Me vs. Trees = uneasy truce
I'm a pretty good mechanic, plumber, carpenter, etc. I don't fool with electronics (yet) and I don't mess with anything structural beyond my ability (that is to say, everything). But for some reason I have been surrounded my entire life by individuals who are convinced that me being a great hand at gardening and carpentry = apprentice lumberjack.

I have a few disasters to relate, and they involve trees.

My father got me and a couple of his friends out to his back yard to down a rather majestic pine tree say about 10-12m high. My father and his friends were firemen, so they reasoned, if it's easy enough to use tools of destruction to save lives, it should be even easier to cut a tree down where they wanted it to go. Is my father a lumberjack? No. Are any of his friends lumberjacks? No. Am I a lumberjack? No. In my defense I can say that free beer was involved, very involved by the end of it.
My Dad and his friends reason that they can tie off and pull tension on a rope, wrapped and knotted well around the tree, and, using another tree as a pulley, they should be able to hold the rope while one of them cuts the tree. I asked at this time, "Dad that tree weighs a ton easy - we don't weigh enough to hold it or move it." He advised me at this time to shut up and help hold the rope. The rope in question was a length of life-saving rope, which has a core of spun rubber interlaced with nylon fibers...this is fantastic stuff for hauling people up out of burning buildings and stuff. It has a relatively high melting/burning point, has tremendous tensile strength...but also has a small amount of give.

So take 1)three drunken idiots hauling on a length of dangerous rope 2) another drunken idiot with a chain saw 3)a tree easily twenty years younger than the one being cut down "acting as a pulley or a guide" and put them in a back yard with a chicken coop, water tank, bonfire hearth, and a stout heavy picnic table.
This is in fact a recipe for disaster. Away goes the tree...my father shouts "Timber!" for effect, as he has cut the tree at a singular angle that he feels will guide the tree away from the house.

Well. Yon tree has ideas of its own, and tilts exactly towards the house. It had slipped from the very steep cut he had made and was now arcing so very slowly and silently at the back of the house. I dropped the rope as soon as I felt it begin to pull and bounce in my hands, as did one of my Dad's friends. The other did not let go quite so quickly and was jerked very nearly out of his boots towards the "pulley" tree. I was standing next to the picnic table and looked up to see the tree aiming at me, and with an amount of deftness that I was not consciously aware of, literally flung myself out of the way. The picnic table? Matchsticks. I again asked my Dad about the "simple matter of weight ratios" and he said, "Nah, we just used the wrong rope - it was springy"

From that time to last Sunday, I have avoided the always regrettable but sometimes necessary task of tree-cutting or pruning.

But I have a friend, and he has a house. And that house has a tree, and on that tree grew - nothing. It had eight primary limbs, six of which were dead, and were standing wood. This spring, the limbs remained dead, but new branches and leaves are sprouting like some kind of new infection all over the trunk. New saplings are rising from the exposed roots. I cannot identify for the life of me what tree it is or what it is useful for - the folks at the nursery insist it is a mulberry - except that I know what a mulberry looks like and it's not even in the same family as a mulberry.

Anyway, it's largely dead, and we have no power tools. My friend actually was a lumberjack in his youth, no fooling, so he had a pretty good idea on how to take the dead wood down with a couple of hand saws. The last one is the hardest, and we had to fell it in such a way as to keep it from taking out our neighbor's goldfish pond and our mailboxes. How do we do this? By bringing it gently down with our hands.

Another thing about this kind of tree is that it sticks little twigs and branches in every available space. They can be very pleasant to look at, but dump sticks on his front yard every fall and winter.

So: A very twiggy and heavy branch, cut off and held at the base by us two yahoos, swiveling this way and that while we manuver it away from the house and into the street. It ends up on my shoulders while he rolls it up and over me. Fine so far, except that as it rolls, a hanging branch swivels up and snags the inside of my thigh - my unprotected, shorts-wearing, sunburned thigh. It travels the length down my thigh and ends right below the knee. At first, I do not register anything but the fact that, hey, the tree hit me. The pain was so great that I was afraid to look, and it was throbbing in such a way that I had to have him look at it to make sure it hadn't gashed my femoral artery. Blood was puddling where I stood in agony.

I now have a 16 inch long gash in my right leg, suitable for framing. It is accompanied by a huge bruise that also runs the length of the cut. I have made a decision that I will harm no further trees, and will allow gravity, the elements and time to fell dead wood.




Length? Three inches higher and there wouldn't be any to speak of.
(aeon chicken Like the Millenium Falcon, only slower and noisier, Thu 10 Apr 2008, 1:22, 3 replies)

pics plz
now.
(misskitty reeks of sex and turpentine; laudanum afternoons, Thu 10 Apr 2008, 4:05, closed)

Sounds nasty
I've never tried tree surgery and this has put me right off!

Wait till Tourette's sees it though.....

standing wood
gash
throbbing

And that's just for starters.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Thu 10 Apr 2008, 8:24, closed)

I got
held at the base
jerked
pull and bounce in my hands (tenuous I know)
(Bazongaloid, Thu 10 Apr 2008, 9:05, closed)