Draggin'

I was back in Salamander's orchard today.

It is hard to make dragging brush sound exciting and it certainly is not photogenic.  But it is what it is:  A job that must be done.  That is reason enough for the work to have dignity.

Nettles are an inch high and the spring peepers were singing this morning.  The temperature has been dropping all day and they stopped singing.  You can click on the picture to embiggen.

Some come up red and some come up green.

I mowed where the pink flags are so I could  spray contact herbicide in preparation for planting replacement trees.  It looked so good I mowed the lane on the right side of the photo.

The big pieces go in a pile to be delivered to the restaurant in Eaton Rapids that wants apple wood to smoke BBQ.

Middle sized pieces get dragged to the swamp.

I wish I had a chipper for the small stuff.  I will probably end up raking it into windrows between the trees and mulch them by covering them  with leaves purloined from city curbside pickup.  The house of one of Salamander's neighbors in the background.

It did not feel like I got a lot done until I compared "before" and "after" pictures.

This is a "before" shot.  I have not started on this lane.

This is the lane I was working on today.  So there is a difference.

I don't have particularly profound thoughts while dragging brush.

I did wonder if any of the people mocking Trump's wall lived in gated communities.  People living in gated communities do not hold the moral high ground when they disparage walls.  The irony is that those gated communities are probably not that hard to breach.

The other thing I wondered about was whether any of the liberals who claim that illegal aliens will simply tunnel beneath the wall have degrees in Marine Biology.  Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute has been capturing the vocalizations of marine mammals since the 1970s.  By the 1980s they were using public domain software and could tell you, based on the subject's flatulence, the species, gender (cis or non-cis) and age of a whale....from 400 knots away.

It is inconceivable that we, in 2017, would not be able to "pick up" the sounds of shovels and picks directly beneath us in the ground.