Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 24, 1994 TAG: 9404210027
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Steve Kark
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
I get cold sweats thinking what life might be like without a color TV and a VCR. Saturday nights would be pretty darn boring around here without them.
Take away my electricity for more than a few hours and I start to edge toward a mild state of panic. (When's the last time you heated your bath water on a Coleman stove?)
Besides, there's folks out this way who live a lot closer to the land than I do. Because they work at it every day, my neighbors who farm know the land in a way I can only dimly comprehend.
But in all honesty, I can't say that I envy them. I'll take paper cuts over mashed fingers every time.
Still, I like to slip into my little backwoods reverie now and then. By hauling out the old chainsaw, I can work myself up to a reasonably bloated sense of self-sufficiency.
I'll grease that sucker up and jerk the starter cord, savoring how the saw jumps to life in my hands. At that moment I'm transformed into a work-booted cutting machine, and I love to make the woodchips fly.
This is the way it's supposed to be. I FEEL the testosterone pumping through my body.
Although I can go quite a while in this frame of mind, it doesn't take much to bring me back to the real world. Sometimes, all it takes is someone to put me in my place.
For instance, there was the time I took the chainsaw over to this guy in Pembroke to have it sharpened. I knew right off that I brought it to the right place because there were all these rebuilt chainsaws sitting around his shop.
Anyway, the old guy gets to looking over my blade when he notices that the nubs have been worn down. These are the things that keep the chain on the guide bar. Looks like somebody's been running this thing with too much slack, he says.
You don't say, I respond_with just the right amount of concerned surprise - must have been that guy I loaned it to a week or so back.
In his favor, he drops the subject and sharpens my blade, but he can't help getting in one more dig before I leave. If you plan on doing some real sawing, he says, you ought to get you something a little bigger than this here trimmer.
TRIMMER, he calls it!
Hardly missing a beat, I slip on my glasses to write him a check. I tell him about all the downed limbs, leftover from the last storm. There's enough to last me a good long while, I say.
We briefly talk about the storms and about how the weather patterns in this part of the country seem to be changing. And I remember that there's a National Geographic special about hurricanes on TV that evening.
We agree that it would be a good show to watch and I head for my truck, trying real hard not to trip over my boots which suddenly feel much too large for my feet.
Yeah, it begins to sound real good. Maybe I'll make some microwave popcorn too.
Steve Kark is an instructor at Virginia Tech and a correspondent for the Roanoke Times & World-News. He writes from his home in scenic Rye Hollow, in a remote part of Giles County south of Pearisburg.
by CNB