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squirrel heartwood dirt
Tuesday, November 2 2010
Today was election day, and among other errands, Gretchen went off to vote. She met up with Nancy (of Ray and Nancy) so they could go vote together. Ray, being a legal alien (he was born in the Phillipines), cannot vote.
Meanwhile I spent about an hour bringing firewood from that salvaging site down the forest slope. It's the most distant place I've recovered significant firewood from using only human-based transportation, and the work involved in carrying it back is proving significant. My Chinese peasant apparatus (featuring two firewood hammocks and a wooden shoulder yoke) helps, but it's awkward over rough terrain and useless on the steps past the cliff (the route I've been using for this salvage).
Later I drove over to Ray and Nancy's house and recovered more of their Silver Maple. It turned out that there were two more Subaru loads' worth of wood, some of it required additional sawing. It's easy to get bogged down in a very large piece of trunk, so for my second load I brought over some splitting equipment. While I was down in Old Hurley to pick up that first load, I also took the opportunity to vote. I voted a straight "Working Families Party" ticket (which is identical to the Democratic Party ticket), though in the line for Sheriff my options didn't include any entry from that most Marxist of New York State parties. So I settled for the Democrat, who was almost certainly villified during the campaign for having been "soft on crime" and will, if elected, have to overcompensate by kicking some poor black man's head in.
While I was collecting the second load at Ray and Nancy's house, Ray and Nancy showed up from wherever they'd been. Poor Ray was recently diagnosed with advanced clogging of various coronary arteries and will soon be going under the knife for either a triple or quadruple bypass. So as I wrestled enormous chunks of wood into the back of my car, there was nothing he could do to help.
Much of the Silver Maple had been hollow and had evidently been providing housing for generations of squirrels (the last of which, according to Ray, had looked forelorn when he climbed its mostly-delimbed trunk shortly before the tree was felled). For perhaps dozens of years, squirrels had lined the inside of the hollow trunk with leaves, which had gradually composted to produce a rich dark soil, gallons of which could still be found in the sections of fallen tree. I often encounter this "tree heart soil" when salvaging trees (and sometimes I take it home and put it in the garden), and had always assumed it was comprised of composted heartwood from the tree itself. But the volume of this soil is so large that it must be coming from some other source. Now at least I have possible mechanism: the nest-building of squirrels.
This evening Ray and Nancy came over for an election-night dinner of lemon-marinaded tofu and some sort of potatoes-and-tomatoes au gratin. While the former was a bit too sour, the latter was unexpectedly delicious, especially for someone like me who usually only likes his potatoes deep fried.
Election results started trickling in while we watched first Jeopardy and then an episode of Hoarding: Buried Alive. But I was expecting the worst and too scared to watch. I lost a lot of hope when it seemed that perhaps Rand Paul had won the election to the US Senate from Kentucky.
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