Grind It Up, Burn It Down

on being cruel to be kind, and also damn lucky

this video is a “before” tour of the property - before the raised beds and green house and grape arbor were put in place, before we ‘shaved’ the palm trees of dead ivy, before we emptied the koi pond of detritus and junk…at the beginning you can see my beautiful olive trees.

Saturday we chipped up the equivalent of three or four entire trees and the pruned remains of at least 20 more. We woke up at 6a and it was a race to get all the animal chores done before the guy with the industrial diesel-powered chipper arrived. I put on my tough canvas overalls and then realized, Jake hadn’t had his morning walk. I chose the route that takes us up and behind the backside of our property rather than through the village, but I still saw tons of early risers with their dogs, me looking like an escapee from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre with my hair sticking out of my baseball hat and my paint-splattered Carhartts.

My job was to drag branches and wood over for the chipper guy to feed them in. The h and Tiago chainsawed the larger branches into smaller pieces and dragged the bigger limbs. I wore deerskin gloves and leather boots; these plus the Carhartts kept me fairly well protected…but I still managed to get stabbed with branches through my long sleeve technical shirt.

We were lucky to work on a mostly overcast day; even so, the sunblock I applied in the morning mixed with my sweat to run stinging into my eyes by 9a. At 10a I went to the quinta to fetch drinks for everyone, and we all stopped for a few minutes to pour energy down our throats - the chipper guy and Tiago chose mini cans of Coke, the h and I a vegan vanilla protein drink in little cartons with bent straws and pictures of Minions on them.

The deadfall was a tall and deep pile of branches latticed together. Removing them was like playing reverse Jenga on a giant scale. Tug a branch and find it stuck fast, so look for the branches above it that pinned it in place, and tug those branches. Once I tugged hard at a branch that snapped in my hand, sending me flying backward off the pile to land on the seat of my pants. The h’s face appeared at the top of the deadfall; when he saw me laughing, unhurt, he laughed with me, but I followed his glance to the chainsaw ten feet away and took his message. After that I looked behind me before tugging; I don’t know if it’s possible to start a chainsaw by falling on it in exactly the right way, the high pitched whine of it chewing through the waxed cotton of my Carhartts deepening as the blade sampled the flesh of my leg, but I didn’t want to be the one to find out. 

Around 3:00p it started to rain, though rain was not in the forecast. We have to hurry, Tiago said. The owner of the chipper, Joao, did not want to run the machine in the rain. I didn’t blame him - the thing radiated menace even when bone dry. It’s not the kind of machine you want to have slippery footing and handholds around. By that time the big stuff was mostly ground up.

the olive trees line the left of the road

While we have the chipper, we should go ahead and prune these, Tiago said, indicating the row of olive trees that border the road to the quinta. They are pretty trees but not particularly healthy. They are certainly in better shape than they were last spring when we took possession of property; then, they were choked with ivy, many branches brittle and dead. The h chainsawed the ivy off and most of the dead branches, but neighbor Alberto was adamant that we needed to prune all the old growth branches completely off and make room for healthy growth.

Now I’m not a tree expert; I thought the trees looked pretty, tall and silvery, and producing floods of olives in season. No, Alberto said. They are not good. Your olives will be bigger and edible after you prune. 

The h pruned the other row of olive trees - eight of them that border the upper quinta road, after it passes the quinta and hooks a right to travel up to the cottage. Frankly they look terrible, like old men bent and twisted with the pain of having their arms sawed off. But early this spring all the stumps where branches used to be are bursting with new growth.  With this success, I knew that before long h would be pruning the trees lining the lower quinta road.

He reminded me a few times. Still I wasn’t ready when he and Tiago, chainsaws in hand, climbed into the forks of the trees and began sawing. (I am tempted to say “gleefully in hand” but the h asked that I be fair to him in this story, so I won’t say it —but they were undeniably happy to be chainsawing, of that there is no doubt, even the h didn’t disagree when I suggested this).

It was a violent process; huge heavy limbs crashed to the ground, to be pounced on with another smaller chain saw, cut into pieces that could be more easily fed into the maw of the chipper.

I kept remembering the movie Fargo, the scene where the officer arrives at the house of the kidnappers searching for an abducted woman being held for ransom, the sound of a power tool drawing her around the corner of the house to find a blood-splattered man shoving a woman’s leg into a wood chipper. 

