Outstanding In My Field

In which the author learns as slowly as possible

probably couldn’t do this were it not a “Denali”

There are only two stories worth telling: “A young man goes on a trip”, and “A stranger comes to town”. Yet there are seemingly inexhaustible narratives of city folk moving to the country. That includes the recently published book by once and future Car and Driver senior editor John Phillips, , Four Miles West Of Nowhere. Since you presumably come here to ACF at least partially in search of the inside scoop, I should note that I am personally aware of at least four people who publicly praised the aforementioned book to the heavens in every possible forum before letting me privately know that they considered Phillips to be “a miserable prick”, “the worst part of C/D’s downhill slide,” and other opinions that made the two already provided look a bit tame. What can you say about an industry where such lockstep cowardice is commonplace? Ten minutes reading Car Twitter or Autojourno Facebook will convince you that each and every humdrum voice in the industry is actually quite without peer in unmitigated excellence. There is only one author regarding whom any sort of malicious criticism whatsoever is permitted:

never be a great talent like Lesley Wimbush or Andrew Krok, that’s for sure

Let them cluck. In the words of Barry Hannah’s Quadberry, I am a dragon, America the Beautiful, like you will never know. They could never really do me any harm anyway, regardless of how hard they tried. I was too much for them to handle, jointly and severally.

Now this God-dammed rotten four-by-four buried post, on the other hand…

all this shit had to go

In the above photo you can see what used to be a “chicken run”, next to an old play structure and a travel-sized (but 900-pound!) chicken coop. I needed to remove all of the above so I could grade and gravel the generally ungovernable area into a proper place to park trucks and trailers.

At first I thought the chicken run was an easy mark, the Glass Joe of demolition opportunities. I snipped off a bit of the wire, hooked a chain over the top beams, and used Rocky to pull it down. In half an hour my son and I had about six individual sections strewn about the ground, all of which were fairly sizable. That’s when I realized my terrible mistake. The chicken run hadn’t been simply sitting on the ground, as I’d assumed; it was buried into the ground a full twenty-four inches deep via eight 4x4 posts. Two of them had snapped off above ground level. The rest had snapped off under. Way under, in a few cases.

The following day, I spent five hours breaking the wood-and-wire frames of the run into man-portable pieces that could go onto my junk trailer. “Get a Sawzall”, I was told ahead of time, but in the interest of authenticity I instead performed all the work with a hand saw (for the wood) and a remarkably stupid-looking “combat” machete (for the wire). It was absolutely miserable, no less so because it was ninety-four degrees outside. I made perhaps fifty saw cuts and ten times that many wire cuts. Then I drove it all to the county dump, where I discovered that the jostling of the trip had entangled much of the wire together again. I stood sweating and bleeding on my trailer, cutting it all back apart on-site over the space of forty-five minutes while enraged professional dump-truckers leaned on their horns because I was making them late. While none of the comments directed my way mentioned this specifically, I was fairly certain that most of them could tell I’d studied Post-Structuralism for much of my early twenties rather than doing any sort of honest labor.

The next day I yielded to reality and bought a 15amp Sawzall. Here’s the thing about actual people who live in the actual country; they have no patience for cosplay-Amish bullshit about hand saws and machetes and whatnot. Now I understand why. Even the Amish in my area use power tools whenever God permits, which appears to be remarkably often. The Sawzall made short work of that little chicken coop east of the run, to put it mildly.

But I still had those posts waiting for me underground, where no two-handed reciprocator could reach.

The above-ground pair caused no trouble. I used a chisel to put a divot in their sides. I put a cinderblock next to them. Then I jammed a steel T-post into the divot, using the cinderblock as a fulcrum, and lifted them straight up and out. Five minute each.

“Perhaps,” I suggested to Danger Girl, “I could leave the others in the ground, since, you know, they’re like six inches beneath grade.”

