Read by Michael Flamel

I’m out in the forest alone—well, I do have my chain saw and beat-up pickup for company. I smell the crisp, fresh air. I bask in the November sun, whose thin light both warms me and reminds me why I’m here. I relax a moment in the still, open quiet of the North Carolina woods.

Then I shatter that silence—by facing my task.

1) Insert ear plugs.
2) Flip ‘On’ switch.
3) Pull choke.
4) Crank.
5) Crank.
6) Crank.
7) Crank.

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

Smoke pours out the side of the saw, a steady shower of chips flies out to the rear, and NOISE roars everywhere.

Chain sawing—BRRRRRRRRRRRR!—seems worlds away from gardening, that peaceful pastime with plants. But both activities have always felt similar to me. Noise or not, both give me a deep sense of . . . something.

What could it be?

BRRRRRRRRRRRR! . . . well, both offer a chance to get outdoors and work with plants, something we modern people have precious little of these days.

No, the truth cuts deeper than that. Both acts are forms of harvesting—using death to maintain life. Now that may be more obvious when you lay the last back cut to a hundred-foot oak and—Timber!—watch it fall and crash, shaking the ground and leaving a new hole to the sky. But take a sharp kitchen knife out back and—Whick!—decapitate a blue-green broccoli before all those buds ever get a chance to bloom. There’s a difference of scale here, but not of kind.

Still, dropping a towering tree onto the saplings below, carving it into foot-and-a-half, hard-to-lift rounds, then busting those open with a splitting maul—that is bigger and more blunt than snipping a bouquet of cut flowers or picking a few leaves of greens.

But the larger deed brings home a lesson as well as stovewood. In a garden, I, myopic human, sometimes give myself the credit. Oh, I shouldn’t: I didn’t grow that poppy or pepper. I’m not the force that makes the seed sprout and mature, of course not. But because I nurse those plants along with water, fertilizer, and care, sometimes I think I really am responsible.

But finding a dead hardwood in the forest, then wearing myself out breaking it up and loading truckload after truckload of stiff, split billets—I can’t do that for a day and have any illusions that I’m anything but the delivery boy. I can harvest a plant, large or small, but I can’t create it. Only a force much more powerful than me does that.

And some days it takes a big tree to remind me of it. ❖