Tis The Season For Logic And Reason

I’ve fallen my fair share of trees, but don’t get the wrong opinion, I am not a professional faller. We didn’t log commercially, we had a sawmill on the ranch and only bought lumber when we needed hardwoods other than poplar for building furniture or windows. We usually cut two to twenty truck loads of trees every winter depending on what was to be built later on in the year.

Falling is a technical and dangerous skill. Widow makers and barber chairs can happen in less than a second and your life is changed forever or over. A widow maker is an inch and a half or larger branch falling from thirty feet up, it is enough to crack a hard hat and the skull of an unlucky faller. Trees with a vertical imperfection, (A Dutchman) or vertical splits will sometimes crack lengthwise during the falling procedure and the top slab will crush or cut the faller in half. Actually it is all a numbers game. I would fall between a hundred and six hundred live trees every winter. A real logging faller will fall over a hundred trees a day. His chances of getting killed are much greater. Those numbers are for green or live trees and does not take into consideration the dry trees you log for firewood.

The dry trees are much more dangerous because they don’t necessarily follow the falling rule book. A green tree or a live tree is fairly flexible and the faller’s wedge can be used on the back cut to push the tree in the opposite direction to insure the tree will fall in a predictable direction. A dry tree often breaks the “hinge” or portion of tree left until the end to direct the path of the fall.

The cuts are not precise on that log!

Falling the trees in a bird’s nest formation makes skidding them to a landing a difficult and dangerous situation. I would only fall fifty trees a day and would skid the trees the next day with a horse one or two trees at a time. Needless to say, I learned to control my trees arc to the ground or I had headaches the next day. Note: We always skidded with one horse on ice trails, this team skidding is new to me. It is also extremely dangerous to walk along side the log, they can catch on a frozen root or an old stump and jump up and take your legs off. You should walk along side of your horse, it’s much safer. I learned to log from an old Norwegian, they were the best and they didn’t get hurt.

When there is sloppiness or the faller doesn’t understand the principles involved, there is a good chance of a disaster occurring.

This situation increases the chances of a barber chair split of the tree or an uncontrolled falling at best. Hopefully this faller learned how or found another line of work.

I managed to buck the odds one day and used up at least a good portion of my luck. I was gathering firewood not far from the ranch house and I came upon three dry spruce snags with 30 inch butts. They were about two feet away from each other and during the course of their hundred year life span their limbs had intertwined and now they stood in a triumvirate of deadly melancholy, waiting for a strong wind to blow the three of them down together. There was an immense amount of hot burning firewood in those three trees, but it would be tricky to fall them without getting killed. Their branches still gripped each other like immortal lovers and it would be impossible to fall them one at a time. I’d need to cut two of them until they were ready to fall in the same direction and then fall the third one into the other two so they would all come down together in a giant pile of firewood.

It was a job for a master faller, but I was young and had the confidence or should I say the stupidity of untested youth.

I cut the first two and they were balanced on about a half inch of wood called the hinge between the under cut and the back cut. I remember feeling confident at this point. I made a beautiful under cut and started the back cut on the third tree. I was almost finished when the tree started a violent vibration that spread to the other two trees. I looked up to see what was going on and my eyes filled with the black bark dust that was floating down in a continuous stream. I closed my eyes and I felt the saw slip all the way through the tree.

I had just made one of the most grievous errors a faller can make. My tree was no longer connected to the stump. My saw was pinned by the weight of the tree and the tree was rotating on the stump. The other two trees broke from their hinges and I saw the bizarre sight of all three trees rotating on their stumps. You are never supposed to take your eye away from the tree, but at this point, I decided to retreat was the best course of action. I ran as fast as my young legs could carry me in the knee deep snow. I made it about forty feet before the world switched to black.

I woke up and looked at my body expecting to see bones sticking out. There was no blood or bones, but I had a tremendous headache and my teeth felt like they had all been hit with a hammer. I felt under my stocking cap, who needs a hard hat for firewood logging, and there was a bump about the size of my fist on top of my head. I stood up and began to strengthen my body that felt like jelly.

The story of what happened was there in front of me waiting to be pieced together. The last tree chased me as I ran away and hit me square on top of the head about two thirds up its length. The tree broke over my head in a spot that was eight inches in diameter. By all of the calculations of physics, I shouldn’t be alive and I began to wonder if I was indeed still alive.

I walked over to my Husky 480 chain saw that was undamaged and started to buck up the tree in firewood lengths before I accepted the fact that I was indeed still alive.

The trees burned well that winter and like most close calls with death, you walk away with a greater appreciation of the beauty and mystery of life.

If I had it over to do again, I’d wait for those trees to blow down on their own. That is the intelligence that comes with experience: you don’t learn it in school, it is from the lesson book of hard knocks. If you are lucky and durable, you learn valuable lessons that keep you alive in the future.

Politicians who can’t learn from their mistakes or fail to see the folly of policies that continue to fail are stuck in the blindness of ideological tunnel vision or just plain stupidity. Unfortunately, they can’t accept the fact that their beloved ideology has failed; consequently, they are in denial. It doesn’t matter if someone wants to exist in an alternative reality; unless they insist on destroying a whole country’s economy and perhaps even the economy of the world to prove the legitimacy of a failed economic system. We presently have a leader who is content to bring the trees down on the country despite having proved himself to be an utter failure in economic theory. He could save his legacy and perhaps his reelection if he could only admit abysmal failings with his ideas of wealth redistribution and his Socialism, but he is determined to make the same mistakes over and over.

I survived because of being an extremely fit young man with a skull made of iron: the country is surviving because we have a resilient and dynamic economy, but all things have their limits. I fear the US economy is fast approaching its limits of endurance.

http://youtu.be/2YAf61zz5VU