Empathizing with Pioneers

The sweat poured off me in the hot sun, running down my glasses, making it difficult to see as I tromped along in the dusty dirt behind my small tiller. Every day I had to take a shower to get the dirt and sweat off of me and the water would run dark. My wife would do laundry every other day as my jeans got dusty and worn.

I spent much time bending over trying to rip the narrow, dark brown, but extremely strong, tree roots out of the ground, sometimes to 15 or 20 feet, and cutting them off, or bending over many times as I cut off small roots, many small roots. Instead of chopping down trees, I was disentangling roots and weeds from the tines of my tiller. This would take anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes, digging at the mess, trying to pull one strand and then another free, using my pocket knife to dig at them or tease out one or another strand, maybe if I got lucky even to cut a few free.

The hours grew long as I tried to prepare this area for gardening next summer. The sun was hot and I would have to rest in the shade and swig on a (glass) bottle of water. Once or twice I developed cramps and had to stop altogether for the day.

I uncovered rocks and had to get out the shovel to dig around them, to see if the rock was big or small, if I could just lift up with the shovel or would have to get into the hole and try to lift it out with my hands. Sometimes I had to get the sledge hammer and just spend time hitting at the rock. Often the hammer would bounce back, leaving only a small scar on the rock. But every so often I would hit at the right angle and a crack would develop. A few more hits and a piece would crack off. Eventually I was able to reach down, sometimes below my feet to throw out the pieces of rock. Sometimes I had to use a crowbar or piece of 2x4 to leverage a large rock out of the ground.

And once the pieces were out, then I had to collect them in the wheelbarrow and trundle them over to a collection site. I didn't keep track of how many trips I made or how many hundreds of pounds of rock I moved.

Finally, there were several rocks that were so hard they wouldn't break up, and they were so large I couldn't dig them up. Very large bedrock boulders that I had to just let lay in the ground. So I plant my vegetables around them.

I thought many times that I was experiencing in a small way what the early pioneers experienced as they cleared the land to cultivation. An acre in a year was a good year's work in many cases. They had to girdle trees, cut them down, burn them, dig around the stumps and cut the roots and use oxen to pull them out of the ground. Or they would simply plant around the stumps and let them decay over the years.

But it took a lot of muscle power and effort and time and sweat and curses to clear the land. Now the land is soft, workable, productive, but only because of the immense effort of the original pioneers. They were a breed apart.