Manpower, I’ve decided, is like the peak of Everest. Not many get there and they leave a megatrail of garbage along the way. Useful Fact: if you’re ever crazy enough to climb Mount Everest, in the Dead Zone at the peak where the oxygen runs out, you’ll be staggering past the corpses of long-dead climbers. Impossible to cart them away. Don’t get too big for your crampons.

Anyway, feel free to skip the following description of the MacAvoy Woodpile, as stacked by yours truly last July. It’s behind the house in the middle of the clearing. It’s two tiers deep, oriented west-east to catch the prevailing winds, the top covered with a black tarp (maximum heat absorption, hence maximum evaporation, up to fifty percent of the weight of green wood is water—I could go on). The whole thing sits on wooden pallets from Home Hardware. No bottom rot in our woodpile, no sir.

I lug six pallets from the cellar. First decision, where should they go? Don’t want them under the trees. They shouldn’t go too close to the back of the garage. Should I start by taking wood from last year’s pile and stacking it in the cellar?

Should I lie down on the grass, put my ball cap over my eyes, and go to sleep?

After I lay the pallets on the far side of the present pile, I tip several wheelbarrow loads of wood onto the grass beside them. Birch logs, half-split, the grain pale. Put ‘em bark side up, leave gaps for air circulation, one-over-two then two-over-one. I quit on the third row. I’ve shown willing without doing so much it’ll take me all day tomorrow to redo it.

1.4 [the Semple challenge]

CASSIE’S WATCHING Treehouse when Opal gets home. Floyd won’t be back for another hour and a half, and I’m in a lousy mood. I sneak out the side door, tramp down the driveway, and cross the road by the bridge. It’s one of those days to plunk myself on a rock beside the river and blot everything out.

Today, it doesn’t work. Two cords of wood. Bruises on my wrist. Thirty-one days in July. Thirty-one more in August. Cassie and me. Me and Floyd.

The river’s so freaking goal-oriented, always on a big tear to reach the sea.

Eventually I stand up, wincing because the granite’s rough and I don’t have much in the way of padding. I’d better hike home. It would be just like Floyd to skip out early.

Then, as I clamber up the bank to the road, I get lucky.

Glenn Semple’s walking across the bridge, his greyhound, Igor, ahead of him. No one else on the road owns a dog; but if they did, it’d be chained up, not mincing along on a pale blue leash that’s long enough for six dogs.