The weather here at Falling Downs has cooled out a bit. I'm thinking it might be a good day to tackle the wood situation. Been putting that off.
We pretty much try to heat with wood here. In theory it's more economical than the alternatives, and when you've got a 15 acre woodlot on your property it seems an obvious choice. I try to avoid getting into the math of the equation, because when I do, the further I go, the more I have my doubts. In four years here I'm on my third chainsaw. That ain't cheap. There's the gas, there's the the labour, there's the truck. If you added it all up it probably would come down to what kind of value you put on your labour. If you're just gonna be watching TV all day anyway, you can't really put much value on that.
I think I'll take another crack at that big dead elm on the fenceline behind the house. Started on it last summer. It's one of the bigger trees I've tried my hand at. She's got to be a good forty or fifty feet high, maybe two feet in diameter where I'm cutting. I made a good start on it and then I started having second thoughts. By then I'd had enough experience at tree-falling to have at least a bit of appreciation for the unpredictability of the operation. You think she's going to fall to the south; it goes north. You're three quarters through and it starts to lean, pinching your saw. Then you're dinking around with wedges and ropes and the the tree is defying all known laws of physics and tilting over at the queerest of angles and the saw is still stuck in there and finally, with a shudder and a groan she comes crashing down and that's when you realize if you're gonna pull down a forty foot tree with your truck the rope should be at least forty-one feet long.
Less than a couple of hundred years ago the fields on either side of the fenceline would have been entirely forested. This area, and virtually all of southern Ontario for that matter, would have been forest as far as the eye could see. In these parts the forests and the shores around the Bruce Peninsula were the home of the Ojibway people.
There's an old joke that still comes around once in awhile; there's a dejected looking white guy standing in front of his car, hood up, steam rising. A truck-load of Indians pulls up, four in the front seat, eight in the back. Whatsamatter buddy? Piston broke. Pissed and broke? Climb aboard, brother!
Speaking as an occasionally pissed and usually broke white guy, I think our native brothers get a bad rap. (and wouldn't the history of how we label our native brothers, the journey from "Indian" to "native" to "aboriginal" and back again, be a nice way to graph the relative weight of the white man's burden across time? ) It's a comforting fable, though, the fable of the lazy drunken Indian. It lets us overlook the fact that here in the most privileged nation on earth, the descendants of the people we stole the land from live in conditions we generally associate with failed states in the third world.
Whether it makes sense to heat with wood ultimately boils down to what price you put on your labour. If I were to assign a minimum wage value to my tree-falling hours I think I'd be around the same cost as heating with oil. Since nobody pays me minimum wage to watch TV, I figure I'm ahead of the game.
When I lived on the east coast there was a move afoot to rename one of the streets in Saint John, I think it was Pitt street. Something to do with the historical connection between the name Pitt and an episode in our history wherein the white folks were deliberately giving the natives blankets infected with small-pox. Early germ warfare, if you will. I was against the renaming. There is much that is shameful in our history. Hiding it makes it easier to forget. Forgetting makes it easier to reinvent yourself as paragon of virtue.
And that is what we Canadian's have managed to do. We are indeed the most virtuous nation on earth, aren't we?
What genocide?
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