Burning brush piles in the rain (what fossil fuels?)

The phrase on my mind today was “if only they could see me now.” Where was I a year ago today? It’s the third? Coming back from winter break I think, dragging my body back into the combine, pondering the feasibility of a state mandated education. Today, I spent half the day felling and bucking oaks with a chainsaw, and we burned enormous brushpiles. It rained most of the day, but a little bit of diesel fuel fixed that problem.
It’s just crazy. Let’s see if I can do a first-person snippet from today…if it doesn’t feel too much like writing a college essay.
Chainsaws are heavy. To let a saw eat into a downed log is a simple matter; the weight of the saw pushes the bar through the wood. But my arms feel too dense to make the face cut. The first cut in felling a tree is a pie-slice wedge, the face cut, guiding the fall of the tree when you make the back cut to release the tension and bring it down. Wielding a 30-pound hunk of roaring metal with enough finesse to cut a pie slice out of a tree takes a lot of huffing, puffing, and stops to check your work. But of course, I’m half-blind and wet, too.
No matter how many times I wipe my goggles, it’s like I get cataracts every time I breathe. A penumbra of mist constantly follows me around; my vision is a field of gray. I glance up at the tree as I cut into it, to check for movement, but all I see are silhouettes. The rain doesn’t make things any easier. I already had to change my gloves, as my leather ones (state issued, fire retardant) got so waterlogged and heavy that they would hold form around the throttle, and the saw would continue to run until I took my hand off of it entirely.
Since the tree is supposed to fall towards that side (based on the lean), it’s totally possible that the tree will settle as you’re cutting. If your saw is in the tree when it starts to lean even a little bit, the tree will trap your bar and no amount of horsepower outside of another saw will be able to free it. Besides cutting your chaps, this is the most embarrassing thing a sawyer can do. But I finally free a wedged slice from the tree. I hit the chain brake, shut off the saw, and stretched a bit.
The final cut is the fun part. One straight slice into the tree, and it falls. I give a final shout to my teammates to let them know a tree’s coming down and start the saw. I think I stop cutting too soon, because all of my trees fall slowly, letting themselves down gently as the stump pops and cracks.
I still think it’s crazy, just to look back at what I did in school (which I think more than ever was horribly implemented, but gives me less grief now that I’m gone), and all the questions I had about my future. Especially last summer, where the amount of energy I spent fretting about getting into AmeriCorps was monumental. Last year’s Sam seems pretty shallow now. Not his fault at all I’d say, just a product of his environment. That goes to say that the school and mainstream adolescent environment in this country is pretty shallow. Sure, in school I learned all about the abstract stuff that will let me build machines to manipulate matter and energy, but I’d say I’ve learned as much this year (and with only half of AmeriCorps done, too) about human life than I have in all of my preceding 18 years combined. The way people interact, the way people live, how the individual relates to society and vice versa.
Well, this is going to turn into a societal rant, so I’m going to stop here. But thus far, 19 year-old Sam is primarily concerned with getting to sleep at a decent hour and knows his place in society.
This is my last full day here at Mendocino, and I’m going to miss the industrial kitchens, giant redwoods, and noisy generators. Tomorrow we head back to Sacramento for a day, and then it’s on to Camp Cedar Glen, about 1.5 hours east of San Diego.