I came upon this juxtaposition some months ago and then rediscovered it among my photos recently. So here it is for you to contemplate and enjoy.

What would a visitor from a century ago think of contrails do you suppose? It’s a formation in the sky that would not have occurred before jet travel, so it would be something new under the sun for such a time traveler. The moon, of course, is ancient, always present, always in human memory and experience. Old and new. White and blue.

I’ve shown this tiger mast here on the blog before. It hangs on a large white oak tree beside the pine plantation. It’s been there probably an entire decade. I’m not sure why I put it there originally, but before it came to Roundrock it hung on a tree by our fire ring at the other property we had, which we called Fallen Timbers.

Anyway, when I hung it here, I always half hoped that a bird would use it to hide a nest, and I would check it once or twice a year to see if that happened. It never did.

But a recent visit showed me what was using it.

Hornets!

They’re not using it right now, of course; it’s winter. But they obviously used it last summer. Can you imagine walking up to this mask and seeing hornets emerging from its eyes, nose, and mouth! I should hang it by the entrance to keep interlopers away.

I’m amazed at how long this mask has held together. It’s glazed porcelain (I think), and I wouldn’t have expected it to hold up under the weather extremes it’s been subjected to. Yet there it hangs, year after year.

Lovely, isn’t it? This is a bit of limestone I harvested from the south spillway. I had intended this to be my third stepping stone across the ephemeral pond, but that whole idea needs some rethinking.

Instead I decided to transport this chunk o’ limestone to the wall I’m building behind the cabin. That’s no small feat for someone of my limited equipment and motivation, but I thought I ought to try, so I did.

The dam is supposed to be 200 feet across, which I’ll take as correct. Based on that, I had to move this rock about 500 feet from its resting place to the wall. Fortunately, I had brought the two-wheeler on this trip to the woods, and that made all the difference.

You see it above atop the dam. It was a slog getting the slab up the spillway to this point, but it was a comparative walk in the park across the dam.

It’s hard to tell from this photo, but there’s a hill behind that rock. I stopped at this point, having just finished crossing the dam, and took this photo. For some reason I thought a great deal about Sisyphus while I took a little break here. But I persevered and lugged the two-wheeler with its load up the hill. At one point we even leashed Flike to it, and he helped me pull. I think he made a difference, but he was an erratic force, helping and hindering in equal measure. He was willing, but he was unfocused. But I managed to get the rock to the spot behind the cabin where the wall is rising.

Here is the rock in place. Sorry about the washed out look of this photo, but I was more or less shooting into the sun. Notice how far away from the cabin I’ve built my firebreak wall. I hope it makes a difference when the time comes. (Should the time come.)

Here’s an end view of this part of the wall. (I’m working on three separate sections.) The cabin is to the right, and the newest stone is on the far end. Yes, there’s a tree directly in the path of the wall. I don’t know what the engineer was thinking when he put the wall on this line, but he clearly has rocks in his head.

What’s especially worth noting in that last photo is the leaf litter. Notice how there are plenty leaves on the left side of the wall and comparatively few on the right (cabin) side. That suggests to me that my plan is working in two ways. Not only will the wall slow or stop a fire moving in from the left, but it is depriving the right side of having fuel for the fire to continue. I’ve seen this phenomenon beside fallen trees in my forest all over the place. Generally the leaves collect on the uphill side of the log, and uphill in this photo is the left side.

So every time I visit my forest I try to add a couple of rocks to my wall. I suppose I’m nearly a quarter of the way finished, though I’ll probably want to do some chinking and supplementing for a long time to ensure I have a sturdy barrier.

I’m building a wall. You already know that I have a wooden cabin in a forest. And I worry that a ground fire through the woods will someday reach the wooden cabin and make its acquaintance.

I’ve been doing various things to help prevent this meet up. I’ve been clearing the deadfall around the cabin, and I’ve been trimming up the branches on the nearby cedars. (Ground fires are natural and are generally not considered a bad thing as long as they stay out of the tree tops, so removing lower cedar branches helps prevent this.) I’ve also skirted the cabin with a gravel path (though it is only about three feet wide at its narrowest point, which is not enuf I suspect) and built two retaining walls, one behind and one in front of the cabin. In the fall and winter I even rake away the leaves that have gathered against the (wooden) wall of the cabin.

