stay in the shallow end

My dad bought me a chainsaw when I was 14 and we were doing landscaping in the back yard. In the beginning, I just used it on smaller trees, but as time progressed, my confidence increased, and I decided it was time to fell a bigger one. I lassoed a high branch and tied it up. I then made the wedge cut on the side I wanted it to fall. Finally, I started cutting from the other side of the wedge to get it to actually fall. Gravity had other plans for the tree, and it swiftly fell and landed on top of the air conditioning unit of our backyard. In a manner very typical of my dad at the time, he came out, looked at it, looked at me, said, “Fix it,” and then went back into the house. luckily it only bent the fan out of shape, and I found a local shop that had a replacement and we were on our way.

I haven’t really done much yard work short of mowing since my dad and I landscaped the backyard over ten years ago. I’d been planning on this summer to be the start point of a multi-year yard beautification project, and the first step was cutting back a couple of trees that were in the way and shading some grass way too much. This entailed three visits to Sears.

The first visit, I looked at all the chainsaws, but then saw a pruning saw for $20. I decided I’d give that a shot. I came home, and after about three strokes, I hopped back in the car and picked up a 3.5 HP electric chainsaw. I get home, unpack it, and then saw that they don’t include the oil it needs in the box, which was really surprising and annoying. I hopped back in the car for trip number three to Sears. Then I get home, and start felling branches.

In the beginning, the choices were easy, there was a ring of branches along the bottom that I knew I wanted to get rid of. Then I removed a few smaller branches that were pointed downwards from higher branches. Then came the dilemma. We have two branches that are rooted low in the tree, but are angled nearly straight up. It’s pretty difficult to visualize the tree with them gone, but from what I can tell, the lower half will look better with them removed, but it’ll take a pretty big chunk out of the upper half. We decided to see how the tree compensates for the missing branches and go from there.

Here’s a picture of me with my glasses, gloves, and chainsaw. While I was trying to capture “maniacal glee” with my facial expression, I ended up close to “permanent vegetative state.”