# Maybe it's somethin' in our water?



## Rearden (Oct 6, 2011)

Guy livin' over the hill behind me stops by askin' for a hand with a "little problem". I had been hearin' a small saw run kind of laboriously and intermittently for the last couple of days, but that's not uncommon in our suburban heaven. Turns out Heathcliff had a stand of 60 plus year old yellow locusts (I remember them bein' there when I was a kid), and he got tired of the wind takin'em down willy nilly. The good news was that they weren't near anything valuable. The bad news was that he appears to have not given much thought to a plan for what order he was going to work.

He thought that since the crowns looked dead, he figured that whatever he cut would just go crashing through the limbs of the nearby trees and all would be well. Mind you the tree tops were already intertwined and the trunks were only 30 or so feet apart, providing no room for any momentum to even begin to build. So the first tree is retarded and decides to fall in a direction other than the one that he wished for. Of course his cuts were perfect for where it ended up, but it was still the dumb tree's fault. So the 80-90' high problem was to be solved by dropping the tree that had snagged the first one. Somehow the threat of the first crashing down on him escaped notice till he was half way through the second, so then he decided to try and drop a third onto the first and force the issue. Long story longer, by the time he managed to get his pride in check he had 5 leaners all tied up in a pick up sticks knot, with two of them still close to vertical. The 5th one convinced him to seek help when it popped and hopped. Turned out to be easier to resolve than expected, but I was still amazed at how much trouble one guy could manage to get into with one little saw and no adult supervision. Every one of the trees that he laid into could have been disaster the way he worked, but they say that God watches out for drunks and idiots. I think this fella might have been both.

Maybe there's something to the high incidence of this sort of stuff around here and the fact that there's a liquor store right next to the closest Home Depot sellin' saws?


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## troythetreeman (Oct 6, 2011)

nice story
wrong forum


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## Rearden (Oct 7, 2011)

Sorry, where should it have gone? I'll see about gettin' it out'a here.


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