OCTOBER 23, 2026 – After 10:00 this morning, I spent all day in the tree garden working on my “patented” system for protecting the hemlock trees against winter-browsing deer. Much of the work was tedious, with moments of extreme tension, such as when I tried to catch a falling oak leaf. When it dropped to within a foot of my face, an invisible updraft yanked the leaf suddenly upward and over my head. I back-pedaled spontaneously—forgetting that I was standing beside a repurposed dock lying over an ordinarily marshy area. Had I not caught myself before falling all the way backward onto a bucket bristling with wire stakes, a saw and hand-clippers, the rest of this post would’ve read very differently.
There were other times when I was standing on a stepstool to gain enough height to fasten deer netting at the top of my seven-foot-high fencing posts, consisting of four-foot, treated 1 x 2 sticks spliced onto five-foot-high metal stakes. The stool rested on ground sloping toward the post, and I easily imagined that if I should cast caution to the wind, I risked falling onto the post, snapping the wooden top from the metal stake and impaling myself on the stake. All in an ironic effort to save three luscious hemlock trees from deer chomping.
No sooner had I contemplated the irony of impalement to protect “deer candy” from the deer, than a doe came prancing down the path on the backside of Blueberry Hill. The creature passed within 10 feet of me and paid me no mind. I took no offense but wondered by what means the deer might attempt to break or butt or chew its way through the double barrier of deer netting and plastic snow fencing around a trio of very robust and beautiful hemlocks. Just to be sure, I added a few extra fasteners.
After completing the Berlin Wall of anti-deer fencing around those three trees (out of a total of 30 hemlocks), I ferried tools, deer netting and cable ties down to the other end of the tree garden 500 feet away, to fortify the cages I’d constructed around the dual Gold Medal Champions of the hemlock inventory. Earlier, I’d wrapped these cages with seven-foot-high spliced snow fencing. Upon reading that deer will chew through such fencing, however, I decided to cover them with deer netting, as well.
Simple in theory; hours of work in practical application. With one cage completed, after the sun went down, I worked as much as I could on the other cage, but when darkness fell and I remembered that I was within 20 feet of where a black bear had surprised me a week ago, I decided it was time to pack up and head back to the cabin.
If today’s project was not in the “zen zone,” it certainly produced memorable moments. When I was tossing the deer netting about, I felt like a deep-sea fisherman casting his nets. When I was trying my own patience in attempting to line up the ends the plastic cable ties I use to fasten netting to posts, I pretended I was a sailor threading a fallen halyard back through the top of the mast. Ten tries and . . . voila! Now move stepstool to the next post and repeat. By making a game of it, I turned tedium into an analogy that gave me a sense of accomplishment.
Several times, though, I experienced the magical—in each case, by simply looking skyward. Once I turned my gaze up at the exact moment a bald eagle floated overhead—not more than 50 feet in the air. It was the epitome of quiet grace—though I knew it was on the prowl for rodents below. If I thought, “majestic,” the eagle was thinking, “Where’s dinner?”
The most beautiful moments, however, and there many, came when a gust would blow through high overhead, and the surrounding oaks released their leaves in great abundance. These releases seemed to have emanated straight from a children’s book known for its colorful and whimsical illustrations. At times hundreds of leaves filled the air above me, falling, floating, turning, landing. No two fell exactly alike, and in fact, the descent of each was a remarkable show to behold. Minutes passed before I realized I’d been mesmerized, almost hypnotized by the amazing acrobatics of each leaf, a veritable “show-off” on its one trip from branch to ground. I imagined all the leaves as rudderless paper airplanes competing not for speed or distance but for attention by a single earthbound observer. This interaction with the whimsical flight of leaves gave me great delight. Such a simple thing, really—all I had to do was be there and behold.
Tomorrow I shall finish the second cage, then set up more conventional netting around the rest of my stock—before heading home.
What a day, what a place, what a life.
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
