My absence from this space has little to do with much save the nature of the season, which this year has been accompanied by long stretches of sun-filled skies that have caused the streams to run low and quiet and dust to hang in the air behind the car as I drive down the mountain road.
I have been working the woods every day, skidding spruce and fir logs for projects pending and finishing the last cords of firewood. I like this work for pleasures great and small: The mounting pile of saw logs, the neat rows of stacked firewood, the day’s end fatigue, the strange intimacy of kneeling to wrap the choker chain around the butt log, almost an embrace, really. And yesterday, tractoring along an old logging road near the height of our property, a hawk (what kind, I do not know) swooped from the height of a sugar maple and flew low over the ground, then veered and was gone. Soon after, I came across a mother grouse and her chicks; the former on one side of the rutted road, the latter on the other, frantically seeking one another amidst the sudden chaos of the big, rumbling machine.
I shut down the tractor, let them come back together, scolding me all the while, then reversed and retreated slowly back the way I’d come.
Ben Hewitt 