The sound from the chipper was different when it was fed big thick branches. It whined and gnawed and spat chips out the side like some gluttonous, ravenous monster crouched at the entrance to the campo, a monster reduced to its essential parts: a stomach lined with  gnashing teeth and a long external esophagus disgorging masticated trees.

A few times the teeth of the chipper stopped their gnashing and the operator would work the safety bar before reaching into the throat of the thing to pull out thin branches with leaves or chunks of wood to young and unseasoned to shred properly. I held my breath when he did this, watching from the corner of my eye as his ungloved hand reached and probed. It was easy enough to imagine him leaning forward, his hand slipping, disappearing head first into the chipper.  No wonder he didn’t want to work in the rain. I didn’t want him to work in the rain, either.

The other men seemed not to notice these instances, busy as they were holding their chainsaws aloft, often in one hand, as they leaned way out into space to saw at thinner, high branches.  I was surrounded by screaming machines, tree limbs raining down, for nearly seven hours and it seems almost a miracle no one was seriously injured.

In the middle of the job the h stopped to rest. Three of the olive trees were now reduced to trunks with stumps, while four stood tall and graceful. Are you doing this to all the trees? I asked. He answered, his tone trying not to be frustrated, It has to be done! I stopped him with a hand in the air. I didn’t complain or say it didn’t have to be done, I said. I just asked you if all the trees are going to look like that. I pointed to one of the pruned trees in its agonized shape, the wounds of its stumps glowing tan in the gray overcast light of the rainy afternoon. 

Yeah, the h said. They are all going to look like that. For the next year, anyway. 

I said nothing and headed into the house for some water, the sound of the chainsaws firing up trailing me. Once inside I watched from the window as they men systematically cut everything beautiful off of each tree, till they were all nothing but contorted shapes, the bark darkened by rain. I cried for a few minutes. Jake came over to put his head in my hands. 

I know it needed to be done. I can’t explain why it hurt so much. Maybe because so much of this place is ugly and decrepit and ruined, and they are among the only beautiful things left. Neglected and uncared for, they still rear tall and leafy, providing shade from the hot Portuguese sun and cover from the curious gaze of the surrounding village. Now they are savaged, their beauty destroyed, leaving us as naked and exposed as the sawed off limbs, everyone free to stare at the injuries.  

When the trees were all pruned and the last of the branches fed into the chipper, the four of us stood in the now empty campo - the deadfall  gone, the beautiful olive tree branches gone. I felt like a band of murderers standing around after the village has been sacked. 

I mourn the trees. Now when I walk down the road to the quinta there is no graceful line of olive trees providing shade and privacy - people in apartment houses two and three blocks away, and up the hill across the street, have an unobstructed view of our comings and goings on the quinta road and in the garden. My sense of being in my own little world has disappeared; now I know that unseen eyes are watching us from all angles, and I can’t say it’s a feeling that I enjoy.

That’s the way it is with trees, the h shrugged. You gotta be cruel to be kind. Did you see the first tree? he asked. 

I did. In deference to my distress the h preserved some of the branches of the first in the line of olive trees. I guess I should be glad but all it does is highlight the brutalist shapes of the trees next to it. Like cutting off the arms and legs of all but one of the contestants in a beauty contest, the horror is amplified rather than mitigated. 

It started raining really hard by 4:00p but we were pretty much done, the enormous awful deadfall, ten feet high and thirty feet long, reduced to a pile of woodchips about three feet high and fifteen feet long. We spread plastic over the pile of chips to protect it from the rain, all of us feeling the ache in our muscles. The covered mound is visible from the windows of our front door. It looks ominous, as though it hides a charnel heap of bodies, the decimated olive trees standing witness, the arms they raised in horror lopped off to discourage whistleblowers.

