Bringing It Down Carefully

It's been a pleasant week up at my father-in-law's house in Western Maryland, one filled with reading and hikes and puttering about on the lake.  The weather has been hot by Western Maryland standards, enough that the minisplit AC that had to be put in a few years back was working overtime, with fans set up to distribute that one unit's cool air through the rest of the upstairs.

That heat has meant that I've been using the mornings to get things done outside, focused on whittling away at one task in particular.

About twenty yards up the heavily wooded rise behind the house, I'd been long eyeing a deceased hardwood tree.  It died perhaps five or six years ago, and stood about seventy feet in height.  It weren't jus' dead.  It was really and sincerely dead.  The wood around the base and most of the way up the tree was unrotted, hard, and had "cured on the vine," and for the last few years I've figured it would offer up about a weeks' worth of evening fires in the hearth.

My goal, for this trip: finally bring it down, buck it into rounds, and schlep those rounds down the hill to dry and cure.  I've done that with two other deceased trees on the property, and at that height, it's just about at the top end of what my modest 18" homeowner-grade electric chainsaw can manage.

After taking a few minutes to sharpen, oil, and adjust the chain, up the hill I went with axe and wedge and chainsaw.  Within five minutes I'd hewed out the directional undercut, and begun the back cut to bring it down.  Being a suburbanite, I don't get to do this often, so it's always done 1) in the most straightforward and traditional way and 2) with as much care as my scatterbrain allows.  I know my limitations, and my propensity to forget things, like fully securing the chain-oil plug so's it doesn't goop oil down my pants.  Not that I've ever done that.  Ahem.

Bringing down a tree requires one's full attention.

Vibecoding might be a thing these days, as we offload our cognitive tasks to AI.  But Vibefelling a tree?  That too easily turns into an existential error, the sort of mistake that costs you property damage, a limb, or a life.  

So I consider and then create the undercut mindfully.  Where's this going to go, exactly?  I want to set it down not just as far away from the house and parked cars as possible, but also where it'll do the least harm to the healthy trees around it.  It's worth careful consideration and reconsideration.

As I'm putting in the back cut, I slow down right at the end.  Were I an experienced arborist working with excellent equipment, this would be less necessary.  But when you're engaged in an unfamiliar, infrequent, and risky task, take your sweet time about it.  I've felled fewer than a half-dozen trees in my fifty seven years of life, so I watched the cut like a hawk.  Has it begun to fractionally expand, the barely noticeable beginning of that long final fall?  I want to be a few strides away as soon as that movement begins, in the event I've misjudged something and the trunk steps out, heading in an unplanned direction.

I cut and checked, cut and checked.  Finally, that movement began, the clean line of the backcut expanding at a barely discernible rate.  I pulled the chainsaw blade, and stepped back as the expansion increased.

It all went as planned, and down it came precisely where I'd intended, with a satisfying crackling followed by a deep ground-shaking whump.  The tree, life long gone from it, was now ready to be sectioned out, bucked into rounds and split for the fire in winter.

When we realize a thing needs to be brought down, it's best to do so with care.  If you rush in, full of blind confidence and bravado, you're likely to do more harm than good.