“The Bobcat driver won’t thank you for that,” she noted, and she was right. This was doubly so since “the Bobcat driver” would not be some faceless prole dragged into Manhattan to perform faceless work behind a wire fence, but rather a neighbor performing a side hustle a mile or so from his own house. I now live among “the trades”, the men who drive into Cleveland and Columbus every day to perform electrical and concrete and roofing labor. There are rules for city work, and rules for country work. Out here they charge a fraction of the city price, but they also expect you to not be the sort of idiot who leaves deeply-buried fenceposts where a Bobcat blade can strike them in jarring, and expensive, fashion.

Just in case you ever need to do it, this is the best way to remove buried posts: Use your authentic hand saw to cut a six-inch length of 2x4 scrap wood. Drill three pilot holes into the wood, about 90% through. Then use a #2 bit to put three 3-inch screws into the wood to the depth of the pilot holes. Dig out around the post in question. Place the scrap wood against the post. Use the drill, not your German-made Wiha polished-handle #2 screwdriver, even though it’s beautiful, to turn the screws until they have entered the post and snugged up the scrap wood to it. Then use a T-post or jack handle over a concrete-block fulcrum to lever the post out by the bottom of the scrap piece.

This method requires some reasonable strength; for the most stubborn of the posts it felt to me roughly like incline-pressing 155 pounds. And it’s not fast. But it works. It got four of the remaining six 4x4s out in under an hour, total.

The penultimate post was a bit rotten, so the first two attempts resulted in the scrap-wood block popping out more or less immediately. Each time I had to straighten the screws, remove them, put fresh screws in, and try again. On the third attempt I dug about six inches deeper, found better wood, and the post levered out all at once with a wet, dirty noise, soaked in brown dirt for almost the full length. The whole scene reminded me of… well, ACF is a family Substack, so let’s just say the incident occurred in a college dormitory and the other involved party said she was absolutely unwilling to give it another shot under any circumstances.

(Narrator: She was lying.)

I tossed the post on the south side scrap pile that is already infested with carpenter bees; it’s an accommodation I am trying to make with them, keeping them away from my barn. I’d found dozens of them when I took down a rotting fence a few weeks prior, and did not have the heart to stomp them as they crawled sleepy through smooth-chewed tunnels opened to daylight by the God-from-a-machine of an eight-pound sledgehammer. The post landed with a delightful bonk. I folded my hands and rested them on the upright handle of my shovel, I looked at the setting sun and, Reader, I felt genuinely self-satisfied.

Was it a mere eight weeks ago that my life consisted of professional humiliations, internal squabbles, ill-defined problems that seemed too slippery to grasp, the infernal mechanism of preference and privilege doled out over Zoom? But out here, on my miniature farm, I was the First Man, solving problems by dint of applied brain power and newly-awoken muscle. The work I had done was easily describable, completely quantifiable, and perfectly simple. My shoulders ached and white salt had dried a great-wave pattern across the brim of my “Yoder&Frey” cap. I pitied the old me, the man who went into an office, who lived in a suburb, who handled problems with e-mail and Slack, smooth talk and deference, rather than with brute strength and zinc-coated screws.

“Give me ten minutes,” I told DG, “and I’ll be done.”

About an hour later, with the sun beneath the horizon, blood under my fingernails, and a persist grinding sensation in my right rotator cuff, I was nowhere. The last post was rotten for at least twelve inches beneath ground level. It shed my screws again and again with the casual disdain of a stripper tossing a $3 Chinese bra into the cheap seats. I’d dug a two-foot circle around it in search of true lumber yet just kept finding greasy, mud-like fibers pressed into an approximate column. Every time I leaned into the hole, my prescription sunglasses fell into said hole. I was so dead tired I could not easily think of a way to make that stop happening.

Every effort I had made on this post to this point had been utterly worthless. I was no closer to getting it out than when I’d started. Yet it had to be done. There was no way to finesse it, or shift the work elsewhere. I, the First Man, would have to do it.

(Before you say anything; I know I could have paid someone competent to just come out the following with a backhoe and zero it out. Bear with me in kindness and sympathy, please.)

