Chapter 397 The Nudist Cabin:: 9

• I took my tool, found my pants and boots in the carport and partially dressed. I headed up the road away from the cabin and within a few hundred yards I knew we were in trouble. The backside of the hill was soaked and the road was thick with mud and puddles. A large branch crossed the road just a little ways further, and I got off the bike and carefully walked around it in the dense woods and heavy underbrush. Back on the bike I made it another 5 minutes before I hit a real doozy. A larger tree had been uprooted, with the entire root ball showing, and was leaning across the trail, the upper part of the tree tangled in another one across the way. The only good news was that ahead I could see the turn in the road, where it met the wider, better tended gravel road.
• I had my work cut out for me.
• Call me a freak, but I like physical labor. Maybe because my earliest jobs in high school and college were all hard labor. Now that I spent most of my days behind a desk, I liked getting out and getting dirty. Swinging the axe, trying to cut my way through a tree a good two feet in diameter, feeling the intense impact, watching chunks of wood explode away from my precise blows, I loved it all. I enjoyed the feel of the wooden handle in my hands, the flexing of my shoulder muscles, the tension in my back. I worked hard, cutting through the tree, and chopping it up into sections less than three feet long. I got good and filthy, stacking the logs at the side of the road, and even trimming the large branches down and cutting them into more usable pieces. My arms and chest were scraped up from handling the rough bark on the heavy logs, and by the end my hands were starting to feel like hamburger. I don't know how long I was at it, but I was surprised when I saw Jill roll up on her husband's Road King.