#fiction/publish _"We build a wall to keep us free"_ - Anais Mitchell Jacob sat pouring over a reproduction of the survey plans under a perfectly tuned LED light array on the cherry island he and Sharice special ordered from Montreal. The stone wall was clearly on their side and not the Solde's. His thumbs imprinted his forehead as he compared survey maps, google.maps images, GIS apps, and the deed. "A large stone marks the edge of the lot, 50 paces north-west of the corner of the RiverMill market's foundation. From that stone, a wall leaves in a northern direction marking the properties [sic] edge." When Jacob and Sharice purchased their house online in the spring of 2021, they knew they had to get out of the city. With the pandemic raging, their kids falling apart in the two-bedroom condo, and both working from home, it felt like too much. They had earned plenty of equity after four years of condo ownership, and the opportunity to get out was too good to pass up. They saw that stone wall, the chicken coop, the veggie garden, the slate roof, the three-season porch, and the four bedrooms in the Redfin adds and bought it, sight unseen, for $50,000 over the asking price and had waived the inspection. They knew there would be problems, the leak in the basement that ended up being a broken foundation, radon levels that were five when they should have been four or less, but any house has problems, suitable? Things had started okay with the Solde's. They first met when Jonny came to hook up their 1G up/down fiber broadband from ComfinityHome-Net. They didn't hear anything else until Sharice made an apple pie and rang the crank-style doorbell after a week of unexpected silence. Jonny and Meg had been polite, pleasant, and helpful that first ice storm of October when the dead ash had fallen across their driveway. Jonny had come over with his chainsaw and made a cord of rounds in no time, stacking them neatly along their driveway as Jacob would ever split them. When Jonny's Rottweiler dug under his fence and killed two of their chickens, his truck had careened into his dirt drive, whistling brightly, immediately ending the mayhem. Jonny rebuilt their run with his own hands to protect the hens should Bud ever get loose again. He showed Jacob how to extend the chickenwire a foot on either side of the fence to keep animals, his included, from digging under the enclosure. Since then, they have been amicable despite their differences. They exchanged eggs for honey and veggies, lending a cup of this or that when either house was out. It was a 25-minute drive to the Hannaford's, after all. The Solde's always mentioned how diesel was so expensive now; they drove that white F-250 everywhere, which didn't help. Jacob's Audi e-Tron was running on solar from the new panels in the yard, but still, no reason to drive an hour for a stick of butter. Slowly, Jacob and Sharice had brought that old place back to life. When the pines came down and were trucked out to the mill yard, they borrowed a tractor with a york rake and made the ground even and loose. They spent more on wildflower seeds than the neighbors did on groceries last February, but now the yard glowed yellow in the evening sun. They found an old-timer from over the state line to fix the slate roof, so much more historically accurate than replacing it with asphalt shingles. After two full years, they were starting to feel that the Klein-Jones homestead was coming together. They made mistakes. They lost almost their whole garden to deer the first year. One morning the four-foot fence was bent, and the doe and her fawns had trashed even the rhubarb. Chipmunks took one bite from every strawberry, then ate most of the tomatoes. They planted eight small apple trees, to have six of them ringed by mice, left to wither in the sun, never regaining the greens and eventually looking like a small row of fence posts. And the kids were not finding it easy, they had learned French at their old school, and they seemed to mispronounce everyone's names: Langille and Oullette were pronounced as they were spelled in English, not as they would be in French. They had gone to Quebec annually, and just over the border, those names were pronounced as they should be. They started beating back the woods along the stone wall in the second week of August, now that the ticks had died down. He went at it on Tuesday during an unplanned four-hour break between virtual meetings. Sharice saw him from her office as she led her team's weekly virtual stand-ups. She hoped he was safe, and it was almost an hour to a decent hospital. He mainly cut 10-12 inch trees, not too much to worry about. Jacob thought he could handle that beech row with his electric chainsaw. His earpods fit awkwardly under his helmet, but it was an excellent opportunity to catch up on podcasts. His phone was still on "Do Not Disturb" since he had been working, so he never saw the increasingly angry messages from Jonny Solde, culminating in "CUT ONE MORE TREE DOWN AND BUD AND I WILL BE BACK TONIGHT" He shouldn't have sent it, that reply. "It's ours, not yours, sorry 🤷‍♂️." It