Trails of Mystery
You don’t run into a lot of old loggers down here on the gentrified South End these days. Dangerous work and if you do it long enough, accidents you don’t anticipate happen with more frequency than you’d care to consider. Tree climbers, fallers, gyppos, chainchokers, toppers, well, it’s a young man’s job. Us old woodsmen, we count our lucky stars and are happy to tell tall tales from the safety of our rockers, just glad we’re still here, gimped but alive.
Yesterday I was over at the little park I maintain. Ranger Skeeter, garbage picker-upper, lawnmower, trail maintainer and tree removal guy. An 80 year old doug fir had uprooted on the south side perimeter where it had completely blocked two separate trails so my assignment that day was to lug in my big Stihl and see if I could buck it up without pinching the blade, clear the debris and open the paths. No big deal for a seasoned logger like myself, nothing too dangerous, just don’t let the sections fall on my foot.
I tackled the upper end of the tree first, still a large diameter section, made my undercuts and managed to cut a section out for trail passage, bucked up the thing and rolled huge bolts out of the way, then on to the second trail with a larger part of the tree. Once again I undercut the tree but this time I worried the sheer weight would suddenly split the tree and pinch my saw and since I hadn’t brought wedges with me, I really wanted to finish this and take that saw home with me, not leave it crushed under the tonnage of that fir. So I made a Vee in the top, figuring if the cut snapped shut when I reached the undercut, I’d have a chance of not pinching the bar.
You with me so far? Cause I wasn’t really sure this would work. And this is why guys like me should be paranoid back in the woods with a running chainsaw and just enough experience to make things even more dangerous than they already are. I put that Stihl on the Vee and started the top cut, expecting any minute the section would snap shut when my cuts met, but instead … holy moley, Smokey, the tree, instead of crashing onto the trail, sprang up into the air twenty feet above my head while the cut section stayed earthbound with me.
There is a moment in times like this when what is happening doesn’t just defy expectations, it beggars reality. Your mind doesn’t really accept the possibility a tree will right itself any more than time running backwards. Trust me, an old hand at the unexpected when falling trees, this boggled my mind. I scuttled backwards like a crab on meth, not sure what that tree might do, maybe come back down even, on me. But it didn’t. The cut end of the tree stood at 30 degrees above my head twenty feet up. The rootball had rotated halfway back into the cavity it had originally left, partly because another tree had fallen at the base of the fir and its weight, once the majority of the fir’s own weight was gone, lifted the tree semi upright. Logic, once I managed to calm myself, had returned.
You maybe think you’ve seen it all. But trust me, you haven’t. I left the tree, what was left of it, standing over the trail, a saw cut at the top 20 feet above, for hikers to marvel at. How in the hell did anyone make that cut? Did they climb up there and risk life and limb? Could anyone be that courageous, that utterly dumb? Let them wonder. Let them ask the Ranger, but he’s not going to tell them. Trails of Mystery is what I’ll tell them. Just another tall tale from the pioneers of the South End who survived to saw another day….
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Tags: Arboreal Resurrection, Logging for Dummies, The Jumping Trees of Camano