Logging Roads

Froggy Taylor is the best I've ever known with a small bulldozer. He understands contour and slope, and how to get his skidders from one place to another. His sawmill and log-yard are a treat of desire paths. I was thinking about seeing, now that I take looking at things so seriously. Froggy came to mind. Talk about visualizing. He can look at a section of timber and imagine exactly what he needs to do to get logs from a hollow out to the road. He uses the lay of the land rather than fighting it. When he cuts around a slope, ten or fifteen years later, it looks like a pre-historic terrace. I was saying to someone recently, Kevin I think, that I greatly admired anyone who do could something well. Kevin, who is a carpenter himself, admired my beam-work and staircase, and I felt a swell of pride. It is good work, be it ever so ephemeral. What amazes me is that most people can't actually visualize what something is going to look like. I had the great good fortune to train with Herbert Senn, who could visualize anything, and draw you a picture. Many of us, who worked with him, learned to solve problems that way, by seeing what the problem was. There's an elegance to doing something well. I've built maybe a dozen very nice staircases, some of them almost bizarre in the way they achieved their function. We need to get from here to there. Get shed of any pretense. All those dead cells that rub off against the world. I'm guilty of chewing off a piece of skin, I always thought of it as a homeopathic cure for surface diseases. I'll tell you though, and this is the truth, when I drank raw goats' milk, and they were eating poison ivy, I was completely immune. I was walking one of Froggy's logging roads, looking for morels, and I found a good patch, mushroom dreams. If you're not a mushroom person, it wouldn't make any sense. Like a bird-dog rolling in road-kill. I'm drying morels, I'm the richest person in the world. Other idiots pretend, but they don't eat as well as I do. Not that the asparagus and bacon dish wasn't a success. I don't set the bar that high, I can roll over a three foot fence. I can hit a pie plate at a hundred yards, in my cups, with iron sights. When I used to hunt squirrel, I only shot them in the head. Rereading Carl O. Sauer essays and they are wonderful. D wanted to meet for lunch at the pub, a beer and conversation, then over to the museum to see the camera show, D being a film camera nut, and chat with TR. Then back to the pub for another beer, then Loren wanted to buy me a beer and talk about him doing a Becket play. A new novel by Skip Fox in the mailbox, sure to jack-up my weekend. He's an incredible writer. Someone in the pub had been at my reading and she thought that my manner and voice were great and she loved (as everyone seems to) the piece where I micro-waved mice for the crows. I might go back to town tomorrow because of the farmer's market. I like sitting there, next to Ronnie (this early he's only selling bread, jams, and eggs), and watching people. He knows everyone, so people stop by, and he is a master of bullshit. No mean degree. Mackletree is canopied, and parts of the driveway are in deep shade. Sometimes I feel like I'm in tune, other times not so much.