If there’s any character in folklore that I can relate to, it’s John Henry. We all know the story of how John Henry went toe-to-toe with a steam-powered steel-driver. It was man against machine, muscle against technology. In the end, John Henry won, but the stress caused him to have a heart attack and die.
In college, I answered an ad where a man was looking for someone to split firewood. I had hoped those days were behind me when I left Sand Mountain, but I always needed money. I had been splitting wood since I was eleven using a maul, which is like a big steel wedge on a handle. And I became quite proficient at it.
Imagine my surprise when I got to the man’s house, and he had a state-of-the-art hydraulic wood splitter. I could say it was the nicest one I had ever seen, but the fact is, I didn’t even know they existed. That first day, while he and his crew were out cutting wood, I split every piece of firewood in his yard. He was so amazed; I didn’t want to tell him I could have done it twice as fast with a maul.
In my mid-twenties, a friend in Montgomery asked me to help him build a deck. I knew we would need about a dozen postholes and was not particularly excited about using posthole diggers again. During those firewood-splitting days, I had to build a 15-acre fence and dig every hole. After an hour, both hands had blisters. An hour more, and they all burst, soaking my gloves. And I still had several hundred holes to dig.
I was in for another surprise. My friend had rented a two-person motorized auger. It had double handles shaped like a big X with a throttle on one grip. Watching that huge drill bit churning out perfect holes in seconds made me shake my head. I’ll turn 59 the day this article runs, and I still have the callouses on each hand from manually digging those holes 48 years ago.
Dad planned ahead and had our well dug and pump installed a hundred yards away, where he planned to build a new house. Unfortunately, it didn’t materialize for decades. When I was 14, I used a shovel with a long, narrow blade and dug a line 100 yards long and a foot deep to run water to our little house. Wait, there’s more. Dad accidentally plowed up the line, so I did it again.
Hence, the first time I saw a ditch witch, I was in love. “You’re not a witch,” I said. “You’re the most beautiful woman in the world.”
Neal Wooten is a columnist in the Mountain Valley News and North Jackson Press newspapers. He can be reached at [email protected].
