Sometimes there is nothing you can do, so you put your hands to whatever is before you.
I recall a small bit of movie seen somewhere long ago, centered on a luxury automobile from the 1930s. In one scene some VIPs were smuggling a fellow over some national border in the trunk. When they had cleared the border, they pulled over to let him out. He was asleep. The occupants of the car were nervous wrecks and asked how he could sleep through such an ordeal. He responded there was nothing else he could do, so he might as well rest for the next leg of his journey.
There is nothing I can do to make myself safer and more prepared for possible nuclear fallout from Japan’s melting reactors. There is nothing I can do to aid either side in the many revolts in the Middle East. There is nothing I can do as the stock markets start to collapse, and food prices soar, and so forth. I’m too poor to take the lowest level of preparations for any of these things. So I’m doing what little is left for me.
The garden is ready, so I have started replacing my trail. Turns out the fire didn’t destroy as much as I had first thought. Three quarters of it still usable, so I have only to cut some 300 yards of new trail to replace what the bulldozer destroyed in putting out the fire. Today I marked some 50 yards of clear path on the new trail, blazed over the past two days.
I’ve learned a lot since starting this project three years ago. In those days it was all machete work, plus a bit of ax swinging. I no longer fight with the honeysuckle vines; I simply run a lawn mower over them when the path is clear of heavier underbrush. Because of the blistering cold temperatures (for Oklahoma) just a few weeks ago, a lot of smaller vegetation can be simply ripped from the ground, up to saplings about 1.5 inches (3.8cm). Anything larger is simply chopped below ground level. Using what the locals call limb loppers can take extra time, but do a much nicer job of breaking down densely spread limbs from all sizes of trees. It makes it easier to toss them aside without creating great unsightly piles of debris next to the trail. In the main, I’m moving much faster than when I first started the project.
It won’t matter if something makes it all futile again. I had no sooner finished the whole thing and used it only a week before the fires started. It matters not. There really isn’t much else I can do right now.
