Make a Major Improvement to the Path

October 12, 2010.  Tuesday.

Situation:  Work this afternoon, get home about 3:30.  When I pull up in the car, I see Mway on the sidewalk, and she comes over to sniff me when I open the door.  As I get out of the car, she runs back to the sidewalk to stare at me, making her squeaking sound.  She follows me to the door, stopping once to stretch her legs.  When I get inside, Moi is sitting at the kitchen table: “Did you say you saw a big black-and-white cat the other day,” she asks me.  I nod. “Well, I saw it today,” she goes on, “It was getting ready to pounce on one of the chickens.  I sicced Mway on it, and she chased it all the way into the back acre, and it finally ran up into one of the neighbor’s yards.  It’s a big cat.”  “Well, that’s good,” I address Mway, “You did something useful today.”

State of the Path:  Mway follows me upstairs as I’m going to the bedroom to put on my walking clothes, and she stands at the door as I put on my gloves and safari helmet.  Next to the outbuilding, I see our wheelbarrow turned upside down.  For years I’ve kept the wheelbarrow in an outbuilding when it wasn’t being used, but some time ago Moi put some posts for her new wigwam in it and it’s been sitting outside ever since.  She finally took the posts out of it.  Its underside looks pretty rusty, and I poke it with my walking stick, half-fearing the stick will plunge through the rust.  I think to myself I’d like to put the wheelbarrow in the big outbuilding, but the building is so cluttered right now, I’d have to move stuff around and I think “Some other time.”  I stop near the pig pen to look at a giant pokeweed growing out of some old logs. Its stalks, now bent with age, are an otherworldly pink.  As I’m looking at it, Mway wanders into the pig pen.  I think I hear something like a branch snap behind me, but see nothing.  I start to go down the side path, but then I remember I want to drag the planks from the front porch down to the feed channel after our walk, and figure I’ll conserve my energy and just stay on the main path.  Mway soon catches up with me.  Coming into bug land, I notice that the black walnuts along the creek have lost pretty much all their leaves.  The locust trees, which have been losing leaves, don’t seem to have turned any color, just a dull green.  The pin oaks, which if I remember correctly usually turn bright red in the fall, are only turning partially red at the bottoms of their crowns; at the tops, they’re simply turning brown.  All along the walk, I notice it’s getting harder to find a goldenrod stalk with a bright yellow spike of flowers.

State of the Creek:  Mway goes into the creek at the tree stand.  The water is flowing gently.  A frog dives into the pool at the log jam, another plops into the water farther downstream.  A lot of lady’s thumb, which must have been underwater a week or so ago, is now sticking out of the stream.  When I stop walking on the leaves, I can just hear the water faintly gurgling over the rocks.

The Fetch:  Up at the clearing, I take my stance in another section of the wedge of goldenrod because the area where I had been standing is now well-trampled down.  I pitch the birch branch down the path, but when Mway brings the stick back she drops it short of the goldenrod I’m standing in, and I see that I’ll have to start trampling it down myself.  I alternate tossing the stick down the path and toward the opposite end of the clearing, slightly into a patch of fuzzy white goldenrod in front of the sumacs.  Eventually Mway starts spinning around in the goldenrod when she brings the stick back and contributes to trampling it down.  When we get back to the house, for some reason Moi is at the back door opening it, and she is amused to see that Mway has dropped the birch branch right in front of the bench, where I like to keep it between walks.

Addendum:  After I finish writing this, I immediately go downstairs and ask Moi where I can find a crowbar.  She says there’s one in the outbuilding.  Moi must have let Mway back outside: when she sees me she starts dashing around the yard.  “No, we’re not going for another walk,” I tell her.  I find the crowbar.  It’s rusted, but it’s solid.  I shuffle some things around in the outbuilding and manage to squeeze the wheelbarrow inside, then I go to the front yard.  The one plank looks pretty rotted, but the other, a 2 by 10 about 8 feet long, looks like it would hold some weight.  There are about twenty nails in it, about six of which are six-inch spikes.  I manage to claw out a few nails, almost injuring myself on one when the crowbar slips and hits my knee.  I go inside to ask Moi where I can find a hammer. Back outside, I manage to pound some of the nails back through the wood and claw them out.  Most of them I end up pounding edgewise into the wood; the spikes are rusted and break apart when I whack them from the side.  The plank has a notch on either end.  I pick up one end and start dragging it down the path along the summer house, the quickest way to the feed channel.  The trailing end digs a little furrow in the ground, of very black soil.  Burrs from some burdock attach themselves to my shirt.  Below the summer house, in the grassy lane, I spot a puffball, chicken-pecked it looks like (Moi later tells me this is the one she spotted before).  When I get to the field, as I fear, there’s no longer a path there (I haven’t walked this way all summer).  Because it’s the time of year when hornets build their nests, I worry about plunging through the weeds, besides their being thick enough to make the way difficult.  I go to the outbuilding to get clippers, snip the bothersome burdock on my way back, then hunker down to begin cutting down goldrenrod.  I can’t tell at all where the path once was, but I aim for the space between a cedar bush and two small bare black walnuts, about 20 yards ahead of me.  I run into a honeysuckle and a dead multiflora.   At the cedar, I see the Russian olive bushes just below the strawberry patch and realize I have to angle toward them.  Eventually the goldenrod becomes sparser and I’m mostly clipping stalks of poison ivy.  I come upon, hard to believe, one heal-all, then the juncture to the clearing and the main path comes into sight.  I go back to get the plank where I dropped it, when I see Moi up in the yard walking towards the chicken coop, and I think “why the hell am I trying to drag this all by myself?”  When I call out to her, she agrees to give me a hand.  We each grab an end of the plank, and Mway follows us down.  Beyond the ridge, Moi scolds me for stepping on the evergreen sapling she told me always to watch out for.  At the feed channel, I have to step carefully down the ditch and up the other side, grabbing hold of the honeysuckle, until the plank straddles it.  When we set it down, the notches at either end cause it to flip up on its side.  Moi suggests that if I cut down the honeysuckle, the plank would sit flat over that part of the ditch closer to the creek.  I tell Moi to move the plank toward the skating pond, and when we move it as far over as it can go, it finally sits flat.  Moi immediately walks over it, then back again.  But to get back across the ditch, I step down the footholds, holding onto the plank like a rail.

Second Addendum:  After supper, while we’re sitting in the living room waiting for Moi’s cobbler to finish baking, she reaches under a cabinet and pulls out an all-gray kitten.  She tells me Lenny gave her the cat.  The story goes a timber worker found it in a tree on J_____ Mountain, just inches away from the marauding blade of his chainsaw.  I tell Moi I don’t even want to talk about it.