The Ridge Trail I Opened Up

I stood there in the middle of the grown-over grade with my heart going and I thought, I have twelve days.

I did not do it alone, and I want that said.

My husband Dale came home from his shift at the co-op and I told him over supper what I meant to do. He put his fork down and looked at me for a second.

“That’s a lot of brush for twelve days,” he said.

“I know it.”

“You’ll want the chainsaw and the brush hog both.” He got up and went to the window and looked out toward the ridge like he could see it in the dark.

“That oak across the second bend, we’ll need the tractor and a chain for that. I’ll take Friday.”

He did not say one word about whether I should. That is the kind of man he is.

He heard what the gate had done to me and he started counting what tools it would take to go around it.

We worked the grade for a week and a half. Dale ran the chainsaw and I dragged brush.

His brother brought a skid steer with a brush cutter on the front and knocked back the sumac in an afternoon that would have taken us three days by hand.

A man named Carl from two roads over, who I had shod horses with for twenty years, showed up Saturday with his own saw and said he had heard what Lane was up to and he had a free day.

He did not say anything else about it, which was its own kind of sentence.

We chained the fallen oak and the tractor pulled it off into the woods. We filled the washed places with creek rock.

We cut the little cedars and left the big maples, and we grubbed the blackberry out of the bends where a horse would have to turn.

The work was hard in the good way. My hands blistered and then they callused.

I slept those nights the way you sleep when your body has spent itself on something your heart picked.

One afternoon a game warden came up the creek on a four-wheeler to see what the sawing was about.

When I told him it was the color ride moving onto my own bottom, he looked up the lit grade toward the top. “Well,” he said. “That’s a shame it come to that.”

He meant the gate, not my saw, and he put his machine in gear and left us to it.

Brenda’s husband came with a drag made of a cattle panel and weighted it with cinder blocks. He smoothed the whole grade behind us so it rode like a county road.

On the eleventh evening I rode my mare up the grade to the top for the first time in forty years, and she went up it easy, her ears forward.

At the top we came out onto the shoulder fifty yards above Lane’s quiet gate and the whole ridge was turning.

I sat there on my horse and cried a little where nobody could see me.