What is Lost

I broke my grandpa’s splittin’ maul today.

It had developed a bit of play. The first tell-tale sign that indicates a handle is about to go. I swung it up over my head using the momentum that it takes to get it in the air to continue over the top and bring it down with the weight of my body behind it. The head sunk deep into the round. As soon as I tried to remove it, I knew it was its last swing. The play was there and two or three rocks back and forth to remove it and the maul just popped right off.

It wasn’t much of a surprise. As these things go, the maul is the important piece, the part that doesn’t go away. The handle, well, that is something that comes and goes. I don’t know for sure, but I would venture a guess that the handle that is no longer attached to the maul was not the original, but one that had replaced one, two, a dozen other handles that this maul had adorned. My grandpa probably broke more splitting maul handles than I have seen. In my life, I’ve broken several. I can’t say I’ve kept track.

What’s a splittin’ maul? Well, it’s a kind of weighted ax. The one in question above is a 6 pounder. Axes are great for certain things, but if you are splitting rounds, a maul works exceptionally better due to that weight. An ax will sink in and get stuck without the momentum to go all the way through. A properly swung and placed maul strike will go right through a round. If you happen to need to split a bunch of firewood, the appropriate tool is a splitting maul.

Unfortunately, most people have never needed to split a bunch of firewood.

Creation is a Destructive Force. Destruction is a Creative Force.

There is a tinge of pain that I’m not entirely sure where it came from.

The macleod comes down over my head and breaks through the crust of dirt. I’m on Webb Hill, alone, and I have just put the first strike into what would become the Kentucky Lucky Chicken Trail. Mostly, I’m excited. I’ve been working on the concept, design and permission on this trail for several years. To finally begin the construction, especially in such a non-descript way, feels right. I’m here to create, to give something to the mountain biking community, something from my soul.

Another swing. The idea feels right, but I can’t help but notice that tinge. It takes me a while to understand why I feel it. As the trail begins to take shape, something that I am proud of, I can’t help but recognize that I have created something but that there is a loss attached to it.

Web Hill has been used for years by mountain bikers on the AMA trail, by hikers coming up the road or from the dozens of user-created trails that grapevine up from the neighborhoods. There is nothing particularly pristine or sacred about the dirt I am moving. The hill itself is almost entirely surrounded by suburban sprawl which is why I was excited to build trail there. A quick 4-mile rip from someone’s backdoor, that’s a win in my book.

And yet, the dirt I was moving had not been disturbed, at least recently. I was removing plants, pushing rocks off the trail, slowly building a tread that would become pounded down by foot and wheel traffic and hopefully exist for a long time. Not until I have the pleasure of seeing my idea come to fruition do I realize what is happening. I am creating by destroying and those two seemingly opposing concepts are so intertwined that they cannot be separated.

In our current situation as humans, we almost always look to what is to be gained without considering what is lost. Anything gained has a loss on the backside that becomes the true cost of the gain.

Convenience is what is gained

I can easily walk over to the dial on the wall, the motion sensor waking up the thermostat and flip it. This would quickly kick on the furnace forcing warmed air into our house and making us comfortable.

Instead, every October, Papa Brinkerhoff and I load up into his truck and head up to the hills. He always has some dead trees or fallen logs scouted that will fill up the trailer. We spend the day felling trees, bucking logs and loading the trailer. He’s never satisfied that the trailer is full until you literally can’t fit anymore wood in it without a pretty good chance of logs coming off the top.

It’s not easy work. We lug a chainsaw around for most of the day and for the other part, we are moving logs. This year, the tree in question was a giant ponderosa pine that required us to saw the logs and then split them into 1/4 or 1/8 pieces that we could actually move. We left my house promptly at 6 am and did not return until almost 5. And that’s just the start of the project.

The next step was to finish splitting all of the giant logs. I usually insist on doing this by hand, but our wood pile location is less than optimal for unloading. We back the trailer up parallel to our brick wall and pass the logs over the top. Seeing that most of the logs we got were still huge, this seemed like a non-starter. The load of wood went to Papa Brinkerhoff’s compound where it was dumped. He then used his hydraulic splitter to get most of it into reasonably sized logs before reloading the trailer and coming back over. At which point, we had to unload the wood over the brick wall.

Even after using the hydraulic splitter, the logs are mostly still too big to fit in our fireplace. So every day, we swing the maul splitting logs into kindling and/or smaller pieces to keep the fire going.

