David, the soil specialist from the University of Maryland, called this out to UD as she stood some distance from him in her back forest this afternoon, chopping down a tree.
David was in one of the many deer-ridden thickets in her half acre, planting a black oak between two immense tulip poplars. “The tulips will probably die in not too many years. You’ve got a Dutch Elm, too. The disease will catch up with it …”
As for all the Norwegian Somethings, get rid of them! Foreign interlopers, and we’re reestablishing the native canopy. Did UD have an axe?
She did, she did. It was one of many fine garden implements UD inherited from her mother…
She’d never used it; hadn’t seen it in years. It lay at the bottom of her little storage shed, its silver dirty and gray.
“Try girdling this Norwegian. Chop it all around the bottom, about an inch in. Only the bark is alive. The leaves will start to go… You should be able to push it over… ”
The axe’s blade was very, very sharp. UD girdled Norwegians here, here, here, and there. “And what,” she asked David, “about these excess honeysuckles? Could I take the axe to them?”
“Sure,” he said; and it was when he heard UD‘s cry of triumph at felling a honeysuckle – wood chips flew in her face as she slashed – that he said the thing about empowerment.
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Later, when Les UDs took a walk along Lake Needwood, UD explained to Mr UD that she was now a woodsman, that she enjoyed axing, and that he should expect her to axe many things.
“Along those lines,” he said, humming the famous song, “What’s a lumberjack, exactly? What does a lumberjack do?” He asked in that special I’m-Polish-and-you’re-American-plus-an-English-professor way.
“Er, much more than chop down trees,” said UD, trying to sound authoritative. “They chop them down, of course; but then they chop them into logs, and then they send the logs, uh, down the river, which is called log-rolling… Or they just, you know, transport them in whatever way they need to be transported, and, uh…”
“You don’t really know, do you?”
Then they drove to Johnson’s in Kensington and bought many packs of moss for their topiary bulls. Also they bought pumpkins.
Mr UD knows nothing about pumpkin placement, but as soon as he parked the car he raced to the trunk, took out all the pumpkins, and placed them here and there around the front of the house. He didn’t even understand that pumpkins need to be massed.
October 3rd, 2010 at 5:54PM
That ax shot immediately made me think of: Carrie Nation and Lizzie Borden.
October 3rd, 2010 at 8:06PM
Hmm. The picture looks more like a hatchet than an axe. is the handle at least two feet long? And, lumberjacks do cut down trees, but they use chain saws these days. And pretty much load the logs on skids, which are taken to trucks. If it’s pulpwood (trees used for paper rather than lumber) that’s being cut, it’s even harvested mechanically. Just FYI.
October 3rd, 2010 at 10:04PM
EB: The handle of my axe is quite short. And I must say I don’t know the difference between a hatchet and an axe. This is one of the Google Images that came up when I typed “axe.”
October 5th, 2010 at 12:36PM
Typically, a hatchet can be comfortably operated (speaking liberally here) with one hand, while an axe requires two. That image definitely looks like a hatchet. Also, you’ll notice that the handle is angled forward at the bottom in order to accommodate a one-handed approach more easily, whereas an axe handle is much longer (generally atleast two feet) and is usually straight, to allow the guide hand to remain at the bottom and the trail hand to seamlessly slide down the handle during the swinging motion.
October 5th, 2010 at 12:41PM
Rob: Thanks. I’ve been slowly learning – from information like yours and from other sources – that there are indeed two separate things here, and that I’ve definitely got a hatchet…
Aside from being a totally not-outdoor girl (I was raised that way), which makes knowing things like this unlikely for me, I distinctly remember my mother – a gardener – calling this tool, as she gave it to me, an axe. For reasons I can’t explain, “axe” sounds cooler to me (and probably did to my mother) than hatchet…