How It's Not Done

I have noticed this dead tree for a long time, and I always said to myself, Such an eyesore, and so easy to remove! Why does it stand so long?

On the morning of my birthday, I see this old man working on the removal, and I stopped my bike, took out my camera, and snapped away as I spoke to ceridwen on the phone. It's quite a sight, and I'll tell you why.

There are no obstacles near the tree, such as wires or the side of a house. All that needs to be done is move the vehicles and drop the trunk, in two or three pieces, to the ground. After it's down, you can cut it up.

All that could be done by two people, a chainsaw, a ladder, a rope, and some yellow caution tape. The tree would be a pile of logs in an hour.

This man is doing all sorts of things for safety, but while doing tasks that don't need to happen. He tied the tree to the house, but if a tree is cut correctly, it falls exactly where it's told. He tied himself to the tree, which is good, but he's cutting one short log at a time and lowering it by pulley, as would be necessary only if there were obstacles to worry about.

He should be about 15 feet closer to the ground, cutting the trunk in half. Doing it with a helper pulling the top with a rope gives you more control, but even that can be left off because this tree is straight, and there is no wind.

The craziest thing is that he is not using a chain saw. That is a hand saw, and he's using it at the top of a high ladder. It occurs to me that, in a pinch, I could get rid of this tree using an ax, standing on the ground. Hand saws are for keeping the helper busy cutting up branches, when you don't have another chain saw for them.

The more moving parts something has, the more things it can do wrong. This fellow is doing about twenty unnecessary things, and he's doing them way up in the air.

Given the man's age, I'll guess that he prefers to do things as he learned them long, long ago and with limited means. That's nice, but this sight gives me a very uneasy feeling. As soon as I saw it, I thought, Crazy!