Trimming the Verge
The building site we’d chosen was a tangle. Black locust had taken over — a mass of tall, top-heavy trees that had spent years competing with each other for light, growing spindly and unstable as a result. Below them, dog rose and Japanese honeysuckle had moved in thick. The dog rose thorns were aggressive enough to draw blood; the honeysuckle had wound itself through everything else. Walking the site without catching a thorn or tripping on a vine took real concentration.
That wasn’t a hypothetical problem. One of the first days Myron went in with a borrowed chainsaw, a dog rose cane snapped back and caught him in the eye. He came home with a significant injury. He learned the value of safety goggles the hard way, and I’m not sure he’s been without a pair since.
The Craftsman Lumberjack
We started with what we had: a pair of pruning loppers and a sixteen-inch Sears Craftsman chainsaw, bought new. I still use those loppers. Myron went through a few more chainsaws. Craftsman had a lifetime warranty on their tools at the time, and Myron worked those saws like a hardcore lumberjack. He returned three of them before the store upgraded him to an eighteen-inch model and told him, politely, that this would be the last one. I’ve always said he may have single-handedly put that company out of business.
Local Support
Earlier that year, we’d connected with a local man named Frank who bought and sold standing timber. Frank was a character — always, by his own account, a thousand face cord behind in his firewood business, and always with a story to go with it. But he knew timber, and he was willing to deal. Myron helped Frank harvest timber from our land to offset the cost of our foundation materials. In exchange, Frank let us use his tractor on the building site. It was the first of many arrangements we’d make where work traded for work.
Learning the Land
Still, a lot of the clearing happened by hand. That was slower, harder, and probably exactly what we needed. Walking the site with loppers instead of riding a machine meant we learned it — where the water pooled after a rain, where the sun actually reached the ground, which corners of the property the deer preferred. You don’t get that from a tractor seat.
The Mantle of Stewardship
There’s something particular about clearing land by hand — a satisfaction that’s hard to describe without sounding a little territorial. You work a section, it opens up, and you feel like you’ve actually claimed it. I don’t think that feeling is wrong exactly. But the longer we worked, the more I understood what we’d actually signed up for: not ownership in any simple sense, but stewardship. We could shape the land, manage it, build on it — but the land would keep doing what land does, with or without our plans for it. Michael Pollan described gardening as “a subtle process of give and take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature.” Clearing felt like that too. And working through it helped me see how our house could grow out of that landscape rather than drop onto it like an uninvited and self-important guest.
Accidental Dead Hedge
What to do with all the cleared brush was its own problem. Burning in the middle of a wooded site with dry leaves on the ground wasn’t a good idea, so most of it went into piles at the clearing’s edge or over the bank into the creek valley. As the season went on, we noticed animals had moved into those piles. That settled it — we weren’t going to level somebody’s home just to tidy up. Some of those piles are still there. I’ve since learned that people now build them intentionally; they’re called dead hedges, designed as wildlife habitat. Apparently, we were doing it before it had a name.
By the end of the summer, we had cleared enough space for the house and for the camper that would be our home while we built it. I drove stakes into the ground and strung twine around the footprint where the walls would eventually go. One clear warm night, Myron and I stood in the center of that outlined space and looked straight up into a sky full of stars. The possibilities seemed endless, and we breathed it all in and smiled. We were on our way.