Uncle Jack and I spent a couple hours this weekend hauling away at least five yards of trash that had been strewn around camp over the last couple years that I have been away. An old refrigerator that no longer worked, blow up toys that had long been deflated and just general trash. Five huge garbage bags were filled with pop and beer cans and delivered to the grandkids for fair money. Five yards is a lot of crap if you think about it. Fifteen foot high by fifteen foot wide by fifteen foot long, cube of garbage. Afterwards I picked up a wheelbarrow load of broken beer bottle glass, cigarette butts and hundreds of those damn plastic wrappers for the straws on those Juicy Juice drinks that had been discarded throughout the campground. Though I don’t know how grandpa and grandma acquired the property camp now sets on I want to be clear why I spent the time, energy and sweat equity to build Beaver Hollow.
I built Beaver Hollow because of a drunken party.
Not so I would have a place to hold drunken parties.
For me the “home place” where Beaver Hollow is built, exudes, for a lack of better words, a healing, regenerating power for me. My fire department hobby sometimes leaves me sadden and confused. Beaver Hollow seems to be the only place where I can truly relax and contemplate about life. Twenty five years ago when I stood in the rough lower field, before the old logging slash piles were burned away to make room for lawns. Before the tall weeds, blackberries and dry grass were hacked back to the forest edge, I knew this was going to be a magical place. No, I am not any kind of visionary but like any painter starting with a blank canvas I could see Beaver Hollow unfolding in my minds eye. No, I did not have the money to make all the features come alive at once. I had to bring them to life when I could afford too or had the time too.
I clearly remember when Lauren was helping me one afternoon clear away the brush and numerous misshapen fir trees growing around where the old pavilion now stands. There was this one little fir tree about ten feet tall that had six tops trying to grow out of it. This poor skinned up tree had been ran over so many times in its young life with a old rusty Caterpillar skidding turns of logs into the field it was a miracle it was still trying to grow at all. Lauren came at it with a chainsaw to cut it down. Almost jokingly I jumped in front of it with my arms up and proclaimed “No!!! Lauren, I can save this one”. Lauren gave me one of those looks like, hummm, ok, good luck. I picked out the most predominate top and cut the others away. Through the years I nursed that little tree back to health. Over time it became known as the "Hickerson Tree". It finally grew so big one summer we had to move the fire pit farther away because the fir bows were growing so far from the stem we were starting to singe them with my story telling bon-fires. It had grown to about forty feet tall before it was removed for a “improvement”. Keep in mind, sometimes one mans improvement is another mans decline. With that said, I thoroughly enjoyed working this past weekend at Beaver Hollow turning it back into what my minds eye saw twenty five years ago, despite that the six topped little fir tree was now missing.
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