What is this, Fern Gully?!?

A week already. I've heard it said that when you're really busy, the days go like weeks and the weeks go like days. I believe it. I hauled the 'Castle Coop down the Valley last Saturday, in the midst of a 'microburst' that left a handful of the coop's shingles on the highway and snapped the telephone pole in our front yard (not the lines, the pole). Sunday was Napapalooza 2013, Monday a shopping / lunch / coop-repair trip to Roanoke and Tuesday was my Fern Gully adventure.

If you haven't seen Fern Gully, it's an animated gem of a movie from the early 90's about a happy-go-lucky California kid (played by me in this production), who is accidentally shrunken to fairy-size by a well-meaning pixie of the rainforest. The kid, Zach, is part of a logging crew that awakens some evil, BP-Gulf-Oil-Spill type of demon that has been banished into a gnarly old tree that talks (maybe I'm blending this with Disney's Pocahontas). When the oil spill mystically overpowers the logging operation and threatens Tinkerbell's hood, Zach and his jungle friends scheme up some first rate hijincks to derail the whole operation. Now that I think about, I'm not the California kid in this production... I'm the anthropomorphic (no, I didn't have to open a new window and google "things in folklore that can talk that aren't supposed to talk" just to pull off that $30 word) oil spill. Allow me to explain.

I took Betsy and the trailer out to Goshen Tuesday morning to find and cut some cedar on a friend's grass-fed beef farm. Goshen, a map dot tucked into a stream-carved crevice in the Allegheny Highlands (or thereabouts) is a hike in it's own right, add the extra 15 minutes it takes to get to the farm from Goshen, and you're in Egypt. Upon arriving, I tossed my 455 Rancher, extra fuel, chain oil and tools in the basket of a four-wheeler and tore off down the road, following the property's owner. We pulled off at a gate, unchained it and headed up the side of a wooded ridge, crossing a mountain stream framed by moss covered boulders and rhododendron bushes, bumping a handful of deer  along the way. The trail turned to forest floor, which eventually opened up to a hillside meadow, half way up one of the innumerable, elongated ridges of the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains. I tried to play it cool, like this was business as usual for me; but, the reality is that I was awestruck by the isolation, the beauty and the remoteness of that little valley, which probably has the same population today as it did in the 1740's when it was first settled (the original cabin on their property still exists today). We wound up heading back down to the river bed, below the main road, where the logs would be easier to retrieve and load. I tried to take a picture with my phone, but the battery was dead.

After surveying the bottom land, we returned to the house and I took Betsy down the road to park near the trees we selected, opting to hulk the logs across the field without the aid of modern machinery. Leaving the truck and trailer half way in the road was the least of anyone's concerns. The 2-3 hours I spent at the location only brought 4 vehicles. Two of which were the same rural mail carrier going out and back (Note: I do promise this story is going somewhere, but I'm in too deep to turn back at this point!). I caught myself stopping occasionally just to look around and listen to the wind, it's amazing how loud even the slightest breeze can be when you're totally out, away from everything. I had a few mini-realizations during those moments that there is no possible way this is not what I was born to do. That is, until I got FernGully'd.

It started when a clever piece of rusty fence wire disguised itself as a vine-y branch and reduced my chain -by way of converting its razor sharp incisors into a fireworks display of showering sparks- to a linkage of dull, toothless nubs. When the sparks began to fly, I literally exclaimed to myself, "What is this, Fern Gully?!?" Normally I would just sharpen it on the spot; however, the Fern Gulley fairies / witches had managed to snap my chainsaw file as well. The tree I was after -obviously at the behest of the forest nymphs- was a beautifully straight, thick, gently tapered and relatively branch (therefore knot) free cedar, conveniently located on a creek bank, behind a barbed wire fence. After crawling under the fence, destroying my chain and running out of fuel, I somehow managed to get the tree cut. Imagine my joy when the trunk broke free and the entire upper portion remained hung up in the branches of the surrounding trees. I proceeded to break the number one rule of chainsawing; which is, "Don't do anything stupid with a chainsaw". I performed an over-the-head maneuver to cut the log a second time, 7 feet off the ground (seriously, don't try at home) to free the upper portion from the clutches of the other trees so it could come crashing down. Long story short, I'm still here (limbs in tact), and so are all the logs (limbs not in tact). Better luck next time, you little Fern Gully gremlins.

I cranked out the better part of a chicken coop today, without pictures, so I'll have some tomorrow. The one thing I do want to showcase tonight is the final results of the Fincastle delivery and installation. I made flower boxes from solid pieces of white oak timbers. I cut some more timbers to size with the chainsaw, on site, to make the posts for it to stand on. Have a look-see.

I think it turned out alright. How about you?

All handmade latches of course. The backside houses the custom built rabbit hutches.

Flowerboxin'.

I don't know who keeps coming here to read this stuff, whoever you are, thank you for the support. Big news coming in the days and weeks ahead, stay tuned!

-F.W.