was supposed to be clear, non-confrontational, fact-based, and friendly. The survey was clear; the stone wall was on their side of the line. The coppice line was on their side of the wall. It was their right to take them down, to clean up their yard; it even made the whole area look brighter and neater. Who the hell are they, after all, to comment on what they did with their yard? They should clean up the mower deck and broken snow-mobile rusting in the woods, right over that wall where Jacob had to look out every morning when he woke up and raised the shade. At least in the summer, the trees blocked his view of that pile of trash they called a yard next door. Mary, on the other side, was in her 80's. One summer night, with the bugs immolating on the zapper on her porch, she told her version of the history of the Soldes. The family emigrated from Quebec's Eastern Provinces in the 1840s. The family had been part of the small Rivermill community that manufactured a strap-suspended seat for the wagon and carriage industry, leading to a boom in the 1860-1880s. Since then, things had been increasingly hard for the family. History's undulations had broken up their land, eventually resulting in Jonny's great-uncle losing his home to foreclosure in the late 1990s after falling into a reverse-mortgage advertisement. After Art had lost his wife, he ended up in the county home instead of finishing his days looking out over the bobolink fields and stoking the fire in the kitchen's wood stove that had now become Jacob and Sharice's. When the Klein-Jones cleaned up their yard, they cut Art's firewood. "It's ours, not yours, sorry 🤷‍♂️" Route 123 West/108 North forked at the wall with Old Turnpike Road creating a slice of pie lot at the site of the Rivermill store. Mary's New Englander-style home is the old store, with two additions and a roofline that traps feet of snow on a porch turn. Mary hires out to kids now for shoveling it clear since her doctor put her on that blood thinner for her heart. Looking up the wall from her porch, she sees that the trees aren't obeying survey lines or deeds. The Solde's side-lot holds their septic runoff, leaving a green space where the grass grows unusually well. They keep their kennel, a small garden, and a rabbit hutch neatly arranged and weekly mowed. Beech, ash, and maple abhor a wasted photon and have slowly leaned over the wall to absorb any solar opportunities. The roots and trunks reside on the west. The crowns stretch a little more to the east each passing year. Beech nuts, wrapped in tricornered velcro purses, fall to the Solde's deck each fall. Bud cocks his head while he watches squirrels bounding to gather the seeds. The red ones chatter while they turn and unwrap the nuts like toddlers on Christmas. In the fall, Rufus hues of the shiny three-leafed poison ivy climb from the east, adding color nearly as bold as the blueberries. Garden snakes sleep on the flatter stones after a ray of warmth has passed, gaining enough energy to snatch a cricket as it sways on a breezed stalk of grass-like Frost's birch-swinging children. Each rock is also a sundial since lichen clings north, evading the sun's drying eyes as if they play hide-and-seek and have found a quiet nook below the stairs. By November, leaves fill each rocky crag and blow leeward regardless of the endless raking. In December, small quarries form, frozen ponds with cliff edges on any cup-shaped stone. January brings little sun and long shadows; the wall can disappear under drifts of downy powder. Snow fleas bounce like popcorn on the uneven surface, miraculously evading the killing cold. Spring releases mud torrents, washing the stones clean and freeing the poison ivy to climb again and try to summit the ridge separating the lots. The process repeats ignorant of ownership, deeds, land rights, affairs, and quarrels. The wall was a co-creation. In the early 1800s, sheep replaced timber as the region's cash crop. To clear the land, farmers on both sides piled the spring-freed slag onto the edges of their lot. My border was also yours, and neighbors both contributed to the growing spine. As farms and fields faded, the woods returned, this time trapping the walls within the forest. Walls without upkeep fall into disrepair. Cleaning up a wall is often the work of teams, with goats or now poisons to remove the greenery and people to re-stack the stones and straighten the edge. What started as a pragmatic way to mark an edge, till a field, and fatten a lamb, became a symbol of prosperity. The co-creation of two households brought them together and kept them apart, keeping livestock separated and preventing property quarrels, as a rock wall won't be moved quietly in the night to steal a setback. A rock wall is only 2-3 feet tall. Who owns the tree that leans from the base to the air on the other? Legal precedent says the roots and trunk location decide the tree's ownership. If my tree drops a branch on your house, I will pay. Yet the tree can outlast the owner, untouched by her, maturing without nurturing. The tree continues pulling carbon from the air and fixing