“I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay. I sleep all night and I work all day.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus
What’s black and white and red all over? Two mimes fighting with chainsaws.
I saw a quote this week that made me smile a lot. I’ll share it with you:
“When God put a calling on your life He already factored in your stupidity.”
A few weeks ago, a tree fell down and hit our house during a storm. And by a tree, I mean a huge one. I had snapped off 15 feet (57 Joules) up the tree. It was nearly horizontal, and resting on my favorite roof.
I’ll admit that I was sitting in the hot tub during the storm that brought down the tree.
It was glorious. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a tree fall. It’s wonderful. Approximately once every five minutes, I’d hear the tearing of wood and then, after a pause for the amount of time it took for the vertical tree to become horizontal, the crash. The next day, one more tree fell.
It fell into my house. The Mrs. sent me a picture.
I waited until Saturday when The Boy was down from Upper Lower Midwestia University to solve the problem, because the one thing a boy home from college wants to hear? “Hey, son, glad you’re back from college for a weekend of rest. I’m going to grab you and your brother and we’re going to work all day in one of your dad’s crazy adventures. Oh, and it involves you getting up early and chainsaws.”
Honestly, he should be used to it by now.
Looking back, I realize that in a normal world, I would have called my insurance company. They’d send out adjusters who would look at the tree. They’d measure it, weigh it, and sensuously cup its fallen boughs, which still happens to be legal in my state.
I’ve heard you can save a lot of money on car insurance by switching. Switching to reverse and leaving the scene.
They would look in the book of “Tree Falling On House Payments.” They’d then tell me that elm trees falling on houses in Upper Lower Midwestia were excluded. I would then correct them because I live in Lower Upper Midwestia and the tree was actually a son of a birch.
Then he says, “Oh, you’re that John Wilder. Of course! Insurance will cover it.”
Then, I would call a tree company to come and move the tree. Since everyone in town had a tree fall on their house, it would take a month for them to show up for an estimate, and another month for them to remove the tree. After the tree company charged me $2200 to move it, I’d toss the bill to the insurance company.
I’d pay the deductible (which is currently set at my left kidney for my homeowner’s policy, and my cornea for auto), and that’s it.
But would that be the Wilder Way? Of course not.
I can sleep in on the weekends. The Mrs., who is borderline insomniac, feels that this is my superpower. Generally, I can get to sleep in less than five minutes, often in less than one. The Mrs. can only sleep on Tuesdays after 9 P.M. if it’s not Daylight Savings Time. The Mrs. has walked into the bathroom to brush her teeth and returned to find me sound asleep. I can even do it when I’m driving, though my passengers don’t seem to care for it.
What’s green, fuzzy, and will kill you if it falls on you out of a tree? A pool table.
The reason I can sleep is only when I don’t have a Mission. When there’s a Mission? I wake up and I’m ready to go. I don’t even need an alarm clock. The tree on my house represented a Mission.
As it was, I had Pugsley and The Boy available, and daylight was burning. I knocked on each door as I went out to start work.
I started with the branch trimmer. Alone. The sleeping leviathans inside had yet to move.
Branch trimmers are like the scissors that Hannibal Lecter would use to, umm, prune a rose bush. This was my third set. The problem with the first two is that The Boy and then Pugsley pulled the handles too hard and bent the metal. Sometimes, living with them is like living with five-year-olds that don’t understand that they can twist metal with their bare hands.
So, a paid for the expensive trimmers this time.
Trees don’t walk. They lumber.
These trimmers were good enough to cut through about a 2” branch, which is pretty stout. I took the trimmer and started hacking. I was about 30 minutes into hacking when The Boy showed up. Pugsley showed up slightly later. It took us 10 years to convince him he had to shower, and now he has six of them a day. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that he takes a cheese plate into the shower.
When Pugsley showed up, I had him get the chainsaw, mix gas, chain oil and chainsaw sharpener. I showed him how to sharpen the chainsaw blade, which took all of 30 seconds, but then he knew how it worked. I also showed him how to adjust the chain. These may seem like small things, but they are rites of passage. There are many tools in a cabinet, and some are mostly harmless, like a screwdriver. But a chainsaw?
A fear of spiders is called arachnophobia. A fear of chainsaws? That’s called common sense.
For the next seven hours we were like ants, taking branch after branch off of the tree, first with the branch trimmer and then with the chainsaw.
I had a dentist who used to be a lumberjack. He pulled a tooth by mistake. I’ll never to Axedental again.
Finally, we were down to two major branches. By the time we’d gotten there, I realized that what I had done was, slowly, cut off all of the minor support points. It seemed like a good bet. But it was also a nagging feeling that I might be making the problem worse.
I was. While sitting down, I heard a sharp crack.
