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single-day backpack salvage record
Saturday, November 3 2018
There had been heavy rains all night, slowing Gretchen's return from the Pfunk show in Manhattan; she didn't get home until 3:00am or so. The rain ended this morning while I drank coffee. Gretchen was so out of sorts that she didn't even want decaf. She had a big day today; she'd be driving down to Poughkeepsie to read poetry at the Hudson Valley Vegfest and wouldn't be home until after dark.
I spent the day mostly gathering firewood. I began by walking the dogs on a loop that that took me to the south end of the Farm Road, then east on no particular trail until I found a smallish dry standing oak. I'd brought my little Greenworks electric saw and backpack, so I had what I needed to make a backpack load out of it. Since I was quite far from home, I did not make the load especially heavy (maybe eighty pounds) and, since I didn't want to carry it either up or down steep slopes, I headed back to the Farm Road and returned home that way.
By now the clouds had cleared out and winds had begun to dry things out a bit, though there was so much water in the forest that I would continue wearing galoshes for all of my subsequent wood salvaging.
In addition to that initial load, I recovered four backpack loads from the stack of pre-cut/pre-split wood a little up the ravine just of where the Stick Trail crosses the Chamomile. I'd prepared these stacks over two and a half years ago, wanting the wood to dry before carrying it home. The wood all seemed pretty wet today, but that was just on the outside. When I split them into yet smaller pieces back at the woodshed, they proved dry inside.
In addition to all of that wood, I salvaged a backpack load from the tree I'd used wind to fell east of the Chamomile as well as a load from the upper branches of a large oak a couple hundred feet to the south of that (also east of the Stick Trail). For those not keeping count, this all came to seven backpack loads in a single day, which probably added up to over 800 pounds of wood. That has to be a single-day backpack salvage record. Only one of those loads went into the house; most of the rest contributed to the woodshed's second tranche. There's also a third tranche, so at this point the woodshed has the equivalent of about two tranches of wood. Since a tranche is equivalent to a cord and we burn about two cords per winter, we would have more than enough for the coming winter were it not for the fact that a fair amount of the wood will never be dry enough to burn this heating season.
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When Gretchen returned from VegFest, she'd brought a couple Korean "meatball" sandwiches. They looked really good but they actually weren't as delicious as I expected. I preferred the vegan mac 'n' cheese, which was delightful when combined with some "green tomato pickle" (it had the shoe-polish-like flavor of Indian mango pickle).
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