around.
And I cut it down.
After that I chopped all of the branches off of the trunk, and carried them up this hill.
You can see what’s left of the trunk just a bit right of center, it’s that little black post out there.
So I dragged all of the branches over all that distance and up that hill by hand, for a distance that seems to be a tenth of a mile or so. For somebody who hasn’t done or even cared to do anything like this for years, I feel totally pumped that I buckled down on this task as much as I did.
And then there was this. And this is where I got a bit of the crazy in me.
From end to end, that piece is a little over eight feet long. I’m 5’6’’, hovering around 150 lbs. Any reasonable and intelligent person would cut this in two, and carry those totally manageable portions up the hill in the span of… ten minutes?
But no. I had the Crazy and Stubborn in me, and now it was a challenge to see how far I could push my already tired body. For what was at least a half-hour(probably 45 minutes, really), I lugged this damn piece of wood across the field, up the hill, and into our yard. My modus operandi of moving this hunk across flat ground was to squat down, bear hug it as hard as I could, and then waddle 10-20 feet before resting.
I got about a quarter up the hill like that before I gave up on that, another quarter dragging it up the hill after me, and the last half flipping it end-over-end, which was much easier than the other two methods. Bear-hugged it the rest of the way back into the lawn and I was done.
All in all, I was out there doing this for 3-4 hours(6p~10p) with a couple of breaks, but I feel really proud of myself for finding the drive to do something like this. The insides of my forearms and the top of my right shoulder are bruised up pretty well, and I picked up a set of gashes on the inside of my left wrist. Arms, shoulders, lower back, and legs are all sore but I just feel really good about it, totally worth it.