Like wood breaking. The exact sound I had heard while having a beer in the hot tub during the storm.
One of the two branches left holding up the whole tree was cracking. Looking at the tree, I saw that it was big. I estimated that what remained was about 5,000 pounds (one metric “Your Momma”) and a quick check of my estimate that I did while writing this backed that number up, unless the tree was on a low carb diet.
That 5,000 pounds was going to fall on my deck, and if I wasn’t careful? 5,000 pounds dropping 15 feet is a lot of energy – enough energy to smash a deck, a Wilder, and maybe an insurance adjustor to boot.
I had The Boy and Pugsley run into the garage looking for whatever lumber they could find that was the right length to prop up this rapidly deteriorating situation. After ten minutes, I had two 2×4’s and one mangy plank holding the tree up. It wasn’t moving, but it wasn’t stable, and it was 10.5 feet (one metric Barron Trump) up in the air.
The Mrs. took a picture of my makeshift supports. She sent it to her high school friend list. One friend who is in city planning responded, “Oh, no! This looks like all of the ladder safety videos that they make us watch.”
I thought about what I’d do, and sent The Boy and Pugsley off to buy a 10’ stepladder and some ratchet tie-offs. When they got back, I propped the 10’ stepladder under the branch, shimmed it with lumber, and then got the chainsaw-on-a-stick.
The chainsaw-on-a-stick is just that – a tiny electric chainsaw mounted on a stick. This one has an 8” blade, and is meant to cut things far away. That’s good, because that’s exactly what I intended to do. I would have liked to cut this particular tree from orbit, because it was lopsided – it looked like it wanted to twist, hard, clockwise.
I used to be a lumberjack in the Sahara Forest. Well, it used to be the Sahara Forest. I’m that good.
I tied off the branch to a convenient tree so when I cut it loose it couldn’t fall into the garden shed. I further tied off one of the remaining branches so maybe that it wouldn’t twist as it fell.
Pugsley pulled out his camera to record the action.
“Nope. Put it away.” The situation that I had put myself into was less than optimal. I realize that as men we are here not to live a life without risk, but to live a life. And the Sun was now going down. It was now or never. One way or another that tree was coming down before the Sun went down.
Getting injured because you refused to let someone else clear the tree? That seems like a stupid and futile gesture.
Well, if you’re looking for stupid and futile gestures, you’ve come to the right place. I just didn’t want my particular stupid and futile gesture to result in YouTube® videos of my death. I proceeded to take the chainsaw on a stick and started to cut into the branch.
As far as tense moments go, having the stored energy of a Ford Explorer® 15 feet up in the air, dependent upon your calculations and being right?
It’s tense.
When I was back in Alaska, I could regularly drop trees within a degree of where I wanted them to go. Was I a lumberjack? No. But I had to lay in dozens of metric Your Momma’s worth of wood a year just to heat the house. You get pretty comfortable with a chainsaw doing that.
When I cut wood in Alaska, I didn’t get overtime, even though I logged a lot of hours.
But that was 15 years (3 centimeters) ago. I cut into the tree. I first cut a relief cut in the top of the horizontal branch. I didn’t want stress to build up there and hang the whole mess up. Then I started to cut from the bottom up.
You have to cut a tree that’s acting like a beam from the bottom up. If you cut it from the top down? It will bind the saw, and you end up in a crazy place where you have a stuck saw and a Ford Explorer®’s amount of energy dependent upon you freeing it.
I cut into the tree. A lot. Then paused. The opening the chainsaw had made grew larger as the stress pulled the tree apart. I cut into the tree again. By now, the entire 5,000 pounds was hanging by a 3” by 2” slab of wood. Still no movement.
Finally, I cut deeper. I hear the “crack” as the tree split. Pugsley was watching from a safe distance. He said the tree dropped perfectly down. I wouldn’t know – I was headed the opposite direction. Not only was there the 5,000 pound tree, there was also the bit still on the roof. I could easily imagine that part whipping around as it was pulled by the main branch.
The final crack came.
The tree did come down. Perfectly. The bit left on the roof? Didn’t move an inch. Exactly as I wanted it to go. I sat down as The Boy and Pugsley removed the rest of the debris. Pugsley even got me a beer and said, “You’re done, Pop. Have a rest.”
I trained my kids that if I ever choke on a beer, they should give me the Heineken® maneuver.
The damage to the house was minimal, actually. A bit of gutter needs to be moved back into place. One shingle lost its gravel in a small circle. A solar light was broken. I need to replace one deck board, one chair, and one plastic bench. Oh, and we spent 27 hours of labor. I was sore for the next three days.
If a tree falls on your house and that’s all you lose? You’re as lucky as me. Which is pretty lucky.
Or, more likely? God has factored my stupidity into my life.