I kept digging until more than a full foot stood proud, finally seeing what looked like decent wood at the bottom. I cut yet another scrap piece, pre-drilled three holes across instead of in a triangle formation, lay on the ground to get it screwed on the post, then tried my Snap-On jack handle against it. Finally, the block held. But the post could not move. I put every bit of force I had on it, enough that my 250-pound bulk lifted hippo-ballerina-like to tiptoes. But nothing happened.

I briefly wondered if farmers were prone to crying, out in their fields.

At a time like this, most of us are frantically searching in our heads for an easy way to do it. If you’ve spent most of your life as a smart cookie, always being able to write a shell script or re-purpose a program to do your dirty work, it’s very counter-intuitive to think that there is simply no other way available. It’s what Pirsig called stuckness, except it’s not the Zen stuck where you have a brilliant idea. It’s just stuck.

I knew what I needed to do. As darkness fell, I dug an eighteen-inch slot next to the post. Then I put a Snap-On racing jack (I’m not getting paid to mention Snap-On, I’m just doing it because, hey, Made in USA!) in that slot, replaced the jack handle in its proper spot, and started using hydraulic power against the scrap wood.

Which snapped off.

Most of me wanted to go home, and indeed I think I made some statement to that effect at the time, if only to the sky. But what kind of coward pulls seven posts and fails on the eighth? I simply had to do it again, but right. That meant: digging down to fresh wood again, cutting new scrap, drilling four holes instead of three, then tamping down a nice flat place for the car jack, almost two feet below ground level.

The first pump of the handle produced a cracking sound, followed by what may have been an audible sob from my chest. The second produced motion. I finessed the third one like I was repairing a Grand Seiko balance spring.

Eppur si muove, mutha fuckas.

The post came up encrusted in fecal-looking, worm-ridden mud. Yet I clasped it to my bosom and sprinted to within twenty feet of the woodpile, at which point I javelin-ed it over and across with a vintage Caitlyn’s worth of moxie.

“THAT’S RIGHT!” I yelled, or perhaps coughed. Intellectually I knew that my accomplishment was pretty small beer, and nothing that a real farmer couldn’t handle as the relaxing finish to a day’s worth of real work. Emotionally, I felt like I was ready to deliver the commencement address to the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences at The Ohio State University.

If you’ve been reading me for a while;

a) thank you.

b) you know that my informal mottos are “Live in reality” and “Be about it, don’t just talk about it.”

From the chilly day in February when I took delivery of my approximately (meaning not quite) twelve acres, I’ve struggled with this city-boy idea that it’s more land than any one person should have. That idea has eventually morphed into: I have to earn my land. Not by writing a check. Surely we all understand that in the America of 2022 there is no longer any correlation whatsoever between wealth and worth. There are millions of people who can write a bigger check than I can, and millions of people who are certainly better and more worthy.

It was said of Chris McCandless that “In a world without frontiers, he chose to create one.” That same insightful but cruel thing could be said about me. In a world where anybody can just buy a plot of land, I’m striving to be worthy of mine, by a self-selected and arbitrary set of rules. They include: Do the work myself, if I can learn how. Be a good steward. Know my neighbors and my community, then make a positive impact if possible. Serve as a good example to my son.

To the two stories that begin this piece, let me add mine. Right now I am an uncomfortable and awkward hybrid creature, truly fit for neither Bleecker Street nor Steam Corners. There is so much that is ersatz about me, from the affectation of calling a Star White F-250 Platinum “a work truck” to my “farming outfits” of Alden and Gustin and Turnbull and Asser. It’s okay. I can laugh at myself, too. Because I’m on the way to somewhere real. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there. In time past I have been a prodigy child, a brilliant programmer, a good-enough writer, a competent manager, a faithless lover, a scheming manipulator, an abysmal if enthusiastic musician, a bloodthirsty racer. I may continue to be all those things, or not — but all I truly want, at this moment, is simply, in the words of the hoary joke, to be out standing in my chosen field.