Man Eater

Honor thy roots and thy ancestors.

Just sat down with a bowl of steamed broccoli—drizzled with olive oil, sprinkled with sea salt—at 7:28 PM. Today was a doozy. My whole body is vibrating from operating a brush hog for about as many hours as it takes me to run thirty miles, give or take one hour depending on the nature of the terrain. The sun was downright bellicose. No matter how much water I poured into myself, none came back out. In the nomenclature of working folks, a brush hog is what is called a man-eater. Now it doesn’t literally eat a guy, but it will do a number on him. On a job site, you will, if you are working folk, eventually hear the term.

“Billy.”

“Boss?”

“Take that yonder man-eater up the backside and give it hell.”

“On it, Boss.”

I’m a tad spent due to wrestling with said man-eater, but progress was made—old dubious progress. Dubious because with the man-eater, I took what was a meadow of native grasses and wildflowers and made it into a lawn of sorts. That pained me, but at least I didn’t have to rip out the vegetation to put in a chemical-laden layer of hideous sod. I just had to mow a few acres for fuel mitigation, fire being a major concern in arid country, especially for these clients, who were burned once and are, understandably, not pining to lose another home to wildfire.

So the deed is done, though it made a mule out of me and I questioned, as I always do, whether or not I am intelligent or just earnest. At the moment I’m leaning toward earnest. But it was not a bad day. No day when a man possesses a sense of purpose is a bad day. I saw some white-tailed deer fawns and some gorgeous, dominating, evanescent summer thunderheads. Because this is Montana, I saw big mountains capped with snow, some jagged, some round. This is always the primary difference between my old life in the Adirondacks/New England and here: I can see forever, and in each direction, the horizon is typically a showstopper.

Strong-arming the man-eater, I thought a lot about my native home back east in the Adirondacks and in New England. I came up with a dad and a grandfather who themselves strong-armed man-eaters, so all day while I was chewing through a meadow, being jostled around, watching the knobby tires of the brush hog spin out on the steep hillsides, I pictured my dad and my grandfather doing the same damn thing five, ten, thirty years ago, mowing whole fields grown over in sumac and goldenrod and raspberry and the dreaded buckthorn, all good beings for sure, but not the best for horse pasture.

There was even a soothing sound, heard through my earmuffs, of chirping crickets, a trick of the ears since it was coming from the machine, which wasn’t chirping, yet in that playful way of acoustics, that is what I heard while handling it. Crickets always make me think of home too, of the long ago, of a life left behind. I used to hear them as a kid coming up on a bacon-and-butter farm in the Champlain foothills, where these days there aren’t many farms, just downstaters with second homes commandeering nice views of a world they will never really love the way someone who works with that world loves it.

I passed at least six hours today in this fashion, engrossed in the errand, trying to do my best in a tough situation, thinking of home, of my ancestors living and dead, thinking of crickets and milkweeds wet with morning dew and festooned with the webs of orb weaver spiders. It’s been this way for me for a long, long time. I’ll be doing things in the here and now, looking to all the planet like I’m a man married to the present, but on the inside I’m a time traveler. I guess it is a form of affection as much as it is a form of remembrance of things past, the only way I know how to honor my roots and my connection to a faraway place and a bygone time and to men like my dad who is still, at 71, grinding stumps and cutting firewood and man-eatering and loving the world through physical labor.

People often see in me an indomitable spirit who perseveres and does what needs doing until the doing is done, but what they don’t see is where I learned the indomitableness and the perseverance. I learned by bearing witness, and though I’m more than two-thousand miles away from where I began in this life, I can’t ever shake the sensation that they are with me. I mean home. I mean men like my dad and my grandfather. Some days I’m just proud to be a working man come from working men.

If you’ve run a man-eater, then you know it shakes you up. There are tolls to doing hard things. Soreness is one of them. Fatigue is another. Occasionally, when you are fatigued, so much of what is now blurs with what has been. The past slides into the present, and the present into the past. You think of others. You think of how long they will last, and what it could possibly mean to keep going without them, to keep working how they showed you. Then you must follow the thread, the way poet William Stafford said to:

The Way It Is

There's a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see. 
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt 
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread. 

Alright, then.