Marti Leimbach
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Burning wood in March
 
Over the past year we’ve been piling up dead wood in our back field to burn. Seeing our pile of sticks and branches growing with every month must have made our neighbours decide it would be a good idea to add to the collection. I say this because a few weeks ago they chainsawed down the holly trees that were actually on our side of the fence. You would think a fence would serve as a visual reminder of such things as property lines and ownership rights. It would not be outside the realm of imagination to consider that before you took a chainsaw to somebody else’s trees, you might ask. Perhaps our neighbours thought post and stock wire fencing was merely a prop? Or that the trees were violating their right to light?

Hard as it is to imagine, I found these neighbours in our field a few weeks ago hacking down the holly trees and piling the greenery into their own gigantic wood pile, one that had become so large it must have frightened them as they asked me very politely if it would be okay to add the holly to the pile of other drying greenery in our field. It takes guts to destroy a person’s trees and then ask if they would be please be so kind as to burn what was once their personal property, but there you go. You almost have to admire them.

So today, weeks after discovering our holly trees in pieces on the ground thanks to our neighbours, who now have no natural obstruction to interfere with their view over our field, we have had the dubious pleasure of burning the trees. As an American who once lived in Southern California, I will have nothing to do with fire. However, Alastair, my husband who is English and therefore genetically programmed toward pyromania, couldn’t wait to set it all alight. He’s very good at jobs like this. If there is a large amount of something to be destroyed, burned, hacked at or removed to the dump, he’s your man. Don’t ask him to take out garbage or fix plumbing or paint room – none of that is dramatic enough to hold him. But burn an enormous wall of wood on an unseasonably warm night in March, a job that requires petrol and boxes of matches and a small measure of danger? As he flew out the door I could tell he found this great fun, though I did consider it might be the last time I saw the man.

I found him a few hours later out in the field reading a book by Peter Matthiessen called the Snow Leopard which chronicles the author’s 1973 journey through the Himalayas to get a sighting of a snow leopard. By the light of the fire, no longer an inferno but more like a large campfire, he told me how Matthiessen and his companion trekked for weeks, carrying their own food, to see this great cat and how they sought also to see the rarely observed blue mountain sheep that were (according to Alastair) a cross between a goat and a sheep. Okay, nobody believes the goat/sheep thing and I doubt Matthiessen wrote about such a cross, but Alastair was taken by the romantic, rugged beauty of the snow leopard expedition. You could tell he’d love to have done such a thing.

The fire was wonderful. We were warm even as it got darker, the moon now showing in the sky. We could hear the owls, a pair of which call to each other from different ends of the woods. He talked about the snow leopard and how hard Matthiessen tried to track the creature. A few minutes later I asked him where were our sheep. I wouldn’t expect them near the fire but where, exactly, had they gone?

It turned out he let them loose by accident, couldn’t catch them (didn’t try) and they were wandering around somewhere in the night. I can’t help but think that, had they been snow leopards, he’d have pursued them as the holy grail. Had rounding up the sheep required him to pack a rucksack, carry water, buy expensive equipment from a specialty shop, or bury his own waste during a great mission of discovery, he'd have been right on that duty.

But they are only sheep. They require little more than food, water, some basic sheep first aid and the consistent closing of gates. Therefore, he had no idea where they were, nor did he care. “Over there somewhere,” he said, with a wave of his arm, and then returned to The Snow Leopard and the wonderful fire. The sheep were....wherever. The holly trees that our neighbour took against were now a pile of glowing ash. People really are very strange. I made my way through the night, listening to the owls and a collection of rooks that like the woods by our house, to find our plain old domestic sheep, untouched by goats, and not nearly exotic enough to attract anyone other than me. Luckily, they hadn't gotten further than the henhouse and no neighbours had decided to throw them on a spit.
 
Sunday, March 15, 2009 | 19:59:00
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