Would you?

The old tongue twister ‘How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood?’ comes from the lyrics to a song in a 1902 musical called The Runaways. Over a hundred years later, people still enjoy this playful query. This speaks not only to its test of our swift pronunciation of the ‘ood’ and ‘uck’ sounds, but also to its existential probe of the Marmota monax (woodchuck). As soon as we start uttering this tongue twister, we immediately put ourselves into the woodchuck’s shoes and deeply ponder the question of effort when applied to chucking wood.

“Steph, how much would you chuck?”

But I’m kidding. No one deeply ponders these things. Mostly we goof off with each other, move our heads in a jingly rhythm when we half sing this chucking song, and continue to breathe life into an old piece of language. Some of us might briefly ruminate on how much woodchucks in the wild do chuck, or whether they even chuck at all. We might test our knowledge of rodents in general, “Well, the beaver is known to . . .” If anyone is like me, you’ll ask, “What does that mean ‘chuck’? As in, throw? Woodchucks throw wood??”

It turns out woodchucks don’t throw wood. This is all part of the gag.

I believe the reason this nonsensical jingle has not died out in the broader culture is so clearly due to one thing: we don’t have an adequate answer to this question, and we persist to find one.

How could this be though, given all our technological advancement? Couldn’t someone have figured this out by now—the rate of wood chuck of the woodchuck? This glaring deficit in our understanding was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me, so I decided to take the bull by the horns and get the answer straight from the horse’s mouth, not turn it into a fishing expedition. Or a wild goose chase. In a manner of speaking.

There was only one individual who could elucidate this mystery for me, so off I went.

I threw on a jacket, grabbed some water and snacks. I did a quick search online to determine an ideal location for success, jumped on my bike, and rode out to the edge of a field a few miles past the suburban sprawl around here. I leaned the bike against a split-rail fence and poked around the ground until I found what I was looking for: a hole. And not just any hole, but a big enough hole. Then I stood there and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Nibbled on my snacks.

Waited some more.

Sat down on the ground.

Took a swig of my water.

Flipped through my phone. Checked email.

Called my husband to tell him I wouldn’t be home when I thought I would.

Blew my nose. Squinted at a bird. Picked a clump of grass in front of me. Threw it.

Watched the funniest cat video. Was laughing and laughing, when suddenly--a woodchuck peeked his head out of the hole!

Whoa.

I wasn’t sure what I should do. Stay seated, slowly get up, start to speak? But then he spoke.

“Ma’am, you’re blocking my sun.”

“Oh. Sorry about that.” I stood up to move, tripping over myself, all thumbs. “Pardon me. I’ll move over here. Let me just--”

“Look, I’m kind of busy,” the woodchuck told me, “Can I help you with something?”

“Well, yeah. It’s um. I wanted to know. About the. What I’m trying to say is—"

“Lady, no disrespect, but I have my buddies coming any minute to help me move this thing.” He pointed off in the distance to a pile of something I couldn’t quite see. “I’m in charge, so I need to get over there.” With that, he started to waddle off past me, and like a good curious pesterer, I followed. A hundred questions ran through my mind, the first of which: What was I getting myself into?

On our way to the ‘thing’ we ran into a pair of raccoons who were walking behind a deer.

“Hey, Chuck,” one of the raccoons said to the woodchuck.

“Hey, Mike. Thanks for coming out, man.”

“You got it. Anytime. You’re always helping us.”

With a quiet ease we all fell into single file, me in the back, Chuck leading the way. By the time we arrived at the pile, which appeared to be a large, stranded collection of wood debris dragged in by a flood, more animals were filtering in from different directions. I felt a little out of place, but nobody seemed to mind that a stranger was around. I decided that I’d help with whatever this was, just to blend in if anything.

Chuck got up on a big fallen tree to address the crowd.

