If you see Victorino coming up the trail, his chain saw slung over his shoulder, you know that some work is about to get done.
Good work that wouldn't happen otherwise, like getting a very big fallen tree cut up and rolled off the trail.
Sometimes the beautiful trunks of fallen trees become beautiful boards, cut by eye with the chainsaw. These he thought we could use as planks for a boardwalk, but they look too good for that. Benches, maybe?
Where we might see only problem, impediment or hazard--more wood to noisily grind into chips--Victorino looks at the crook in a fallen tree and sees possibilities.
He'd been working for two hours. It was time for a break. Cut a section of the tree just right, and one half becomes a chair, the other a table. The chair is angled just right to get you looking up at the cicadas' flying high in the canopy. Give him enough time in a woods littered with fallen trees and he'd build a whole house.
What break in the day was ever more deserved? Thank you, Victorino.
(The chair's a couple hundred feet in along the righthand trail from the Autumn Hill Reservation parking lot. Best enjoyed with a cool beverage.)