it to the sweet carbon rings glucose in solution or turning it to cellulose to thicken its trunk. It only cares when we tap, nail, or chop it. Can one own a tree, a wall, a lot or are we stewards of whatever temporary cave we might reside in at that moment? Zooming on the blue dot, we and the tree are en-pixeled, joined. Can we own the rock, born from a magma belch or a plate tectonic crunch before mammals, dying with the bursting extinction of the sun? Temporary laws in temporary societies govern arbitrary temporary boundaries of control. The next day, in a moment of spite, Jacob was back out with the chainsaw. It was electric, but at 18 inches, it did the job on all but the largest trees and those he left for fear of dropping them on the house. To avoid having a tree fall on his chest, he turned to his modern apprentice program, Tube4You. He had succumbed to a continuous stream of helpful advisors made up of do-it-yourself videos shot in the early 2010s, with up to thousands of views. Many came from channels with folksy titles like "Your Mountain Friend" and "The Backyard Teachers" or whatever was to him based on his most recent requests. He, an Augmented Reality development team-lead for one of the wealthiest companies in the history of the world, often ended with a no-shirt-wearing rural Tuber teaching him a skill. It felt ironic, but it was also endearing and helped him appreciate his new home and the skills of his new neighbors. In her usual wit and wisdom, his sister-in-law bought him a shirt last holiday with a picture of a chainsaw and the words, "I don't know what I'm doing, but I watch a lot of Tube4You." To fell a tree, the videos say it is best to make a V-shaped cut through 15 percent of the tree facing the direction the tree should fall, about 18 inches off the ground. Then you plunge through the tree's center, parallel to the ground. The cut leaves a "hinge" of a couple of inches wide just behind the apex of the V. Hammer polycarbonate wedges into the plunge cut to push the tree towards the V, directing the fall. Complete the back cut, freeing the tree leverage towards the V. The tree falls in the intended direction, away from your cable and electric lines, home, cars, and loved ones. Judging by Tube4You, if you have enough beers or take shortcuts and have a nearby phone to video with, you are likely to have the tree land on something you love. As the tree swings towards the ground, it gains momentum, the crown whooshing through the air, finally impacting the ground. Often the tree will bounce, sometimes in unexpected directions, as it falls through another tree's branches and onto its branches. Once the tree starts falling, you should move away. Before cutting, clear a zone of egress in multiple directions. Cutting trees is un-reliably dangerous, the most hazardous form of danger. Even people who know what they are doing can get in trouble, but it almost always goes fine. This may be why it's so expensive to hire it out, which may be why people do it themselves. So Jacob, with hours of experience, double that in "Tuber-cation," and just a little fury clouding his judgment, went out to continue cleaning up his side of the wall. He felled a half-dozen nice 8-14 inch maple and beech trees. Jacob then went about the task of cleaning up. Jacob limbed the trunks, creating a pile of debris he would dry out and make into a bonfire for New Year's Eve. Finally, Jacob cut the trees into manageable rounds after putting in his second battery, tightening the chain, the bar to the saw, and filling the oil well. He would pick up one end of the trunk, put it on a perpendicular piece of wood, and work his way down from the end in the air. He would cut down every 18-20 inches, roughly measuring with the saw. As the trunk got shorter, he would lift it, move the cross piece, and free another length for cutting. Finally, when just the butt of the tree was leaning against the cross, he cut up through it from the underside, so the chain didn't get trapped in the trunk's weight as it closed on the cut. Chainsawing was hard work, but he was making good progress. Within a couple of hours, he had a nice pile of brush and had gotten through two of the trunks. He smelled like sawdust, sweat, and chain oil, basically a form of the "idealized American male ."It felt good to change something physical instead of just moving digital cards on a digital poster from left to right to show progress on a digital project. He worked in an enormous company that was, as likely as not, going to lose interest before they finished, scrap the whole idea, and move him to another virtual project. Chores could be better, he decided, than quarterly personnel reviews and his company's new leadership process, SIGS, or "self-improvement goaling sessions." The rhythm of the work hypnotized Jacob. He semi-listened to "Making a habit of making habits." He was making a mental note to figure out how to keep notes while listening to an audiobook on earpods with his hands full when his right leg buckled, and he was lying on the ground. Warm wetness poured down his groin towards the