Mountains Make a Manly Man I wasn’t trying for the alliteration there in the title of this column, but mountains do tend to help make a manly man. And weather like we’ve been having brings it out. Makes you want to beat your chest. It is a tragedy that spring has come early, but that’s just the way it is. Maybe we’ll get ten feet of snow next week. Let’s hope, but don’t hold your breath. Spring really brings out the manly man in Crestline guys. I have to admit that I kinda let myself go during the winter, but as soon as spring hits in earnest, I start hitting the weights and burning the calves. But I don’t go to a fitness club like those wimps down the hill. I just go out to the yard. I’ve been chain-sawing this 80-foot tree I cut down a few weeks ago into 40-pound pieces and carrying them 50 yards up a 30-percent incline, and then hacking them up for firewood for next winter, along with doing a score of other spring-cleaning-type chores. After two weeks of this, I can really feel my arm and leg muscles rippling. All right, I’ll be honest, it has been a few years since I could say they were actually rippling, but at least they’re not jiggling quite as much as they were a few weeks ago. Recently I heard a woman telling another woman in a Crestline store that she had a new beau that she had “found” down the hill. (Again, I warned you—you talk about this stuff within earshot of me in the store and I’m going to use it in this column). She joked that she had to go all the way down the hill to find a guy who was single, and had a full-time job and a full set of teeth. I think she was joking. I almost interrupted the conversation and told her, “I resent that remark!” But then I took a closer look at myself. Let’s see, I’m a head-over-heels married guy, my three teeth in the front on top are phony and I’m missing a few others, and I’m a freelance writer and editor, so I don’t really have a full-time job. So I guess I have to take that back. “Hey, I resemble that remark!” Plus, if you would have seen/smelled me walk into Ace Hardware on Saturday afternoon, you would have thought I hadn’t taken a bath or had a change of clothes for a week. So there’s something to add to your little dig, lady. But we are manly men up here, and that has to count for something, and you just can’t get that down the hill. Down there they do “gardening.” Big wow. Up here we do LAND CLEARING. Down there they do weed pulling. Up here we do STUMP PULLING. Everything is bigger with us manly mountain men. I’m not getting defensive, but I’m out here in my driveway using my sledgehammer and an iron wedge to split rounds. Anyone who has split wood by hand knows that when you have a round that once had a few branches sticking out of it, it is tough to split. So I’m pounding away on this thing, and some young construction guys working next door are having their lunch break and are watching me trying to split this thing. I say, “Man some of these are tough.” Then they flat out laugh at me, and one of them says, “Yeah, you’ll never split it with that puny sledgehammer.” Then he pulls out this huge bulbous thing that probably weighs fifty pounds at the end, and he smirks and nods his head up and down for what seemed like a half an hour. Needless to say, I now I have one of those. It splits the hard ones quicker, but my back seems to hurt a lot more after I’m done. When I lived in Germany, it was also very important that you be a manly man. I remember sitting at the dinner table with my girlfriend’s father, a lifelong farmer and lineman. He knew I was fluent in high German, but pretended he didn’t know that I also spoke the dialect of his four-town area, even though he sat there listening to me gabbing with the rest of the family in it. “Petra, you cannot marry this man,” he would say, as he reached and grabbed my hands in his gnarled, calloused mitts. “He has the hands of a piano player.” This of course, implied that I had never done an honest day’s work, and worse, that I wasn’t up to his manliness standard because of my sissy, piano player hands. If old Emil Bickert were alive today, he’d be impressed with how beaten my hands are starting to look. But he’d still be happy that his daughter took his advice 25 years ago. (I’m with you there, pal. Whew!) I’m not bragging, or trying to say that my chainsaw bar is bigger than yours or anything, but I have brought down some hefty trees in the past year with this thing. My wife didn’t think that my little chainsaw was up to the task, and, as you can imagine, this made me quite self-conscious about taking on the job. I looked at self-help books and Web sites about cutting trees, and found many sites that were dedicated to cutting huge trees down with very short blades—not that my chainsaw blade is short, or anything, it’s just fine. O.K., I’ll level with you, my chainsaw blade is actually pretty small as chainsaw blades go—only 16 inches. But it’s amazing how much I can do with such a small blade, just ask my wife. She has been there for me every time as I have dropped them. She knows that I am careful enough not to get myself injured, but she still worries, because of the stress it causes. She hears those first few cracks in the branches above, and then watches the big moment as that thing crashes down through the forest. And she breathes a sigh of relief that I didn’t die of a heart attack in the process. And I remain...a manly man.
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