We still have to burn the small bits and branches not big enough for the chipper, which will take a few days. Next, the wood we set aside for firewood will need to be sawed into lengths that fit into the cubby that is outside the kitchen, within easy reach of where we are planning an outdoor pizza oven. The h has been busy sketching it out with a mechanical pencil on graph paper, enlisting Alberto’s help with the design.

this makes me sad

To make myself feel better about the trees I wandered around the Secret Garden, which is already looking healthier after undergoing tree removal and heavy pruning. Now that the sun can actually penetrate the canopy, the bushes that form the edges of walkways that meander throughout the garden are starting to fill out. Lo and behold I found 4 eggs; in fact, I had to wait for one, the hen was in the process of laying when I bent down to peer at her in the nest she’d made for herself in the now-sparse underbrush. When I returned to the house the h was returning from the campo, another egg in hand.

Seeing me with the eggs, Tiago told me where I could buy more hens. We have only nine, and twenty one roosters, possibly more - it’s hard to get a count when there is a batch of eight or nine that look more or less identical, like Michael Keaton in that movie where he is cloned, all of them looking alike with the exception of minor details, only in the personality displaying individuality.

While the current crop of hens are certainly beleaguered - two of them are missing feathers from their backs where over-enthusiastic roosters mating with them have torn them out - I can’t see trying to introduce an outside hen to this big intergenerational family. And at any rate, we have Princess Leia, and the eight babies just born in the garden shed; that’s definitely one more hen, and likely three or four…in less than a year they will be laying. I know from experience they won’t all survive without intervention by us, though summer peeps have a better chance than chicks born in the fall or early spring. We plan to ensure at least half a dozen hens survive this summer, more if possible.

(as I write this Princess Leia perches on my left hand, shifting her weight with the movement of my typing fingers).

On Monday the guys started burning the remainder of the shrunken deadfall. The h grabbed his chainsaw and worked up in the upper orchard where there is a pear tree, fig tree and cherry tree that needed attention. Soon the deadfall was growing again. Tiago and Paulo manned the burn barrel. Alberto’s car pulled into the driveway, Rosa in the seat next to him, just back from the orthopedic surgeon. Alberto pointed out the newly pruned trees and Rosa nodded and smiled. You were stopped by the rain? Alberto asked. In my halting Portuguese I explained that one tree was left with branches because of me, because I cried over how ugly they were. Sao feios (they are ugly), I said, making a face. Rosa laughed, and Alberto told me that next year the trees would be beautiful again. 

Late in the afternoon I noticed a Whatsapp message from Tiago. Sandra, he asked. Can I please prune some of your olive tree? I laughed, not just at his polite wording but also because it did look quite silly, a lone tree with branches while everything else was pruned so brutally - like a woman in a formal dress poolside, everyone else naked. I gave him the thumbs up and soon the sound of the chainsaw mixed with the smell of smoke. So I have been outnumbered, crying over something everyone else laughed about. Perhaps it’s not about the trees, this need to cry. I’ve been aware for days now of the pending three year anniversary of the death of my ex husband. I have lost friends, my business partner, and my daddy, but nothing compares to the grief that still invades me over the loss of my ex. He drew an unlucky card - a rare, incurable form of colorectal cancer took him just a few months after his fifty-sixth birthday, way before he had enough time to spend with his children, way before moving to Portugal was even a gleam in my eye. He’d be so thrilled for me, if he were here, and among the first to visit regardless of how primitive - he was always venturing forth, buying a house in Brazil, and ultimately moving to China. Coming to Portugal eased some of the intensity of the grief - I am no longer surrounded by places we went to together, or people that knew us back when. But his absence in this world is like a presence, not unlike the way a footprint reminds you of the foot that left it.

Tuesday I applied for and received a burn permit and the work continued without incident… until lunchtime. The h and I made our weekly trek to the grocery store and returned home before the guys took off for lunch - on a burn day it’s important to have someone around the smoldering ashes, even if they seem safely banked. We put the groceries away, I fed the chickens and the h retreated to the house to get ready for a conference call. I was heading over to the quinta to put some groceries in the fridge when I heard the unmistakable sound of flames crackling. It is a sound I became very familiar with last year, minding the burn barrel for a month’s worth of days. I glanced at the driveway where Tiago parks his car, but it was still gone, it still being lunch time.  I looked over at the campo where the guys had set up the burn pit and saw an orange lick of flame. It was hard to see in the bright daylight but I didn’t wait. I ran back into the house, shouting Herb’s name. 

There’s a fire in the campo, I yelled as I ran up the steps and grabbed two buckets of water sitting in the bathroom. 