I should say that on the east side of the cabin we have a large gravelled area where we have our fire ring and general outdoor gathering area. It’s probably 40 feet across, and then there is the gravel road. So I think I have enuf fire break on that side of the cabin. And we have cleared a view on the south side of the cabin from the porch to the lake. We only have short grass growing there (if we keep it trimmed) so I don’t see much of a threat from that direction.

But on the east and north sides there is nothing but forest and leaf litter. Generally in this part of the hemisphere, fires spread from west to east since that’s the predominant direction of the wind, so a fire threat is more likely to come from the west.

And so I am building a wall. It won’t be a great wall or a tall wall or a thick wall. I’m just going to stack stones, maybe a foot high and two feet wide at the base and about a hundred feet long, as a sort of fire break. My hope is that any ground fire that crawls through the leaf litter will meet this wall and at least be stalled long enuf for someone to attack it with a rake and try to snuff it. (That would require someone to be present during the ground fire, which isn’t likely, but still . . . ).

The biggest problem I have had with this project is collecting the rocks I need. It’s ironic that in the Ozarks I would have trouble collecting rocks, but I do. The ones I want are all the way over there, and the wall I’m building is all the way over here. I’ve already scoured the immediate area for the rocks it will yield, and while my forest is filled with plenty of suitable ones, getting them where I want them calls for physical effort, which I try to avoid. Plus, I can generally only transport one rock at a time from these distant points (cradled lovingly in my arms), which makes for slow progress. I keep meaning to take the wheelbarrow to some rock rich area and load it then wheel it back to the cabin. It’s a good idea. I may even do that some day.

So next time you’re out at Roundrock, let’s have a rock collecting party, shall we?

I’ve had this afghan for most of my life. In fact, I think I’ve had it for four-fifths of my life. My sweet mother made it for me when I was a wee lad, and it’s stayed with me ever since. (Okay, I think it went off to college with #1 Son, but when it came home, it stayed with me.)

All of the dogs I have ever known and loved (except for my very first dog, Touche) have slept on it. Scout. Precious. Whimsey. Max. Now Queequeg and Flike. Out at the cabin, where the afghan now resides, it’s a favored sleeping place for little Queequeg. On cold sleep-over nights, he prefers sleeping on top of it rather than snuggling under the covers with us.

I’ve made a conscious effort to prevent the Cabin at the End of the Road from becoming a repository of my life’s junk. There have been plenty of cabins and second homes I’ve seen that have accumulated all of the clutter of their owners’ lives: spare furniture, knick-knacks, spare this, and the extra that, decorations too ghastly to display at home, and so on. I don’t want my cabin to become that way. (Besides, we Westerners tend to have too many “things” anyway.) Thus I try to be careful about what makes it to my cabin and what I’ll allow to remain there. This blanket with its many uses and many memories is something that belongs there.

Also, speaking of things worth keeping around for a long time, Happy Birthday, FC!

You don’t know about me without you have read a post by the name of Stepping Stones; but that ain’t no matter. The post was made by Pablo, and he told the truth, mainly.

What you see above is a more recent photo of the stepping stones I’d placed in the ephemeral pond below the dam. What? You don’t see them? There they are. Under the water!

My plan is not working out as well as I had hoped. The water seems to be deeper at some times than at others. (And when it is deeper, it is also wider, which means the normally dry land I would step from might be underwater too.) No doubt the deep times will be when I need to cross, right?

So I’m not sure just what to do. I have a pretty good supply of slabs up the hill, but I may need to break them up to make them manageable sizes. And then what? Put them on top of these? Will they be wobbly? Will they tip me into the water when I try to cross? Will I come to see them after several weeks away and find them unseated by rushing water or mischievous critters? Is this what I get for trying to civilize the forest?

Whatever happens, I expect I’ll have wet boots. I been there before.

My apologies, Mr. Twain!

I mentioned here recently that #2 son and his lovely wife are now doctors doing their residencies in Portland, Oregon. When we visited most recently, I was impressed with the many crafts and arts practitioners and the many markets where a fellow could find and buy such things. But I didn’t acquire this sign when I was in Portland.

Instead, #2 son and his lovely wife sent me this sign as a holiday gift. A welcome holiday gift, I should add. (The package also included three chocolate bars. Libby asserted that the sign was obviously intended for me and the chocolate was hers alone. I never saw them again.)

On our next trip to the woods, we hung the sign on the cabin, just beside the door, and I took this photo. I posted it in a couple of places, and immediately the conversation began.

“Are those two bears fighting?”