small of his back. He reached down to feel what was wrong and noticed a crevasse where his front pocket should be. The chain broke and hit him in the thigh at full speed. It was over before he knew anything was wrong before he felt any pain. The next thing he noticed was an intense chill over his body. Why was he freezing? Bud was barking that continuous, low, constant bark that made him angry. Bud barked randomly at all hours of the day and night. He would open his window, enjoying a gentle breeze in his corner home office, when the dog would start up again. He would have to close all the windows, put in his earbuds, and get back to the meeting. Sealed off like that to the outside, why did he even live way out here in the country anyways? Wasn't this the worst time for the dog to be barking? When he worked out the wall issue with Jonny, he would have to figure out the barking. He seemed fuzzy and felt like he should try to get up and let Sharice know what happened, but somehow he couldn't get himself to move. Maybe he was afraid that he had now confirmed what she knew and had no business with a chainsaw, tractor, or any of the toys he had bought since they moved out to the country. There was no way she would hear him yelling, she always had her big cones on with noise cancelation and the windows shut. She had bought a gamer headset when they had moved and took her meetings standing up, with the boom mike in front of her and a green screen behind her with a virtual background of a fake hillside with fake clouds and fake grass gently moving in the unnatural breeze. She looked like an air-traffic controller directing dragonflies in a hypnosis video. She thought it was relaxing for her team. If she had been his boss, he would have fallen asleep whenever she came on. Crawling, maybe crawling would work. To test the theory, he tried rolling over. That's when the pain came. When he tried to pull his right leg under himself, something snapped and balled up in the crease of his groin. His leg refused to move. And he was short of breath, just from the effort. Now he was in worse shape, with grass and dirt in his mouth, rapid breathing, and laying on his chest, with what felt like a weight on his back holding him down. He had been working hard. Maybe he just needed to rest and close his eyes for a minute. Then he would have enough strength to get into the house. The tree had long since swallowed the nail, and it had been a good solid steel nail like they don't make anymore. It was square, maybe even original to the house, and a kid had found it in the dirt and decided it would be the perfect hanger for a target for his new bow and arrow set. It was no longer visible from the outside, and only the saw had found it and hit at the perfect angle, with the ideal tension and the excellent wear, to snap it and send it flying from 2,500 rpm or almost 60 miles/hour off the bar. The chain launched towards the 5th pocket on his Patagonia organic cotton blue jeans, under kevlar chaps that had twisted to expose his inner thigh while he held the log still with his right leg, his left leg planted firmly facing the tree. The chain was new, just out of the box that morning, and mounted with the aggressive teeth jutting out like crab claws, designed to bite wood but willing to take chunks out of anything soft they contacted. As it flew by him in an irregular path, the lower part wrapped around his inner thigh and pulled until it halted. The chain severed his saphenous vein with tearing and ripping that caused euneven ends and gaps in the thin-walled structure nearly as big as his pinky. Sharice knew something was wrong instinctively. The yard had become silent. Somehow she could tell, despite the layers of defense against sound, that this was unexpected. When she glanced out the window, she saw Jonny on the ground, kneeling over something. After that row last night, what was he doing in her yard? Had he poured something on the ground? What was that stain in the dirt? At this point, she was curious, so she turned off her webcam, took off her headset, and gently pushed open the window. It was the first anniversary of the incident, and Mary led the Soldes down the trail through the gap in the wall. They held a strawberry-rhubarb crumble, pesto pasta salad, and a spinach, feta, and blueberry salad, all garden fresh. This year, the mid-July harvest had been outstanding, with twice-weekly rains and moderate but sunny conditions. They set the items on an outside table made of saw-horses and an old door from Sharice's basement. The kids fed the bunny clover and dandelion greens through the hutch fence. It was so much nicer now to move back and forth between the houses since Jonny and Jacob had expanded that gap in the wall to make it an actual path. They had walked the survey line together and located a few big triangular stones. Jonny had moved them to create markers on either side of the passage. Jonny was as gentle as a Zenga player with that bucket loader, and Jacob had leaned against the rocks until they were in just the right position. Lon Setnik 2022-08-23 #fiction/publish