A Mental Health Holiday

One January, when I was living in Marietta my friend, Scotty, from California worked out a weekend visit with me when he had a business trip to Georgia. The last night he was there we were hit by an ice storm and the early morning was very noisy with pine branches cracking and whole trees falling in the woods behind the house. When we were both up and moving about, I was standing at the patio door pointing out a large pine tree that had fallen - away from the house, thank God - presenting its entire route structure. Just as I reached out to indicate the tree I was talking about, a large branch from a tree beside the house cracked overhead and dropped at my feet with great fanfare, aluminum, splintered wood, and ice, having ripped off the gutter over the patio door on the way down. As Maxwell Smart would say, "It missed me by thaaaaaat much." I looked at pine trees differently after that - especially the ones overhanging the house.

A year or so later - I don't do anything on the spur of the moment - I couldn't stand the suspense any longer and decided to have a number of trees taken down, before I found one in bed with me some morning or sharing my La-Z-Boy. I called an appropriate contractor and we came to an agreement. He'd take down X number of trees and I'd pay him Y dollars. The evening before his crew was to come, I went around the house and marked all the trees that I wanted taken down with blue tape, thinking that they would be finished with the job by the time I got home from work. As it turned out, I couldn't stay away and miss the show. I think I called into work with a lack of interest. . .

As expected, they really put on a show. The crew turned out to be very hierarchical. There were two cutters who competed with each other, each had an assistant who handled the ropes, and there was a young fella, who was more or less a "gofer". There was another guy who drove the Bobcat who was kind of a referee, or perhaps a scorekeeper. When all the trees were down, he moved the logs to the truck and the branches out to the chipper in the cul-de-sac.

Each cutter selected a pair of the trees that I had identified, worked out a plan with his assistant, and rigged the ropes in a manner best suited to accomplish the plan. Then the Bobcat driver counted down and started the race. Each cutter went up his first tree lopping off branches on the way up, then descended and did the same thing on his second tree, topping that one at a predetermined height. Then they used the ropes that they had rigged to cross over to the first tree again, top that one and return to the ground - hopefully, to win the race. They were having a great time and I was enjoying it as well, albeit from a safe distance.

When they had each taken down four trees, they took a rest break, dropping with their assistants on one or another of the several piles of pine boughs scattered around my yard at the bases of the trees they had dropped. The highlight of the show was when the winning cutter - still catching his breath - called over to the gofer and told him to grab a chainsaw. The kid's eyes lit up, thinking he was going to get a chance to use a saw. When he'd run over to the truck and fetched a saw, the cutter told him, "Now cut down to the bottom of that pile and see if you can find my cigarettes for me."

A couple of months later when I had plumbing problems and my backyard was awash, I called someone out to empty the septic tank. That was a story in itself, but it all goes back to having the trees removed. Turns out the Bobcat driver, besides keeping score for the cutters, managed to destroy the drain field for the septic tank, carrying the logs across the soft back yard out to the truck. The picture above shows the shovel at the end of the first day of digging the new drain field. The picture below shows the same section of the yard when they were "finished". I was just so glad to have them all gone, that I didn't even squawk at the mess I was left with.