I’m not sure that was the artist’s intent. It almost looks like a football scrimmage, doesn’t it? You could argue that they’re not even bears. It may be that the artist made one of the bears upright so that they didn’t look like a pair of cows. Or maybe they’re actually dogs. Or people in bear suits.

The conversation continues. Feel free to join in.

I’m not sure how well you can tell from this photo, but there is mold beginning to grow on the logs of the Cabin at the End of the Road.

This is the north side of the cabin. It gets no direct sunlight except in high summer when the sun does creep far enuf north to shine back here. I’ve built a retaining wall about four feet behind the cabin (and filled the space between with gravel), and I found the first fall after that, that all of the leaves in the forest like to collect themselves there in the space between the cabin wall and the retaining wall.

My first concern was that I had a fire hazard as a result. All of that dry tinder piled so nicely against a wooden wall. So the first thing I would do when we visited the cabin was get out the rake and rake the leaves away, across the fire ring area, and into the trees beyond. (It was like having chores back in suburbia.) A friend told me of her brother’s house burning to the ground as a result of spontaneous combustion from a similar leaf collection. (I was skeptical of the “spontaneous combustion” explanation, and it was subsequently learned that a nephew had, indeed, flicked a cigarette butt into the area shortly before. Still, Pablo’s phire phobia is well documented here.)

What I’ve found since those phobic phirst days was that the leaves only collect like this during the fall. In recent visits, I haven’t found any leaves collected there. Nor, as I reflect, can I recall finding them in the spring or summer. So my worry can be managed.

But what I did find is what you see above. On one of the occasions when I was raking the leaves away, they were heavy and wet from a recent rain. The result is that spots of mold are forming on the lower logs in the back of the cabin. Grrr!

Do I have anything to worry about? I suppose not. The mold isn’t likely to consumer the logs in my lifetime. (And it would be easy enuf to replace them since they’re not really logs.) And I’m not finding it anywhere else on the north face and certainly not on the east, west, or south. (I am still occasionally finding those mysterious piles of rocks on the cabin porch though. Suggestions?)

The cabin was sprayed with a sealer when it was built, and it’s getting to be time to seal it again ($$$$), but I wonder if I could (or should?) take a rag and some bleach to these few low logs and see if I can arrest the mold growth before I begin resealing.

Is this what they call a First World Problem?

Nothing beats a good pair of work gloves! (Well, okay, a cold beer or two at the end of the day, winning lottery tickets, and maybe one or two other things.)

The pair on the right have been with me for a half dozen years, and they have been trusty and reliable. But the leather on the fingers has worn through, making it hard to handle things like blackberry canes, burning logs, heavy rocks, and sundry insults to the flesh. So with the turn of the new year, Libby gave me a new pair of gloves. (They’re the ones on the left.)

I wear these throughout the year even though they are insulated. In fact, the insulation makes it easier to work with the post driver since the jarring it sends into my bones is softened a bit. They go with me on all of my hikes in the woods and whenever I take up some new project. (There are always new projects to be undertaken at Roundrock.)

When I’m not wearing them, they go in the truck so they’re handy wherever I may wander.

I’m keeping the old pair, at least for now. They still have some life in them, but when it’s time to retire them, I may do what I did with the last pair: wedge them into a branch on a tree. I think the critters made a meal of them. In a few visits, they were gone altogether.

I found this photo in my file and I looked at it for a long time trying to figure out what I was seeing, what I was attempting to capture by taking the picture. A crack in some sandstone ledge? But we have no sandstone ledge a Roundrock. The placement of that wedge of stone on the left? That certainly doesn’t look natural. But why had I taken the picture?

The scattering of limestone gravel finally cleared it up for me. This is a close up of the sandstone steps leading to the shady porch of the cabin. You can see a pretty good shot of them at this post (which I will not be bringing forward since it is a true backfill post to correct some omissions from when I had that hard drive crash long ago). That gravel has been spread around the cabin, and when I realized that, I knew what I was seeing. This photo is a close up of the meeting of the top and middle steps.

Not long after we had the steps installed, some critter began excavating the space under the top one, presumably for a secure place to live. I would pour or shove gravel into the openings each visit (the critter was excavating at the base of the step and at the top where it meets the porch floor), and by the next visit, new excavations were made. I’d wedged that piece of sandstone into the gap to up the stakes.

The excavations have been quiet in recent months, but I suspect that’s due to whatever critter being in hibernation or torpor or stupor. Perhaps in the spring I’ll be back at it again. But I have a nice pile of gravel nearby, so I can play this game for a long time.