The Woodsmen

One of my favorite card games as a kid was Authors.

Their distinguished names, handsome faces and classic titles sparked my imagination, but I never made time to spend with these masters; until now. Thanks to LibriVox, many of these great works of fiction are available as free audiobooks and that suits me to a “T”; I’m like a kid in a candy store!

With so many sweet treats to choose from, where do you start? I recently picked The Last Of The Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper and it was riveting. Chingachgook, the chief of the Sagamore, his son Uncas and the scout known as Hawkeye are depicted as extraordinary woodsmen and deeply spiritual beings. To them the physical body was a temporary home for their spirit; a vehicle through which they could express their oneness with Nature’s God.

Yesterday we got a break from the deep freeze and I took advantage of the benign weather to continue cutting along the trail that passes through the Buckthorn Alley. Below, I look north, east and southeast from the spot where we left off last time.

A video tour of the same.

It was partly sunny in the morning and relatively balmy all day. John and Sue Hrobar stopped to visit and John stoked the fires I made with freshly cut brush. Ben Johnson joined us later in the afternoon and added fuel to the fire as well. I got a lot cut and I think we might be near the halfway point to sweeping the alley clean. Here are the same three perspectives shown above.

Pati joined Ben and I and we visited campsites #334 & #335 at Ottawa Lake to see if the brush piles I had made there were ready for burning. I was very pleased to see that campers are taking advantage of the firewood! At the rate they are going, all of the brush and log piles will soon be gone.

We returned to The Springs for a little sight seeing…

… and we heard the buzz of a chainsaw beyond the south end of the loop trail. It was our old friend Carl Baumann harvesting firewood from a huge red oak that had fallen down this past year.