God did it again, but this time for my husband.
A poor maple tree in our back yard never recovered from trenching work done before we bought the house. We've been putting off removing it, and last year it finally died. It's been disintegrating ever since. After every wind-storm, we find pieces of it littering the ground. We did not want to one day find pieces of it leaning against our roof or fence. Or worse, our neighbor's fence.
Both neighbors and a few friends and relations have offered to help us take it out, we just have to holler. My husband couldn't find a perfect weekend to host help properly.
Last Sunday, he was touching up some pruning on the oak and thought he'd give a try at pruning a branch off of one the trunks of the dead tree. That whole trunk just fell down. Pumped up by his success, he decided to take out the rest of the tree. The chainsaw wouldn't crank. I offered to go borrow one & a neighbor to go with it, but he said no. He tried using a maul, a carpenter's saw and a hacksaw before he finally used our "Binford Destroyer" (the reciprocating saw) to take off a thicker but shorter trunk. I said that in the time it took to do all that, we could have borrowed a saw and have done with the whole thing. The remaining trunk would be the most work; it was the least rotted and leaned back over the fence. He said he'd try later to see what was wrong with the chainsaw. He called it a day.
The next day, he went to help my brother & father unload my brother's truck. Men talk about men things, so the story of the tree was told. My father insisted Scott borrow his chainsaw. Scott had used it quite capably back in April when he went to Ft. Payne to remove a tree that had fallen in his mother's yard.
Today, with two saws and a wife available, he set out to remove the tree once & for all. But just to see, he gave our chainsaw a crank. It powered up, but burning the year-old oil/gas mix, it smoked & stunk like my uncle's old pontoon boat. Hey, my dad's chainsaw cranked like a charm... after Scott put fuel in it.
We tied a rope around the tree and strategized. If he was sawing, I'd be the one pulling. Our rope was too short to anchor for triangulation. Our southern neighbor, Al, was pruning; he also does forestry management on some land he owns. He asked if we needed a come-along (which we did, but...) Scott stopped to talk with him about where to best drop the tree. We thought we try Al's advice of putting a ladder against the tree so Scott could top it out & have it drop on the lot on the other side of the fence.
We then reconsidered. It could be that the remaining trunk was more rotten than we though, and would fall away, bringing Scott, ladder & running chainsaw down on a chain-link fence and another barbed-wire fence. Not good.
Next idea was to see it we could pull any part of the top down to the lot. Turns out the tree was pretty sturdy. It would bow & vibrate, but it wouldn't budge. Before we'd given up on pulling it over, a young man approached us and asked us if we needed help. He was from across the river, but his mom lived up the street. She & his son had not returned yet, so he's been killing time racing his motorbike on the undeveloped street. He took out trees for a living with two different firms. He'd be glad to help. For free.
I didn't say anything. Scott graciously accepted his offer and told him about the tree. Eddie (the young man) tried to crank my dad's saw, but it wouldn't even cough. Scott offered him our out-of-shape saw; while that one was refusing to cooperate, Al just went over to his garage, cranked up HIS saw, and walked it over to Eddie. Eddie didn't even bother with the ladder; he just stood on the stumps of the other trunks, braced against the remaining trunk and topped the tree out. He next put cuts most-way in on either side of the lower trunk, then used his own arms to snap it off. Scott heartily thanked him, and got a business card for a company he works for. (One day, soon, that sweetgum in the front is going DOWN.) Eddie went back to waiting for his son, and Scott & Al took out the stump.
Could we have planned for Al to have been pruning the same day as our tree work? Could we have planned to have a kind stranger riding in full view of our futile efforts, and who would offer the skill and time he just so happened to have available? Could we have planned to have two different chainsaws fail to crank so that Al would bring out his own, which had the longest bar of all? Could we have planned it?
Well, we could have organized a work party, and with the combined efforts, gotten it done. But we didn't organize one, so God did it for us. Ain't He great?
(I also got a bunch of work done in the garage while Scott got some things fixed on the Protege. It amazingly also refused to crank, so after we gave it a jump, Scott figured he might as well get the oil changed, the fuel freshened, the tires fully inflated and the battery replaced. The guy at one of the auto shops gave Scott a business card of a man who does good tune-up work across the river.
Yep, ain't God great?)
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