What I Did In The Woods

What did I do when I got to the woods? I must have done something useful. What was it? With lumber and nails and tools all around, certainly I did something.

A cheese sandwich.

Yes, that's it. My contribution for that first day was to make a couple grilled cheese sandwiches. But that night, the big guns arrived, including my aunt, who would for the next several days keep us fed and thereby keep us on our feet. So it wasn't until they left a week later that I was making sandwiches again.

Instead, I took to the shovel.

How many days of digging was it? How many wheel barrows of sand? The important thing is that it kept me occupied while the big guns worked. And when the digging was done and the drainage pipe laid out, only one thing remained: to cut the too-long downspout with a hacksaw and connect all the pieces.

Cut the downspout with a hacksaw.

Hold on. Hold on—I was on top of it. Even I could see the risk of cutting too far and slicing into the 4x4 patio post. So I found a pair of tin snips to do most of the cutting.

I began to cut off the unneeded part of the downspout by starting with the saw and finishing with the snips. The saw made a horrific racket on the aluminum, but held at the right angle it wasn't so bad, and my cut was fairly straight.

I decided to saw a little further.

Then it happened. As I was just getting the hang of it, I heard a frantic hiss and saw a fine white mist spraying out from far side of the downspout. I didn't need to look. I knew what it was. My hacksaw had sliced thru a copper water line like a hot knife thru butter.

And that is what I did when I got to the woods.

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Half Mile Lake
Gowen, Michigan

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