ACTUALLY I would not, though everybody seems to want to send them to me for some reason. Not the everybodies of my acquaintance, whose company I enjoy. It’s the commercial everybodies who want permission to push me around. I always say, no, I sincerely prefer that you don’t. So piss off.
The last three months scooted right by, did you notice? I already miss the snow, what little we had.
I took down some red maples in the woods behind the kids’ house on the west side of town. One was rotted at the base and leaning toward the garage, so that had to go.
And I finally got around to harvesting the stump of that big oak I’ve been bucking into rounds and splitting with an ax for years now. That was quite a tree. We got winters & winters of firewood out of it.
All from an acorn sprouted in the late 19th century.
This whole rack came out of the stump. It seemed a shame to let it rot away, which is what I had done for, I don’t know, it must be five years anyway.
It was a line tree way back when. Found wire in the center of it.
I felled its storm-damaged twin more than 30 years ago. Found wire in that one, too.
So that’s two big oaks down, we have only this one left now. Happily it’s the best tree the house came with when we bought it in ’86.
Here’s 14 seconds of me walking the saw around the stump.
Finished product: an oak dance floor for the groundhogs.
A navigation problem I was having off road has been resolved. Finally figured out what I was doing wrong in managing my GPX files.
Now I’m running the Garmin in tandem with the Gaia app on my old iPhone: so I’ve got a zoomed-out picture of the track on the Garmin and the zoomed-in view on the phone.
The latter follows my location via satellite, keeps me in the center of the screen. The Garmin won’t, hence its usefulness for the big picture only.
With this combination I was able to navigate the Rhode Island and Connecticut sections of a rural route to Vermont.
Rode it several times on cold winter days in February and March. It was fun to go ripping around in the dirt. It’s mostly third-gear stand-up riding.
In closing, because that’s the way he would want it, I’ll say a word about a friend of mine from Ohio, Chris Eck, who came to the end of his journey this week, on Wednesday. He was 56.
On my way to the Arctic in 2019 I stopped and saw Chris in Akron. He treated me to a wood-fired pizza in town, and good conversation. Terrific guy. A real gentleman. A gentle giant.
Chris was diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer over the winter, in November. He thought it likely to make quick work of him. But when the disease initially responded to chemo he readjusted his view of the horizon and thought he might have at least a little time left to enjoy a Porsche he’d been lusting after. So he bought it.
He sent me this pic from the showroom.
The last time we corresponded, around the end of January, he was feeling as if things could go either way for him in the short term. He was private about it, hadn’t said anything on social media because he didn’t want his facebook page turning into a cancer blog.
Sharing it on FB means informing all of my co-workers, reporters I work with, people who will overreact with emotion and smothering, and lots of awkward exchanges, like 50 people from high school saying “You’ve got this!” just weeks before my obit runs.
About two weeks later, February 4, Chris had a change of heart and told his FB friends he had been diagnosed. He asked them not to write to him there but to be in touch privately if they wanted to.
Three weeks later he posted again, the briefest of follow-ups: “It’ll get me eventually but probably not this week. Thanks to all of you who reached out after my last update. I feel surrounded by love.”
Chris told me his diagnosis on January 24, after he read this update on my lymphoma. Though he always wanted the latest news on it, I was embarrassed that my mickey mouse situation was on his radar.
“What I’d give to say ‘see you in 90 days’ to any doctor,” he said.
Lest I give you the impression all we talked about was cancer, no, it was mostly cars, actually. Chris raced a Miata in recent years. He’d been into British racing in his youth, had piloted, among others, a red ’59 TR3 and a Bugeye Sprite. Little cars for a big man. He was hoping to get out on the track in July were he to live that long.
We did talk about wills, I remember that. About putting your assets in a trust. I did it years ago (the motorcycling, you know), Chris only recently. He got such a kick out of the fact that you can name your trust anything you like. He named his The Boating Accident Trust. I thought that was hilarious.
Chris lost quite a lot of weight over the course of his illness. Not a healthy loss; he called it a wasting. When he sent me this selfie in January he wrote, “I miss my chins.”
Because Ohio doesn’t list weight anymore on drivers licenses, Chris said he was going to add his new weight to his license with a sharpie. Funny guy, always. A real delight.
He ended the email thus:
And yes, please do share with Pam and I’ll keep you posted as we get closer to being “unable to tell the dancer from the dance.” Or perhaps farther away from it. Who knows what this looks like, but I hope to make fun of all of it, regardless of where it goes or ends.
It was Pam who told me Chris was gone. We didn’t know until a day after the fact, Thursday. One of his friends had posted it.
Chris was a good writer. Read his obit here, if you like. Anybody who knew Chris will have no doubt as to its authorship.
Live life out there today, all! As Chris liked to say, crediting Warren Zevon: “Enjoy every sandwich.”
Tony DePaul, April 27, 2024, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
Hello Tony,
Your posts are very unique and very informative at the same time. You could have run a photography blog itself. As usual, more stunning images of mother nature.
By the way, how many days/weeks it took to arrange those woods? 🙂
Sagnik
Thank you, Sagnik, but those images are just snapshots with the iPhone I’m bound to break one of these days. It usually takes a close call, then I finally remember to take it out of my pocket and set it down someplace safe.
I wasn’t there all that long. Maybe three days? The firewood shown in the photos is just the beginnings of it.
Many thanks for following my occasional scribblings here.
Howdy Tony. Beautiful tribute to Chris. He was an incredibly kind human. Thank you.
Yeah, good guy. He lived successfully in that others will miss him. All other measures of meaning are bogus.
