Columbus, Ohio USA
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The Great Victorian Village Stump Massacre
By Joel Knepp
March/April 2019 Issue
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My wife and I live on the poor underbelly of Victorian Village in an undistinguished frame house that was occupied only by renters since the time it was built in the 1890s. Here’s an idea of what things were like in 1984 when we moved in: one time when my wife got up to get off the bus as it stopped next to our newly purchased abode, the driver looked at her with concern and asked, “Do you know where you are?” Things were a bit rough by suburban standards, but after years of renting we were proud and happy to have a place to call our own. For this we thank Neighborhood Homes, Inc., a nonprofit entity empowered by the city to purchase trashed properties, fix them up to a minimal standard, and sell them to locals of moderate income.
Our particular house, a double, had been vacant for a year after a big fire. We had humble civil-service jobs and zero savings, but the deal came with a large chunk of free federal money and a modest amount of sweat equity which combined to make up the down payment. Additionally, we benefited from the legislature’s first-time homebuyers mortgage rate of, brace yourself, 10 percent. Yes, in those crazy ‘80s when certain financial institutions were paying 17 percent interest on savings accounts, a 10 percent mortgage was actually a great deal.
After the initial elation of trading rent for mortgage payments began to wear off, we looked around and got a bit depressed. This joint was going to take some work! Not even considering the house itself, the backyard and the vacant lot next door made the area look like a war zone. They were replete with trash trees and refuse, including screen doors, auto parts, old iron fence posts anchored in globs of concrete, ancient disintegrating walkways, and broken glass. (For more on this, see “The Crop that Never Fails” in this paper’s archives.) Being still young and vigorous, I went to work whacking weeds, pulling up the fence posts, busting up the mangled walkways, and gathering the junk. Haulers carted away load after load. We received an initiation to the neighborhood when somebody stole our hibachi off the back stoop and the house across the street burned down, but we weren’t deterred. Someone stole our pelican planter off the front porch, but we hung in. Not even the bikers down the street could drive us out. To quote Bruce Springsteen, we were workin’ on a dream!
Stump destruction
As our efforts progressed, the backyard was starting to look a bit more civilized, with one major problem remaining: a stump from what had evidently been quite a large tree still sat right in the middle. We needed to get that thing out of there to move forward with landscaping plans. Mind you, I use that term loosely. Good fortune smiled upon us in the form of two neighbors who offered to remove the stump for $100. In 1984 a hundred bucks was a lot more that it is today, not an insignificant sum for two modestly paid public employees before the blessed day that Ohio instituted collective bargaining. Money was tight; we were still using shelving made of cinder blocks and boards and driving a 1967 Volvo. However, this sounded like too good a proposition to pass up, and the deal was struck.
We arose one Saturday morning about 8:30 and looked out our kitchen window to find the industrious lads had already made considerable progress digging around the formidable eyesore that was the stump. Perhaps they thought that with an early start they’d be quaffing brewskies by noon. That didn’t happen. By lunchtime they were still at it, up to their waists in a hole ten feet across. In the middle sat the venerable stump, unperturbed. Later, to supplement the initial picks and shovels, out came every known weapon of stump destruction: axes, saws, drills, flamethrowers, and IEDs (actually not sure about the last two). Within the now-enormous hole, the guys were hacking through large side-branching roots. My wife and I left them to their Sisyphean labors while we went about doing whatever 30-somethings did around the house back in the last century. By mid-afternoon, we noticed that they had wrapped a chucky chain around the stump and attached it to a tow truck out in the street. That truck commenced to spin tires, smoke, roar, grind and generally make an awful racket. Finally, its overloaded transmission gave up the ghost. It was like watching a train wreck or a certain presidential administration; we were horrified but couldn’t bring ourselves to look away. Through it all, unmoved,
sat the stump.
Our neighbors, men of considerable inner as well as outer resources, didn’t give up, no sir. Somehow, someway, they came up with a second tow truck. We were impressed. After a lot more to-do, ‘long about 6 that evening we heard what sounded like the boom of a large cannon. I mean it was LOUD. We rushed to the back of the house just in time to see that awe-inspiring stump come out of its hole. Once in the open, we saw that it had been held in the ground by a tap root probably three feet across, and the boom was the snap of that mighty root. I don’t know what became of that massive piece of vegetation, but we surely had gotten the deal of the decade for that hundred bucks. In tribute to the incredible sticktoitiveness of those gentlemen, we threw in a case of beer.
Recall early settlers
For those who haven’t partaken of hard physical labor as well as those who have, I invite you to contemplate this: it is often said that our beloved Buckeye State once had so many trees that a squirrel could travel from Pennsylvania to Indiana and back without touching the ground. Now, as we look around Ohio, we find that the squirrels have taken up residence but most of the state is open land. Every one of those corn and soybean fields probably contained trees as big as or bigger than the one that once lived in our backyard. Most of those fields were cleared for plowing and planting by people and animals, not backhoes. The early settlers felled those million trees by hand and somehow pulled their stumps without chain saws, come alongs, Bobcats, dynamite, or tow trucks. The next time someone says they are stumped trying to solve a puzzle or figure out where they left their keys, think of our backyard, the pioneers, and the origin of that term.
Joel Knepp lives in Victorian Village with his wife Lynda McClanahan, an artist.
They performed as the musical duo Nick & Polina for many years in the area.© 2019 Short North Gazette, Columbus, Ohio. All rights reserved.
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