Rage Against The Night: The harvest

The thing about proposing a Large Art Burn [LAB] for Alchemy is that you have to harvest all the trees you’re going to need to build it, even if it’s miserably hot and humid. Which it was.

Fortunately, all us LAB types know how to work as a team, so this weekend I was out there lopping off limbs and measuring ten-foot lengths of whatever the guys with chainsaws cut down: pine and sweetgum mostly, some oaks and maples every now and then.

The large meadow in the background is where alchemy takes place. [see below]

In the photo above, you can see three of the stacks of poles we collected, each containing 25 poles and tied together to keep them from being pilfered or scattered. In all we collected 6,000 linear feet of lumber, not shabby at all for two days’ work. With another two days in August, we should easily hit our total goal of 10,000 linear feet.

Since Rage Against The Night needs mostly four-foot lengths of fairly narrow lumber, I was able to mark a great many of those for cutting when there was not another full ten feet on a trunk, and since one of the other LABs needs lengths of six feet, they and I can share a ten-foot pole by splitting it. (I will need approximately 37 feet of four-foot pieces laid side by side.)

Next step: I brought home six of the four-foot poles to experiment tying them together. We’re about to do a whole lot of improvising, aka ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS/SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION.

This is alchemy taking place (2019) / photo credit justin Majors