Hello from chilly Maine and love to the fam! Except for not being pink and having a beard…you’re a lot like the Energizer Bunny. Impressive Tony!
So sorry to read about your friend, but smiles for all the good memories you shared.
Thanks, Donna. Hi to Tom & family.
Come and see us when you’re here in RI.
Not much to say. Chris was a part of the circle of online enthusiasts I communed with over decades. Never met in person, as is the case in most cases. I took note of his rather low key post on FB and did not read the tea leaves very well. And then he left. We all do. And for some, the runway is getting short. More hugs and reveling in being here with others seems to be the thing to focus on.
Very true, my friend. We’re so busy we forget that. Crabby Karl Kraus was on to something with his riff on you only live once: “You don’t even live once.”
My sympathy on the loss of your friend Chris. 56 is way too young, but it sounds like he had a very good life.
That he did, Ellie. Thanks so much for reading.
Leaving in a Porsche? The man definitely has style and humor.
Something poetic about you being a woodsman these days, life drifting backward from being a man of the pen and paper to a wrangler of chainsaws and the mighty oak. Actually Hemingwayish, Old Man and the Oak.
I definitely feel the part! About two full days in the woods is good, then I need a day off. Never did when I was 25 but who does at that age?
While dropping those maple trees I discovered a bunch of oak logs on the ground in the woods behind the neighbor’s house. The guy had a contractor in to drop them but he didn’t want equipment driving over his septic system, so there the trees lie. With his permission, I sawed up eight or ten logs into 30-inch rounds and peevee’d them 140 feet through the woods to my woodpile behind the kids’ house. That was a workout! I took a few pics, maybe I’ll post them next time.
There are four more nice logs on the ground, biggest one is about 3′ at the base. I told the guy I’ll come get them next winter when there’s snow on the ground. It’ll be easier to sled the rounds out on a quarter-sheet of plywood.
Great to hear from you – I have missed your musings. Also happy to see you on the KLR again (I think that’s the KLR). We are riding to Alaska/Dawson in June and Colorado/Moab in September. Join us if you can.
Hello, Robert. Thanks for reading.
It’s a KLR without the water pump: DR-650.
Thanks for the invite. Is the whole crew outward bound? Steve, Mitch, etc…?
Yes, the usual suspects.
Hey Tony,
It’s always good to read your thoughts on life, wood, and motorcycles, in no specific order. I am very pleased you resolved the gps issues; I wound up mirroring your set-up, though I hadn’t thought to do a zoom-out on the Garmin. We took a 175-mile ride (three of us) and I ran both units for most of the ride. I actually realized that I have not been using anywhere near the full extent of the Garmin features available.
Thank you for sharing your grief for Chris; we would all do well to be able to find humor about life in the way that he did (at least, I would like to be able to “lighten-up”). I hope that your health continues to be manageable for you and your family.
One more thing: I was visiting with my Mom last night and we wound up watching “The Green Mile”, if you’ve never seen it, I highly recommend it.
I have seen it, many years ago. Stephen King.
Farmer Dave here, BTW, was Stephen King’s roommate at the University of Maine at Orono, if I remember correctly. Keep following that thread and eventually you get to Kevin Bacon.
You can tell a lot about a person from their friends. Although I never met Chris in person, I do know a lot of his friends…. great people all. “Enjoy every sandwich,” indeed.
And every wood-fired pizza.
Did you count the rings on the Oak stump?
And speaking of trees, what’s the deal with all these undertakers offering to sell you a tree these days?
lol… if this is a composting thing, I defer to Farmer Dave! The rings go back to the 1870s or so.
Hi to Jeanne.
Don’t really have much to say on this one…
m
Hi, Michael. Funny, I thought about you this week when I sent my King Features editor a note about how that Sunday strip, the one that used the phrase “on the floor by the door,” was a play on words to your attention, your movie The Door in the Floor. I guess she must have been amused, she hasn’t fired me yet.
I’ve often wondered what people thought when felling trees. Last winter, several trees here were felled by a professional tree guy. I’m sure he didn’t even think about the life of the tree he took down, (although I didn’t ask). But your musings about that oak growing from an acorn in the late 19th century struck me with surprise and awe. Gratitude for that! Behold the stash it left you in the end.
Hi, Denise. Always a pleasure to hear from you. I counted the rings on that tree back to the neighborhood of 1870.
Here’s a thing about our friend Johnny Danger that Pam thought I should mention in the blog. Which I didn’t, but will here: when my friend Chris passed, and before I knew he had, Danger appeared in my dreams that night. First time that’s ever happened.
Pam thinks it means something. Me, oh, I don’t know. My philosophical stance is to remain ever aware of what I don’t know. It’s delightful to think there might be a mystery to it all, and maybe there is, but I think my inclinations are more Occam than Pascal, more razor than wager. Don’t like to make too much of what is likely a coincidence.
Hello Denise,
As a former full-time, and now part-time arborist/tree-guy, we do sometimes wax philosophically about the trees we’re felling, and even wish that we didn’t have to knock down every tree that someone found inconvenient or threatening. But, I think Tony can offer something more eloquent.
Will
I know 0.5 percent of what Will knows about trees, Denise. All I knew about this one is that it was dropping limbs as big as trees in their own right. I cut up one of them and just a few weeks later another fell right where I had been working, soooo… I love ya, big oak, but your time’s up.
Thanks Will! I’m so pleased to hear that. As a tree hugger, Earth mama, your words put me at ease. 🤗
That’s a nice send off for Chris, Tony. You write well.
I’m getting my monthly cancer infusion on Monday.
“See you in 90 Days”.
You and Jennifer crossed my mind at least three times this week, bud.