Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [56]
For the finale, Gertie brought out a selection of desserts: persimmon pudding, a mixture of strawberries and peaches, and homemade chocolate chip cookies. I think I ate as much of this course as Harvey did. It was gratifying to partake at the table of a healthy marriage.
After the meal, I was ready for the labor Harvey had promised. I followed him outside to a storage shed, where he grabbed a hatchet and a bow saw. Harvey, I sensed, was brighter than he let on. His clunky good nature was deceptive. Listening closely, one could hear him juxtapose words like “pig barn” with “whereas”; “he don’t” with “materialize.” Other words he slipped in included “conception,” “disregard,” “advocate,” and “acquire.”
“I have to confess,” he admitted. “I am a bookworm.” All through school he pretended to read his assigned texts but concealed pleasure books behind them. Biography, nature, and some fiction were his favorite subjects. “I could sit all day with a book, if it’s something I like.” He explained that he used slang expressions when talking with the locals but upgraded his vocabulary when addressing better-educated people.
We were meandering our way out of the bright midday light down an incline into a Hansel and Gretel wood, quiet and dark and green, with thick cedar trunks beginning to appear in the undergrowth like macabre wooden legs. Crickets chirped softly and occasionally a lone blue jay cackled in the stillness. One gnarled tree by an old tumbledown fence gave out an enormous show of boughs like a witch’s broom turned upside down. After picking our way through scratchy underbrush and murky bogs, we came to a tall, straight cedar. This would make a good pole for the pig barn Harvey planned to build.
He let me watch at first. He took his axe, and in what looked like some sort of karate demonstration, whacked furiously until all the lower branches were chopped into smithereens. Then he set the blade to the side of the trunk and reared back. Chop! Chop! A deep cavity appeared in the side of the tree. He next picked up the bow saw and directed me to hold one end. We placed the blade against the trunk opposite the cavity, and the saw began to move. I couldn’t reciprocate as smoothly as I would have liked. Harvey pushed with a confident ease, but my returns were unsteady and irregular, and the blade frequently seized. Still, since the trunk was not thick, the tree soon began to yaw. With a tremendous “swoooooossSSSHHH!” it crashed through the brush and landed on the ground. A captivating stillness followed.
I took a turn with the axe on the next tree. The first swing went wide of the mark. The second failed to separate the limb. I looked up at Harvey importuningly. “I am a little rough,” I confessed.
“It’s not something you should be ashamed of,” he assured me.
After a few more misses it became apparent we would make much faster progress if I left the hatcheting to him. Despite the cool and darkness and the “help” I was giving him, during the sixth round of hatcheting a stain began to spread from around his suspenders, darkening his blue shirt. “I’m getting wet,” he announced.
“Do you wish you had a chain saw?”
“No. Used to have one. Didn’t like it.” A chain saw would have been as tiring, he explained, but in a different way. It wasn’t the physical exertion so much as the stress from the noise and vibration. After chainsawing for hours at a time when he had lived with his parents in their former progressive Mennonite settlement, he felt “numb all over. And”—he pointed to the bow saw—“when I stop, it stops too.”
There remained a larger question I’d been meaning to ask, one principal puzzle of his beautiful, quiet, and solitary farm. Harvey lived two miles from the nearest Minimite neighbor. Everyone else in the community lived within a stone’s throw of each other. For someone as gregarious as he, wasn’t this a little odd? As we began to lug