With the birds I’ll share this lonely view…

They came to cut the trees Friday. Had gotten a call the night before from Jake Cranford saying they could come in the morning, and could we have the cars moved? You bet! Bring it on! I was just going to nap all day and maybe read Ree Drummond’s Black Heels To Tractor Wheels. But I’ve pretty much already read Ree’s story through her blog, and who needs to nap when you can watch tree cutters cutting down hundred foot-plus pines that are growing about five feet away from your house?

There were three guys working the job: owner Jake Cranford, a fellow with a CDL who drove the trucks and held the lines, and Mike the Climber. About an hour into the job, my neighbor Joel got hired to work the lines and load lumber (he used to cut trees for a living, so he just stepped into the job like he had never stopped).

Everyone was pretty low key…except for Mike the Climber. He reminded me of Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Was Appalachian lean, with a shaved head. Looked like an Irish bare-knuckle boxer, missing his two front teeth. High strung and moved real fast, but with the grace of a mountain cat. Talked fast, too. He was out front revving up the chainsaws while the other guys were gone getting the log truck. Strange sound, chainsaws outside your window on a Good Friday morning. But you gotta have good working chainsaws when you’re a climber. And you gotta make sure they all are in working order before you get up in a tree to start cutting. Takes a special kinda person to do the climbing part of tree cutting.

Took probably six hours for them to get finished. And that’s with a very short lunch break. Jake Cranford said that it would’ve taken far less time if the trees hadn’t been so close to the house. That’s okay. It was a good show for the neighborhood. Pretty much everybody and their mother came out to watch. Jilly Jill brought out a chair to the sidewalk, and Danny Dan filmed part of the cutting for a project he was working on. Dad even came from Rainbow City…

For about five minutes that day, I felt like the Once-ler from Seuss’ The Lorax. Here I was, not treating my trees with care. I was not giving them water, nor feeding them fresh air. I was allowing my trees to be, in a literal and literary sense, hacked at with axes. But these trees needed to go. They had been tossing their pinecones to and fro. And dropping big limbs when the winds did blow. I promised that in their place one day, we would plant smaller trees under which the children could play. And there the smaller trees forever would stay…and the Barbaloots in their Barbaloot suits would once again be happy and gay! Okay, I’ll stop…

Later in the day, it got back to me that someone had asked Mike the Climber how long he had been doing this kind of work. His response was, “Oh, my first day was yesterday. But I stayed in a Holiday Inn last night…” Wiseguy.

There was a point during the job where Mike the Climber was way up in the last tree standing. He’d had to go back up to take it down a bit more so that the bucket truck could comfortably reach the tree. I was standing by Jake Cranford across the street, watching. About the time I noticed that Mike the Climber had not hooked his safety up, Jake Cranford said, “He’s not got his safety on. I better remind him.” He yelled up to Mike the Climber, who laughed, and exaggeratedly hooked up his safety, then went back to work without missing a beat. I may have remarked at this point about a certain level of certifiable-ness or thrill-seeking that I thought climbers had to have in order to work the jobs they did. Jake Cranford somewhat agreed. He said of Mike the Climber, “He’s keyed up before he starts a job…and when he’s working. Will probably get off of this job, go home and kill a six-pack just to relax....to come down. Gotta be keyed up and nervous to do what he does. A climber isn’t nervous about a job, that’s when bad things happen.” Well, that sure put it into perspective for me. And Mike the Climber was far lower-key when he was finished with the job than when he started the job. No doubt about that…

So, after the last log was loaded, and I had settled up with Jake Cranford, I fell in love with The Bungalow all over again. Slim and I sat on the front porch for awhile to celebrate the yard with no trees, and to plan the landscaping we dreamed of doing. There are still two stumps that need to be ground (the stump-grinding guy will come next week), and two big holes in the yard where logs were dropped repeatedly (we’ll fill in with the mulch from the ground stumps and then add top soil), but it sure beats having two frighteningly monstrous trees so close to the house. And, I may be imagining it, but I swear that the cross breeze on the porch is even better than it was before (and it was pretty darn good when the trees were there).