To recap what I’ve said here before, I don’t give a fat damn about my “carbon footprint.” The concept is a misbegotten construct of the leftist enviro-cult, and it’s wholly meaningless to me. I’m an honest American consumer — I buy, use and do what works. And if a thing doesn’t work, it has no place in my Life.
Over the last couple of years, DeWalt’s line of 20V electric power tools has won me over. So when I decided to tackle clearing brush at the south end of The Amphitheater on this chilly morning, I grabbed our DeWalt chainsaw and pole saw and headed up to where the work was.
My Stihls might be better and more capable saws but, quite simply, the electrics would make the relatively light work easier.
Today’s target was a mature eastern red cedar that had lost its crown under the weight of heavy snow a couple of winters ago. The falling trunk had taken out some branches as it splintered and fell, and the result was an absolute mess (compared to the other improvements we’d made around The Amphitheater). Time was running short to address it this year, though, and Deb and I had agreed to put it off ’til next winter — until, that is, I got a wild hair this morning and decided to do it now.
I began by limbing up the broken tree, the bottom half of which was still vital. Like all of our mature cedars, its lower branches were dry and dead, and those, some of them quite substantial, had to go if I was going to be able to clear what had fallen.
It took me a while, but I dropped what needed dropping and dragged it all in the direction of the burn pit. (As soon as the wind dies down ’round here, I’ll have another fire.) Some of the cut limbs wouldn’t budge, however, and that’s when I discovered that the mess of downed and dead cedar provided the perfect environment for greenbrier (aka smilax) to take over.
An impenetrable thicket of the damnable, thorny stuff covered about 200 square feet, some of the vines growing 30 feet or more up into the trees. Deb brought me our DeWalt long-reach hedge trimmer and I got to work on the tangle.
It was slow going. The hedge trimmer was the right tool for the job, for sure, but the vines were stubborn, long and everywhere. Each time I tried to pull away what I thought I’d cut free, something was still attached to something else, or one end was still rooted in the rocky ground. It wasn’t maddedning and it wasn’t frustrating, just insanely tedious.
But little by little, I got every last bit of the greenbrier out of the way. The result of four hours’ work on a cool spring day was nothing short of amazing.
Light now shines through the clearing behind The Amphitheater onto the rock formation below. The whole area is more open, and it feels more welcoming. And we got it done just in time, ten months earlier than we’d planned.
Naturally, I harvested a fair amount of cedar firewood in the process.
Those DeWalt electric tools again performed flawlessly. A single 4Ah battery powered all three — chainsaw, pole saw and hedge trimmer — without needing to be swapped-out for a fresh 20V pack before the job was done.
We toasted the transformed space with bourbon at sunset.
(An old friend called while we were bourbon-sippin’ and sunset-watchin’. The call didn’t end ’til after 8:30pm, meaning that we had to make our way down from The Amphitheater in the dark. Fortunately, no tipsy rednecks were harmed.)
I’m going to leave these images here, along with ever-so-cautious optimism that the Ozarkansas weather will cooperate with us on Monday.
Miller Hardware is one of the local businesses with the right spirit for the eclipse.
I can’t say that Smudge helped much today, but she was good company.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable
#LetsGoBrandon #FJB
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