Two years ago I found an old timer looking to get rid of a gas powered wood chipper, an old school Troy-Bilt Super Tomahawk built in the days before EPA regulations on small engines, and a time that if someone got sucked into a fucking woodchipper, it was of little concern that any court would see it as anything but their own damn fault.
I hardly had a place to put it, but the prospect of free mulch for life was too good to pass up. It was in tip-top condition, clean and not the kind of clean something gets when you try to right quick dress it up for sale, but rather the kind of clean that says it was kept tidy between uses. It fired up on the first pull, had a fresh copper crush washer under the oil plug, and the guy walked me through its habits and necessities. I got it to the spot, dumped a double dose of Sta-bil in the fuel tank, and tarped it up per his suggestion. With so much else to do, I forgot to check in on it, and when the time came a few days ago to start prepping it for work, I was dreading what I might find. I was quite sure I would at the very least need to drain the tank, replace with fresh high test, and go through whatever ritual would be necessary to purge out the old gas, change the oil, and play with the points to get it to go.
Much to my surprise and delight, it came up strong on the second pull, and after a bit of fussing with the engagement lever to get the shredder drum to bump up to speed without choking the engine, I was surprised by the instant success. I scrambled to find something to shove into it, and it promptly sucked into the side chute all ten feet of a 3" limb almost as quick as I could feed it, and shat a neat pile of 1/4" wood chips.
The dirt wizard looked on as I hooted and cackled and threw an armload of dessicated pine sapling tops into the top chute, more mulch appearing at the base of the machine without any sign that the machine even noticed.
It's a heavy bastard, but it does have the deluxe original factory option of a towing bracket to which I have already affixed a kind of handlebar. Over the course of the next few weeks, while the dirt wizard continues to cast "Stomp Terrain" and "Levitate Boulder" on this year's focus areas, I will be trudging along the footpaths and around the campsite to line them with mulch made from the brushpiles I have been strategically stacking for just this purpose.
Speaking of strategically stacking, I was surveying the various granite boulders that are accumulating here and there around the grounds. Glacial erratics, chunks of what is today New York that were dragged over during one Ice Age or another and stuffed down into my holler. The dirt wizard finds them all over the place and tosses them neatly out of the way. They range from the size of a coffee table to the size of a small car, dozens of them, and I can't stop thinking about what I want to do with them. I'd like to use the largest of them to transform the short slope of the terrain leading to the eventual main house site with an enormous granite wall to hold up the low side of a three acre terrace.
Every time one of those big bastards appears from below the surface, my eyes spin like slot machine reels and come up with dollar signs, tongue shooting out to dispense the winnings. Lithics like this are not quite as common as dirt in the high country up here, but my brain is still calibrated to see such things as enormously expensive to procure and place. The geology of my little hollow is such that I have a wealth of them, and with the wizard's power, I can punch far above my weight.
I think a lot, figuratively, about throwing stones into the future as I toil on the acres, skipping stones across the lake of time. When I chop saplings or stack brush, I'm getting them a year or two out, passing the labor back into my own future hands. When the wizard turns a patch of rock and root-ridden dirt into a level, clean terrace of topsoil and I follow behind with walnut trees, I'm pushing a century. A stout little stick frame cabin on concrete piers is two lifetimes, and the eventual big house, steel beams potted into the bedrock and topped with a timberframe, well, that's two hundred years easy. Putting sunshine on these boulders for the first time since wooly mammoths and then stacking them up into a thousands-tons edifice is dreaming on a scale of Mesoamerican architecture.
The war was on the scale of geopolitics, hundreds of millions of people and trillions of dollars spent writing in the sand before a tofan, the scale of effort in outrageous contrast to the laughable impermanence of whatever success might have been plausibly claimed.
Here, I can carry lifetimes and generations on my back and know that what I am cultivating will be good long after my grave is forgotten.