Engineer, Lumberjack. Practically the same

If you’re not a homeowner, let me tell you something about homeownership.  It sucks.  If the water heater goes out, sucks to be you.  There’s no landlord to call.  You better hope that you find a really awesome youtube video or a very informative guy at Home Depot.  If your heater won’t heat the house higher than 63 degrees, it sucks to be you.  You better hope you know an honest heater repair guy.

Let me tell you about owning a piece of forest.  It sucks even more.  I guess if you own 60 acres and a mule, then it probably sucks less.  If a tree falls on the back forty, who cares?  Free firewood!  But if you only own 1.65 acres, each tree is like a mini heart attack.  Each tree could fall on something you care about:  the house, the car, a kid, the transformer.

We have two dead trees on our property, and one more which might be ours or might be the neighbors.  Since we’ve moved in, Dave’s been talking about being a lumberjack.  It wasn’t very helpful when all of his engineering friends came over and thought they were lumberjacks too.  There were talks about angles and hypotenuses and trajectories and laws of physics and gravity.

Now that it’s turned cold and there are things that us Californians aren’t used to, things like ice and snow and sleet, people are talking about things which we have no knowledge of.  Things like water spigot covers and tree hazards and freezing pipes.  Our neighbor had trees felled and they came over and gave us a quote for $1600 to cut three trees down!  Yes $1600 to cut a trees down.  I figured they could fall and hit the house and our insurance deductible would be less than that.

We woke up this morning to a fire in the back yard.  I called the neighbor to make sure she knew that there was smoke billowing from the forest.

Her:  Yes.  A tree fell last week and we’re burning the branches.

Me:  I heard that tree fall!  It made a loud crack!

Her:  Really?  We didn’t hear it and it came feet from the house! By the way?  Are you going to take care of that tree in the front? It looks hecka (except she didn’t say hecka because that’s very NorCal) scary!

I relayed the conversation to Dave.

Dave:  I’ll go cut it down right now!

Me: Don’t you have homework to do?

Dave:  I take my procrastination seriously!

Me:  So, it’s not that I don’t trust you and I’m not confident in your lumberjack skills, it’s just that I’m a big fan of gravity.

And I thought that ended the conversation.

Until I heard the chainsaw fire up.

Please excuse the terrible pictures.  I didn’t dare venture from the confines of the house.  I thought about taking all the kids to the movies but then if Dave ended up sawing through a limb no one would be here to call 9-1-1.

Marshall:  What is Dad doing?

Me:  Cutting down the tree!

Marshall:  I didn’t know we needed firewood that bad.

Nate:  I hope he doesn’t die.  I like him.

And then the chainsaw stopped.  I wondered if there were emergency tree surgeons willing to come finish cutting down a tree on a Saturday during Thanksgiving weekend.  I also wondered how much that would cost us.  I figured at least a 50% mark up.  I wonder if they’d take some banana bread in trade.  1600 loaves of banana bread.  Totally doable.  Maybe I could barter with my R2D2 hat.

Dave:  I’m going to run to Sears.  It looks like I need some chain grease.

Me:  You’re going to leave the tree like that?!?

Dave:  Yes.  One of two things will happen.  It will be like that when I come back.  Or, it will fall while I’m gone and the work will be done.

Me:  Or it will fall and take out the transformer and we’ll be without power and there will be a live power line wriggling on the ground and we’ll start a fire.

Dave:  Come on, it’s too wet to start a serious fire.  And if the tree takes out the transformer we’ll just call PSE and tell them a tree fell.

Me:  And we’ll get a big bill for taking out the power line.

Dave:  Only if we admit to it.

Me:  I think it’s rather obvious you were trying to cut down the tree.

Dave.  Rouge lumberjacks.  Happens all the time.

And he made the final cut.  The tree didn’t fall.  It was a little anticlimactic.

And then Dave pushed on it.

Nothing.

Then he started to cut some more with the chainsaw.  From inside we saw the tree swaying back and forth.  I started fervently praying protection over the house, the cars, Dave, the driveway (I had been praying before, but this was a little frantic, like incessant doorbell ringing or stalkerish calling).

The scariest moment was when the tree finally decided to cave to gravity. TIMBER!!!

I think I’ll have to go out and buy him a red and black plaid wool shirt and a pair of suspenders. All of the kids ran outside and the neighbors came out of their hiding places.