Suburban Lumberjack The temperature one day last week got down low enough to have a fire in the fireplace for the first time this year. It’s a good thing, because I’ve got some wood to burn. I have to feel sorry for anyone up here who makes a living selling firewood. I remember paying them good money for their labors. Now I’m the lumberjack. Like the lady down on Wildwood who has the sign, “Free snow, take all you want,” or something like that, I’d almost gladly hand the wood out to strangers if I hadn’t toiled over it for so long. There are probably many of us who have recently learned to be lumberjacks. I’m kind of a burly guy, anyway (what us overweight guys who still have halfway muscular shoulders and arms like to call ourselves), but a few months more of this lumberjacking and I’m going to look like the governor of California. Excuse me, the governor-elect is what I mean—I would have to run from here to Florida and consume nothing but bread and water the whole time before I could look anything like the current governor. But I must have that bionic Terminator eye because my trees are falling with deadly accuracy. I’ve been studying the art of dropping trees extensively for one reason—I’m in big trouble if I don’t get it right, because my trees have to fall all the way across my weekender neighbor’s property. Last week I was doing some writing work for a longtime friend down in San Diego County. I asked him if I could wait until tomorrow on his project because I had just dropped one of my dead trees on my neighbor’s property, and I wanted to make sure that I got the mess in his yard cleaned up before he came here on the weekend and saw it. I explained that I had permission from my neighbor to drop the tree there, but I didn’t want him to come up for the weekend and see the mess. My friend in San Diego replied, “Sure, tomorrow is fine. I just wish my neighbors were so gracious with me as you are.” This guy in San Diego lives in a tract home development. I said: “Don’t give me too much credit—your neighbors might be just playing their music too loud. Be thankful that they aren’t dropping something in your yard that can be heard three miles across the valley when it hits, and would smash your house to bits if their calculations were a little off.” I think my neighbor is probably a hundred times more gracious than I’m being. Not to worry. I looked at the slope, the lean of the tree, found a good lane, and made the cuts in the front and the back to aim my fall dead-on to a stump of a recently cut tree about 100 feet up the hill. It was a clean line of sight with no trees in the way, and it was far from his house. I cut the big notch in the front, then made the horizontal back cut and left just enough of a hinge to where it was almost ready to go, and then my plans fell apart—the wind started blowing. When the wind starts becoming a factor, you can no longer be sure that it’s going to hit the middle of that stump that you’re aiming for 100 feet up the hill. It could smash you and your fence behind you, or it could take out your neighbor’s entire back deck on the top floor by falling too far uphill the other way. It was time to stop. I put the wooden puzzle piece I had created back into the notch in the front and drove two iron wedges into the back cut and hoped for the best. We had wind for a week. Every time I heard a loud noise during that time I jumped. Finally, we had a good, calm day in which I had no other commitments. I took the wedge out and started cutting farther into the back cut, but my chainsaw wouldn’t cut—it just made a bunch of smoke. (I later found out that I had put the chain on backward after doing some maintenance.) I took out the saw and began banging two wedges into the back. It took nearly a half hour of swinging the sledge, and that tree was at about a 50-degree angle before it started cracking. It hadn’t given up easily to the bark beetles and it wasn’t going to give up easily to me. The tree fell slowly, and when it hit, the top laid out dead-center on top of that stump on the top of the hill in my neighbor’s yard. It’s a big relief to have the scary part done. Three things tell you that you’ve done it right—you’re still here talking about it, you’ve got all your fingers and toes, and nobody’s suing you. |
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