The Logging Road

The loggers cut a new road through the woods, a half mile or more, to thin a few acres. The road went straight down a steep slope. It only occasionally turned sideways onto a contour in order to find another steep run downhill. The soil is surprisingly loose on this forested slope. The first big storm will turn this road into a vast gully.

I am used to slopes that are all rock and clay. The quality of this New Jersey soil is extraordinary. How is it that people have told me all sorts of nonsense in my life, but no one ever mentioned the gorgeous soil of western New Jersey?

I walked up there today with some tools to build water bars. Weak from a recent illness, I was sweating profusely after 20 minutes of walking uphill. I had to slow down. Slowing down, slowing down. I hadn’t even started on the work itself, and I was already exhausted.

I had an ax I had sharpened the night before. It was almost sharp enough to shave with, and I had to keep it carefully covered as I walked, to avoid a bad cut.

I had a shovel, also recently sharpened. Am I the last man on earth who realizes that shovels need to be sharpened?

I took landscaping staples, for holding fabric in place on the ground. I had a small sledge for driving them in, and a pair of leather work gloves. I also brought old sheets and pillowcases, and a pocket knife.

The logging road started at a paved road uphill.  The day before I had left four hay bales up there, as well as a rake and grass seed. Also I dropped off a big roll of fabric designed to allow grass seed to incubate; spread out and anchored, this made excellent anti-erosion material, catching bits of leaves and bark.

First, I made a water bar out of some of this fabric, rocks and hay, right at the top of the logging road. You don’t have to dig to make a water bar, you can make it out of anything.  I worked slowly, trying to recover from the walk uphill. I tied scraps of old sheets around the rocks and knotted them up tightly. Then I stretched out the loose ends perpendicular to the direction of runoff and staked them down using the landscaping pins. I wrapped the seed germination fabric around clumps of hay and then put big rocks on top. The fabric stretched from one side of the road to the other. I laid it out at a slant, so some of the water might run off the road on the downhill side.

Standing up to fetch more rocks, and then carrying them back—that was the part that forced the sweat from my skin.  My knees and back were uneasy with my plan to repair these few acres of forest.

After I finished the water bar, I began working my way downhill. With the hay and grass seed and tools, I had to make multiple trips. I spread sections of hay bales fifty feet or so apart down the mountainside, so I’d have hay available wherever I was working, and I did the same with an extra bag of grass seed. I put the tools down where I planned to make the next water bar, and then I walked back up to the first water bar with a bag of grass seed. It was getting hotter.

I began to sow grass seed broadcast when I noticed a new problem. There was an old logging road from years before that intersected the new one; the old road was uphill.  It was covered with brush and grass and small trees—several years of re-growth.  But there was a new gully on the old logging road just above the new road; the two or three evening rainfalls had ripped away the soil and vegetation. Shocked, I realized the new road had changed the velocity of water flow upstream, on the old road. If water flows faster downstream—because a logging road has been cut straight downhill—then it will also flow faster upstream as well. A bad road can actually cause erosion in areas the bulldozers didn’t touch.

I patched the new gully with hay, big stones and broken branches. I threw a lot of material and energy into that work, because I could see the potential for runaway erosion, with one section of the mountainside setting off erosion on nearby sections, and so on. And more immediately, if the gully grew it could wash away much of the grass seed I’d planted on the road.

It was all difficult, and I had to be mindful of my every move. I made my way slowly downhill, where the logging crew had made its single anti-erosion effort. At one bend they had used a bulldozer to make a low earthen dam maybe ten inches high. It wasn’t slanted and there was no ditch for runoff into the forest; the water would just pool up in front of the dam and eventually breach it. But I could work with this dam; I dug a ditch in front of it that I tapered off into the woods, so now there was drainage. And I covered the dam itself with scraps of cloth and rocks.

And then, because uphill is usually better in this work, I built a proper water bar about thirty feet uphill, with fallen branches, hay, and rocks. I had rocks in front of the branches to slow the water, and behind them to keep them from being swept downhill. Hay was underneath every rock and stuffed into every gap.

With this, any water that reached the dam would be moving slowly.

I broadcast grass seed between the water bar and the little dam, and then moved everything I had further downhill. Here there had been serious tree thinning, and there were small logs and large branches scattered around. I chopped some stakes from a long branch and built another water bar out of logs, staked into place. It was a steep section, so I also used rocks to reinforce the log on the downhill side. I stuffed pieces of cloth into all the little chinks. Uphill there were already small gullies forming, so I put hay and rocks in all those.

I built another water bar further downhill, also using logs and some of the seed germination fabric. I was getting low on hay, so I walked up to the first water bar, near the paved road, and tore open another hay bale. It feel apart into neat sections and I tucked two sections under each arm and walked back downhill.

I was getting tired again. For all my intense thought about the flow of water, I had forgotten to bring water to drink. “The shoemaker’s children run barefoot,” as my mother would say.

It had gotten cloudy and it wasn’t quite as hot, but it was as still as death. The foliage was so thick, it was like an extra layer of clothing. A sudden movement went through the leaves of the forest, and I couldn’t tell if it was raining or just a sudden burst of wind. It passed without any rain reaching my head.

I scattered more grass seed on the road above and below the last two water bars. Then I prepared to leave, putting rocks on top of the half-empty bag of grass seed, hoping to prevent—or delay—rodents from a feast. I stacked the remaining hay next to the grass seed. I had already abandoned the rake up by the earthen dam; I had too much to carry. I took the other tools and the seed germination fabric and started walking downhill, where I knew there was a path to the house. But on the way I found a particularly bad gully in a spot where the road slanted into a small ridge that ran parallel with the slope. All the runoff was funneled into this area. I had no more hay, but I did have the remaining fabric, still rolled up. I put the entire roll lengthwise in the gully and put a couple of logs on top of it. I felt like a retreating soldier abandoning his weapon.

Before I left I realized that the low “ridge” was the ruin of an old stone wall, half buried in soil and dead leaves and covered with vines and brush.

How long ago was this stone wall new? Did the men who built it love and fear and grieve as I do?

The road needed two or three more water bars, work for another day, so I might have left the tools if I could have sheltered them from the rain. The rake was already weathered beyond concern, so I felt okay about leaving it outside for a day or two. But as it was I had to carry the ax, the shovel and the sledge home with me, where I had to leave my muddy boots outside. Unlacing them took a long time. Once inside, I sat and drank iced water for half an hour before I got the energy needed to undress and shower. All my clothes were soaked with sweat.