It’s a lot of fucking work to just keep your house semi-warm.

What is Lost

It’s 5 am and my alarm goes off like it does every day. I stop the buzzing from my watch on my arm by hitting the button. The house is cold. I roll out of bed being sure to put my slippers on to protect my feet from the frigid floors. After getting the coffee started, I walk out into the cold, split some kindling and then hurriedly get back inside. The house is cold, but the outside is even colder.

I drop the kindling next to the fireplace and then rub my hands together trying to warm them up. I grab the needed supplies and then sit in front of the fireplace to get it started. Kindling is carefully placed with some paper surrounding it and then lit. There is a sense of satisfaction intertwined with the starting of a fire. It’s as deep of an emotion as one can feel going back to when fire was started by rubbing sticks together taking an even bigger amount of effort to semi-warm oneself.

Soon the fire is raging. The automatic fan kicks on pushing the heat being generated by the combusting wood into our house. I stand as close as I dare warming my backside as the puppies gather around my feet jockeying for position. Then Mama Bear pulls up her reading chair pushing and prying the dogs out of the way so she can get her position. By this time, I’m more or less warm and scoot back to my writing chair where I can witness the scene. Four dogs and my wife all huddled together enjoying what could be rejected so quickly with a turn of the dial.

It would be so much nicer if

It is human nature to try to improve on our circumstances.

We’ve slowly engineered our way into a world that, if one so desires, is pretty nice. We don’t have to feel cold or heat. We can use internal combustion engines for all of our mobility needs. The grocery store is well stocked with food that we can store for anywhere to a few days to several years allowing us the certainty of, not only not being hungry, but overindulging ourselves in calories. And yet, many of the moments that give us the greatest joy are when we take a step outside of this engineered bubble and attempt to do things “the old way.”

Simply going for a walk, not only has been overstudied and shown to provide countless benefits to our physical and mental health, but most people, once out walking, truly enjoy the activity. Their head clears, they notice things in their surroundings that they hadn’t noticed before, there’s little pain involved for most and once done they feel a small sense of accomplishment.

Speak to any hunter about why they hunt and they will probably tell you some version of this same thing. It’s a lot of work, but there is something special about harvesting your own meat from the “wilderness.” Maybe it’s a deep connection to the past and our ancestors that had only the one choice. Maybe it’s the fact that the work provides a sense of having done something. Maybe there’s something lost in being able to grab 10 pounds of high-density feeding lot meat whenever you like.

Personally, I believe we’ve over-engineered our way into a comfortable existence where having things be “nicer” has become a detriment to ourselves, our surroundings and our home planet.

I mean, we’ve literally engineered a way to keep ourselves from ever being bored and look at where that has gotten us.

It’s not just about the handle

As the maul sat stuck in the round, I felt a sense of loss for the tool. I knew I could fix it and I also knew full well that my other grandpa’s maul was sitting behind me and while it was on the road to the same end, it was fully functional and would help me finish what I had started.

The gears that turn slowly in my head started to vibrate and then crustily lurch forward. The idea of a maul has been relegated to the few who do what I am doing. A tool that was ubiquitous at one point is often unknown having been lost with the convenience of central air. The use of that tool, the best method of swinging it, the ability to properly place the swing, reading the grain of the round to ensure a good split, all unnecessary with the turn of a dial.

Of course, the maul was invented because someone thought, sure would be nice if we could figure out a way to split this wood easier. I few years ago, while we were getting a load of firewood, my pops mentioned how his grandpa was blown away when they went to get wood one year. They got in a truck, used chainsaws and had a load of wood in a day that would last them throughout the winter. My great grandpa had spent his life using a horse drawn wagon, crosscut saw and several days of work to accomplish the same thing.

I can’t help but think about the millions of small things he would have known and would have been considered common knowledge to him that I have no idea about. I am not a fan of horses and would have no clue how to rig them up, get the wagon ready and drive them to a spot with supplies for a couple of days. I know what a crosscut saw is, but have never used one and I’m sure there is plenty of knowhow in operating a giant blade with another person, placement, method, energy efficiency, etc.

Of course, as far as a I know, my great grandpa never suggested going back to that way of doing things, but he also never saw where we’ve ended up by trying to make things easier. I am sure he would be able to see what has been lost.

Embrace chaos. Seek discomfort.