Trimming, Risking, Exerting, and Learning

I am choosing to call it "management," although I concede that's a debatable point.  Perhaps I have mentioned before in this space that I don't know what I'm doing.  Having resettled our comfortable urban existence out onto 10 acres of rustic, dirt-roaded bliss, I am learning as I go.  My threshold for risk is high; I hate the thought of screwing something up -- especially something as precious as living land.  The result is that I am slow to intervene.  Though I have been twice visited by arborists helping me with identification and interpretation of the flora surrounding us, it still feels like a precarious and near-inscrutable line separating horticultural murder from stewardship of the land.  Who am I, after all, to be powering up my blade trimmer to impose my bucolic aesthetic?

That said, one truth is unimpeachable:  though I had my problems with tomatoes and peppers -- to say nothing of the stillborn brussels sprouts -- certain trees seem to spring up at will.  If those were oaks or maples or redbuds or the like I could hardly be happier.  As it is, the prolific varieties are osage orange and cedar.  The former spawn lecherous branches with thorns along with those prehistoric looking hedge apples; the latter, though evergreen, simply look ragged and have therefore drawn the ire of my lovely bride.  I am convinced that I could whack down every one of them on the property and overnight they would miraculously reappear.

In that confidence, this morning I gassed up the trimmer, positioned the ear covers and safety glasses, and pulled the starter cord.  Together the roaring blade and I improved existing paths, began the clearing of a new one, and then forded the prairie grasses in pursuit of saplings whose generating seeds had exercised the poor judgment of sprouting in inopportune locations.  My field travels eventually took me northward toward the putative spring.  Deep into the woods -- territory I have traversed only a couple of times at the cost of torn clothes and ripped skin -- is a slender waterway of questionable origin.  Deer and who knows what other wildlife have found it by the signs trampled into the area, but it isn't much for human passage.  Threading through the brush only gets the curious to a couple of drop-offs usually exacerbated by muddy terrain that never seems to dry.  That could be evidence of a spring, or it could simply mean that the sun rarely gets all the way to the ground.

I made a beginning; that's about the best I can claim.  Overarching, but low-hanging branches complicated by thrusting saplings made for slow work.  Eventually the trimmer sputtered to silence having thirsted through a full tank of fuel.  And so I began the trudge back to the barn, remembering that this is the constant work of a lifetime -- like trimming fingernails -- not merely a winter morning's exertion.  Another day I will fill the tank and pull the rope and roar my way back into the woods...

...to manage this land we are calling home.