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simple truths of a moral framework
Monday, February 9 2009
It had been about three weeks since the last time I harvested three woodcarts of wood (giving a sense of how long they take to burn through), and according to the weather forecast, rain would be entering the area. Saturated snow snow and large puddles do not make for optimal firewood gathering conditions. So today I took advantage of the beautiful sunny weather to cut down a mid-size tree that had died many years ago and was now just a bleached skeleton. Based on traces of bark, it looked to be a White Oak. It was only a hundred feet or so down the Stick Trail and had long been a candidate for felling, but I'm leery of doing anything near a largish dead tree. They can be extremely dangerous, as the process of cutting them down can cause them to vibrate enough to shed limbs. Indeed, when I was a kid, my father never attempted to fell dead trees, which he referred to as "dead men" (of course, he was using hand tools, which increases time spent beneath the tree and diverts attention from its limbs). To spare myself the tragedy of being hit by a falling limb, I let the saw do the cutting while I kept my attention mostly skyward. Eventually I could see its limbs moving against the other trees of the canopy and I knew it was time to run. It fell precisely where I had aimed it, and the only complication had been getting Sally to clear the area. Dogs are terrible with the concept of "vacate where you are now, but don't come towards me."
After the tree had fallen, I cut most of it up and brought home two cartloads of wood. It was unusually light due to its extreme dryness.
For the past several days I've been reading the Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The book is about how the human enterprise is dominated by occurences of the completely unexpected, a concept Taleb refers to with the term "Black Swan" (a metaphoric reference to the unexpected existence of black swans in Australia).
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