My yard can beat up your yard
8:18 PM Posted In grass , Hillside Edit This 0 Comments »
Last night, we enjoyed a rare opportunity to just "hang out" with Dan-the-Builder and Chris-the-Architect. We sipped massive quantities of very strong beer at the Hofbrau Haus, ate some German food to the accompaniment of Oom Pah Pah, watched a "Chicken Dance" or two, and yelled over the din to share our thoughts on the Rock Crest project and other memorable experiences and hoped-for future experiences. Aah, so nice!
Today, by the time I made my way to the Crest, with extra water, sandwiches, various materials to drop off, and a kid fully loaded with accessories to keep her occupied while we worked, Chris and Brien were already up on the roof, as Brien demonstrated his new-found talent for stone masonry. Chris watched with rapt attention and many compliments, and we admired the progress together, celebrating the lovely asymmetry of stonework a la Le Cameron. Those were some wonderful moments, up there on the roof, in our little circle of people who can truly appreciate and understand how every project at Rock Crest is its own kind of back-breaking, slow-moving labor of love -- with an emphasis on LABOR.
But, alas, I was not there to enjoy the artwork, and I'd run out of reasons to shirk my duties by the time Chris was leaving. My job for the day: knock down the grass on the hill to a manageable level that would stimulate the roots to do an even better job of establishing themselves and thickening the green carpet.
Daunting. The grass, in some places, was more than 4 feet high. The hill is easily the length of a football field. And the slope is about 40 degrees. It's not a place you can use a push mower -- or, probably even a riding mower. If we had one, that is.
My tool: a brush hog attachment to the multi-tool device we've used as a weed whacker and a pole saw. Assembled, it's about 6' long, with a gas-powered motor, a soft-grip handlebar, and a vibration that's only matched by its high-pitched wheezy whine. It came with a shoulder strap that reduces some of the fatigue of holding that 15lb device to "mow" a hill by hand. If only I hadn't accidentally worn that strap home one day and summarily forgotten where I put it.
So, today, it was just me, my Husqvarna ear protectors, vibrating hands, and trembling forearms. And, let me tell you, the first 10 minutes were absolutely killer. The grass was so high that it was difficult to even determine a strategy for cutting it down. Knocking it down by touch only made it harder to cut. Some patches were so thick that I actually had to use the brush hog like a circular saw.
After a while, I got into a groove. Hard as the labor was, I started picturing the cutter "swimming" beneath the grassy tide, far enough above the soil that the grass was getting a haircut and not being decapitated, but low enough that the blades could once again stand semi-upright when the trim was completed. Fortunately for me but not for the project, something broke in the starter housing, causing the pull starter to not be able to retract, to my cutting work was done after I was about 25% of the way across the hillside. I did, however, have the equipment to add the finishing touch, though -- raking up all the cut grass and tossing the grass balls off the hillside. B and K came to help me finish with that delightful task.
Doing this kind of ridiculous, extreme manual Rock Crest labor leaves a person a lot of time for contemplation and thought. If you're not careful, it will lend itself to overwhelm and worry, so as I worked, I bolstered myself with empowering thoughts. One of these was "My yard can beat up your yard." I smiled to myself when I thought that -- wondering if that was cocky or well-deserved by a person in my particular situation, knowing that other, sane people were home mowing regular lawns with self-propelled lawn mowers or sitting on the couch watching some kind of Saturday entertainment, or maybe doing the kind of household chores I normally do when I'm not having to do something exhausting and insane at Rock Crest.
I thought about the fact that, if I had a normal metabolism, I'd be 90 pounds soaking wet after all that we've had to do in the course of this odyssey. There's no small, quick, inexpensive, or easy project at Rock Crest. And there's no job that we do as 2 people that doesn't really require 10. But, that's the path we've chosen, and we're plugging onward. If I don't sit down periodically to document the lengths to which we're going to bring this dream into reality, then, like the work that went into the pyramids and other high-labor endeavors, nobody will ever know what it took to get us from point A to point Z. I think we're about to point H...
But, alas, I was not there to enjoy the artwork, and I'd run out of reasons to shirk my duties by the time Chris was leaving. My job for the day: knock down the grass on the hill to a manageable level that would stimulate the roots to do an even better job of establishing themselves and thickening the green carpet.
Doing this kind of ridiculous, extreme manual Rock Crest labor leaves a person a lot of time for contemplation and thought. If you're not careful, it will lend itself to overwhelm and worry, so as I worked, I bolstered myself with empowering thoughts. One of these was "My yard can beat up your yard." I smiled to myself when I thought that -- wondering if that was cocky or well-deserved by a person in my particular situation, knowing that other, sane people were home mowing regular lawns with self-propelled lawn mowers or sitting on the couch watching some kind of Saturday entertainment, or maybe doing the kind of household chores I normally do when I'm not having to do something exhausting and insane at Rock Crest.
I thought about the fact that, if I had a normal metabolism, I'd be 90 pounds soaking wet after all that we've had to do in the course of this odyssey. There's no small, quick, inexpensive, or easy project at Rock Crest. And there's no job that we do as 2 people that doesn't really require 10. But, that's the path we've chosen, and we're plugging onward. If I don't sit down periodically to document the lengths to which we're going to bring this dream into reality, then, like the work that went into the pyramids and other high-labor endeavors, nobody will ever know what it took to get us from point A to point Z. I think we're about to point H...
0 comments:
Post a Comment