Jul 28, 2010

Operation Liberation

Brenden:

Well, my days at the rental station have come to an end. I thought I was going to go crazy sitting under an umbrella in the summer heat for 8 hours. Luckily, the grandmother of some of our friends had some work for us to do at her cottage in Kitty Hawk. So I had to give the boss my notice. Thank you again "Go-Dog-Go" rentals for your supplemental income this summer.

The work at the cottage thus far has consisted of waging war on a terrorist vine population devouring the entire back yard. The area is roughly a 1/4 of an acre and on a steep decline. At first we thought we would plow through some light foliage and cut some vines and we'd be in business. Oh how we were mistaken. The vines that we have been combating have literally sucked the life out of most of the prominent trees in the area. At times we have come across adolescent trees that have died and "fallen" yet still stay suspended in mid air via vine. Its a sad situation for the trees. However, there are two young saplings who aren't going down without a fight....Jackie and I worked for about fifteen minutes the first day with some slow progress. It wasn't until then that I remembered the hedge trimmers in the shed. It almost reminds me of a horror movie as I plow through a wall of vines with the vine trimmers. Our goal is to work path ways around trees and then double back to free the tree of any vines. It is crazy. Sometimes I'm actually scared.

The most frightened I have been up until this point has been when I came to the vines epicenter which we have dubbed "home tree". When we stumbled on to this vine system that was thicker then most of the trees I couldn't help but feel a sense of erie-ness. It wasn't that I thought the vine was going to tangle me up and envelop me like many might expect from a large man eating vine. It was that there was a sense that this vine had a brain. Not feelings or that it was in pain, the vines were just watching me. It's pretty creepy. I used a small hand saw to cut through its base, however I could have easily used a chain saw. Our goal this week was to make it to the street. I'm happy to say that we made it. But the war is far from over.

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