“Alright, everybody. First off, thank you for coming out today. I really appreciate it.” The crowd gathered closer to hear the instructions. “What we’ll do is that assembly-line thing we did when we moved Betty’s flood pile the other month. Deer, you guys drag the pile out to the others. Raccoons, you shuttle wood out to the forest line over there. Birds and squirrels, you can clean up the smaller stuff at the bottom. Beavers, as usual, take anything you want. Any questions?”

One of the deer shouted from the back of the group. “As long as Mike doesn’t sing that Woodchuck song all day like last time!” Everybody lit up in a cackle. Mike was chuckling, his round raccoon belly shaking in a jolly vibration.

“Don’t egg me on, Larry!”

I could tell this group was a long-standing team in the business of moving flood piles out of each other’s way, among other things. Once everyone had set up into their positions, I went over to Chuck to see what my job should be.

“Chuck, do you want me to help the deer? I can lift some of those branches and logs.”

“Yeah. That’d be great. By the way, what did you say your name was?”

“Stephanie,” I said, squatting down to hold out a couple fingertips. Chuck reached up and shook them.

“Nice to meet you, Steph.”

“Same here. So, one question. Why do you need to move this pile anyway?”

“You see that pile?” he asked me, pointing. I nodded. “It’s sitting on top of my front door.”

“Ohh. Not good.”

“Not good indeed. And when we have these floods, sometimes it leaves its memory in places we’d rather it not. So, we all come together and clear out the wood as a team. It gets done faster that way. With a bunch of us working on it, we can chuck the stuff out of the way in no time.”

Wow. Suddenly I was thinking what you’re thinking. This was how a woodchuck chucked wood.

So unexpected. So brilliant.

And looking at the huge pile, that was how much it could chuck.

“I heard Larry mention the woodchuck song,” I said to my small new friend. “I guess I should confess. That’s why I came out here—to find out how much wood you can chuck.”

“Steph, I know that’s why. It’s why people come out here usually. Some come to hunt. Some come because they get lost on their hikes. But mostly they come to find me to ask that same question over and over.”

“They do?” I was incredulous. Why then was the question still asked? Why hadn’t the word gotten out?

“Yup. And I give them the same answer over and over: it depends. It depends on how many folks are in my court, how many resources I have, how much has already been set into place that I can work from, what has worked, what might. I don’t know why they keep coming and asking. Do they think the answer will change?”

This I didn’t have an answer to. I didn’t know why this was. Maybe it’s because we tend to think about a goal in terms of only ourselves. Since a personal goal asks for a personal effort, maybe we focus only on that. This seems like an automatic logic to have. But Chuck and all these creatures were telling a different story, and frankly, it has been our human story, too. We don’t do anything by ourselves. Anything we do is only possible through a network of other effort, ideas, resources, encouragement, tools. To solve a problem or make progress, we go wide, not stay narrow. It’s an interconnection thing.

“Steph, it’s not a big mystery. Just look at me. Does it look like I can chuck pieces of wood? Twigs maybe.” Chuck flexed his miniscule bicep for me and gave a raised eyebrow to indicate a ‘negative’ on that. “My goal is to be able to use my front door again. That’s a reasonable goal. But I can’t do it myself. I need to find a broader way. It just takes some thinking and planning, and some conviction that it’s possible.”

“Then you just do it?”

“Not always. Sometimes I get dragged down by my own inertia or futility, but then I look around at these guys,” he said, sweeping his arms towards the hodgepodge team starting to disperse the pile. “These characters, they keep me going. I readjust my view on things.”

Now I was getting it. We keep each other in our own games. We provide encouragement, accountability, direct help, or feedback. Any one of which can be the make-or-break in our journey forward. But I knew this already.

“Chuck, I think I just learned from you something I keep forgetting.”

“Hey. We can all forget. But we can all remember, too.” Then he pointed his thumb over at the deer nudging the larger pieces of wood off the pile. “You want to go over there and help Don and Helen?”

“Absolutely.”

Hence, I was off to move a pile of wood off a front door. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be helping a woodchuck chuck wood. It got me to wondering whether I might start to set up my own support structures. Seeing how hopeful it all was, I think I would. What about you? Would you?