I’ll get the hose, the h said, leaping up and racing out the door.

Hurry, I shouted, It’s almost out of control.

He ran down the quinta road; at the quinta there is an outside sink with a faucet the h attached a splitter to, with one hose going up to the horta and one going to the quinta garden, where we have loquat trees, an almond tree, trumpet bushes and other things planted. The h recently replaced one of those hoses with one that is extra long, which easily extended over the quinta courtyard wall and into the campo.  

By the time he reached the fire I’d already thrown one bucket of water onto the flames and was judging where to hurl the second for best effect. I backed off and let him direct the powerful hose stream at the front of the brush pile where tall flames were crackling among the pruned olive branches tangled there. Steam hissed like a dragon.  A great geyser of smoke rolled out from the brush pile, enveloping me in its thick gray stink.

After dousing the flames, the h doused all of the wood that was piled up waiting to be hauled to the woodbox in the kitchen patio, then the trunks of the newly pruned olive trees. 

After ten minutes of spraying we stood back and looked at the brush pile which now featured a good-sized burnt black stain, like a cancer cell arrested from spreading.

Good catch, love, the h said.

I nodded. It wasn’t just  luck - we had timed our return from the store purposely to ensure the fire area wasn’t untended. At the end of the day Monday I checked the burn area several times to make sure a smoldering bit wasn’t fanned by an errant breeze into a dangerous spark. After darkness fell, I looked out over the campo from the second floor balcony to make sure there was no orange glow of embers. I did see a spark, but it was from a firefly rather than fire. I ran downstairs and outside to stand where I saw the firefly; within a few minutes I was surrounded by their tiny, phosphorescent winking. I caught one and brought it into the house for the h to see, then took it outside and set it carefully on the wall, where it blinked on and off for a bit before flying off to illuminate what darkness it could. 

While it wasn’t just luck that we stopped the fire from spreading, luck was involved, certainly - had I not decided to walk to the quinta right away to put away some things that could have waited, I may not have detected the fire until it had grown much larger. It was on the verge of becoming serious when we doused it; another five minutes and it would have been a situation requiring the intervention of the  bombeiros. 

After the fire was put out Alberto wandered over,  perhaps having seen the great cloud of smoke. Similar clouds had been rolling from the campo all morning, but his sharp eyes likely detected this one was happening while Tiago’s car was gone. 

Tivemos um incendio, I told him. He nodded and went to join the h who was still hosing down the surrounding area. 

When Tiago and Paulo returned we told them what happened. They looked serious. We were all subdued, looking at the burn-scarred pile. How quickly everything can go from fine to on fire.

Later the h and I discussed the worst case scenario: the entire pile of brush igniting and also burning the good wood we’d piled to the side, wood that we intended for the outdoor pizza oven and the fireplace on the second story of the palaceta, in the room that will one day be the sitting room outside of our bedroom. 

We would have lost all the trees too, the h said, meaning not just the row of de-limbed olive trees - there are six of them - but the fig and almond trees at the back of the campo too.

There are two houses adjacent to the campo - a neighbor, and our own guest house (the quinta). The neighbor’s house is made of stone and sits on the other side of an old wall that would have acted as a firebreak. The quinta, also stone, is separated from the campo by a large stone courtyard and a wall. The two outbuildings that sit on the eastern and southern edge of the campo are both brick, with metal roofs.  So there would not have been any domiciles burning down… but it would have been extremely embarrassing to lose control of a fire in a field, especially being foreigners with residence permits. It also would have been dangerous - not to buildings, maybe, but definitely to people.  I still bear the scars from last year’s burn, and that was controlled within a barrel. In today’s case, the fire would have run amok in a much larger area, eating a ten foot brush pile and all of  Saturday’s work, now represented by four thousand pounds of wood chips.

I don’t know if anyone in the surrounding apartment houses happened to look out and see us in the distance, dashing to and fro with buckets and hoses. I suppose we will not know until we get a letter from the camara informing us we’ve been reported. It’s nothing we can or should worry about; after all, we followed the established protocols - registering for a burn permit, notifying both the bomberios and the municipality of our activity, ensuring there was an adequate water source nearby.  Still, we were very, very lucky, and we know it.

we still have pretty trees to celebrate while the olive trees grow back

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