Red Ox

Sfted 0x by John D. Douglas I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go. Theodore Roethke's "The Waking," the first tercet of the villanelle. The afternoon I hired on, the gnarled foreman told me to wear high topped boots and to bring a pair of work gloves and to be in the parking lot of the main station at five in the morning. So I bought a pair of leather work gloves but wore my old boots, ones already broken in. We met shortly before daybreak, loaded into panel trucks, huddled up like cold cattle, and headed for the woods. Powerlines cut strictly across country. Up hills, across glades, through thick timber , in and out of swamps, over ravines, canebrakes and patches of red clover, cutting through stands of evergreen, beech and oak groves, pine and poplar clumps. Powerlines belong to no particular land or sky. Most of the black wire, under which we cut a wide path, ankle-clean, were triple utility lines with ten feet of space 29 between each strand. On the margins we cleaned a twenty-foot belt, making a forty-foot swath. There were two crews: brushhooks and axes. New men were given brushhooks , with hickory handles worn slick with use, about four feet long. The blade, sharp on both sides, rose like the tip of a quarter moon. And the first chore each day was to whet one's blade. A sharp blade required less swinging, chopped evenly. A dull blade wouldn't dig in. Bounced. It wasn't much fun dodging blades and snakes. And there were plenty of both. Especially snakes. Not only live ones but man-made ones. The foreman, his face sunk-in like dented corn, was forever setting traps for the new boys. Just like old-timers always do. Old corn-face would sneak up behind a new boy, gouge him above the boot, and yell, "Snake!" And when he wasn't doing that, he was sneaking up behind and goosing you with a stick. Afterwards, he'd reload his jaw with Red Ox, smile and spit a dark stream of amber, with a few flecks of leaf, indicating he was chewing hard and content. One morning he caught me from behind , unawares, and scared me about half witless ; and I asked him why he went around doing such stupid-assed things. He just looked struck with sleep and said, "Boy, that's the best way to learn." In the summer woods, dense with leaves, there are real snakes too. And when we found one, there were always more. Snakes mingle in pairs, packs and dens. There a week, I was on a constant lookout. I was forever wary of tromping on a copperhead, rattlesnake or yellow jackets. One works in the woods, with his eyes open, trying to stay off a poison spoon. It wasn't long, though, before the foreman found out that I could use an axe, having split kindling for Mom's cookstove , having cut starter-logs for the furnace. And I learned early on that it was one thing to look the part of an axeman , big and burly; it was another thing altogether to use one; to know which side of an oak to stand on when severing a limb, how wide the "V" ought to be, depending on the width of the log, and to know where to notch the log to avoid knots and to make the piece come out so that two men could handle it easily. It was plain to see whether one could hit his mark twice in a row. And one could tell more than a little by the size of the first chip. Even though I was one of the smallest on the crew, the axe and I became best friends. There's a sweet ring of axe on wood. There's something pure about hard work outdoors: the smell of fresh-axed cedar, the mystic color of the heart of a big black oak, the sight of an axe sunk deep in poplar, and the...