The Hardest Job

While Thom and Jane and Felix were gone to Halifax, Moragh and I worked on completing a list of odd jobs that they had left for us (see previous posts). One of the jobs Thom had mentioned was a "dream" of his to pave the paths in his greenhouse with flat stones from the brook. The difficult part would be getting the stones up to the greenhouse, with the only access to the brook being a narrow, steep footpath through the trees. Of course, this kind of challenge seemed like great fun to us and so we decided to commit ourselves to the task.

lovely, but heavy as sin

This is an exemplary pile of rocks pulled from the brook. We had about eight or nine of these piles to move. The first step was to bring the rock piles to a location close to the footpath. We did this mostly by tossing the rocks along the bank one at a time. Once they were gathered, the rest of the job was simply to get them along the footpath and up the hill. 

hard to tell but that hill goes up at about 80 degrees

 However, the rocks were mostly too wide to fit into any sort of bucket or basket we had available, and if we were to carry them by hand, we would have been taking them up one by one because they were so heavy.  Clearly, we needed a better system.

What we really wanted was a pulley to haul the rocks up the side of the hill with minimal effort, but we had no pulley or means to make one. What we settled on was burlap bags to carry the rocks in, and what came to be known as the rock’n slip’n slide.  

NB: way less fun than a real slip n slide

Basically, we put plastic and tarps down along the path and dragged the bags full of rocks along the “slide” one at a time. We would move all six bags along the slide and pile them at the opposite end before moving the plastic along to the next part of the path.

"easy" flat section

this was one of the worst spots to get over

Morale was high in the beginning, but after two hours of pulling extremely heavy bags through the forest, we were approaching slight despair.

We had both been clobbered in the leg by the rock bags more than once, and had our toes crushed when the bag unexpectedly got set down. Our arms were scratched up from raspberry thorns and tree branches, and of all things, our FINGERS were aching from gripping the burlap so tightly.

Moragh at the bottom of the second part of the hill.

Things turned around when we reached the bottom of the hill. We looked up at the steep slope we had left to conquer, and back at the evil bags of rocks. Hill. Rocks. Hill. Rocks. And we just started laughing. We kind of lost it. And because our muscles were so tired already, we had to collapse for a minute and just wait out the giggles like crazy people. Ever laugh and lose muscle control, say, on the stairs? This was so much worse.

looking up the last section of hill.

Long story short, we did eventually get our sanity back and the rocks are now piled by the greenhouse. We managed not to really hurt ourselves either, a few bruises and scrapes notwithstanding. 

Moral of the story: this is how hard we were working when no one was watching. Next time, we'll wait for an audience. :P