Nostalgia is a powerful force. I do remember being happy.
Last night we cut down an ailing aspen tree. The poor thing is not budding this spring (it did poorly last year) and it shows clear signs of infection. Better to remove it before the other trees which have grown from its roots are infected in turn. There’s a real problem with planting Aspens at this elevation (5400 feet). It’s really too low for them. The freezes aren’t hard or long enough to kill the parasites and infections they are prone to. This tree is the closest to the open space and exposed to every minor pathogen that blows in on the wind.
I bungee corded a bow-saw to an 8-foot telescoping pole. The pole had come with a fancy duster and is covered with a turquoise-colored paisley pattern—hey if you're gonna do something, do it classy. I climbed up a ladder to saw off some of the higher limbs overhead. I then cut down the top 1/3 of the trunk, starting about 16 feet up.
I don't know how this happened exactly. I mean I planned the cuts and the angles carefully, but weirdly it went precisely as planned.
I didn't want the tree to fall on the fence or into the neighbor's yard just 8 feet to the south, and the tree had a very slight lean in that direction. So I cut off all the branches I could reach on the neighbor’s side above where I planned my first trunk cut to move the center of gravity away from the fence. Then I made a cut at a shallow angle on the fence side of the trunk about 40% through. I followed that with a cut at a steep angle from the other side down into the first cut. When I cut through, the trunk kind of shifted and the whole top 1/3 of the tree fell straight down and got caught in the branches below it. I grabbed it and tugged. I wound up jumping backwards off the ladder tugging the tree trunk. My (considerable) falling weight was enough to pull the section out of the branches.
I handed that section to my wife to chop up in to smaller pieces and repeated the procedure with the middle 1/3 of the tree. Again, it shifted and fell down into the branches below. I was able to wrench that section free without any acrobatics.
Then I put a new saw blade in the old Porter & Cable sawzall (OK, reciprocating saw, "Sawzall" is a brandname) and went to town on the base of the tree. This is a tool my parents used when my dad was a general contractor. After my father died, my mother used it to finish the renovations on their kitchen. She gave it to me a number of years ago when she moved to a smaller place. It may be old and ugly (the same has been said of me), but it WORKS (I hope the same is said of me).
I cut down the bottom 8 feet or so of the tree, cut the stump flush with the ground, and then started trimming off branches and cutting the trunk into handy sized logs for the fire pit. Yes, I know aspen isn't the best firewood, but for a fire pit, it works just fine. Let this dry out till autumn, and when the air starts to get cool, and we have Rocky Mountain sunsets over the (remaining) aspen leaves, I’ve got a couple dozen more handy free logs of firewood.
There is a tremendous joy in using good power tools. It makes me feel capable—I swear I feel physically stronger. The machine working so smoothly is its own work of performance art. There is a glee in setting out to do a task, and having it go exactly as planned. At the end I have a neatly stacked pile of firewood and the branches are all snipped into yard-waste-bin friendly pieces, and my wife and I have been working hard together for just an hour and a half—enough to feel the task in our muscles, but not be exhausted.
Let's see, it's about 10:30 in the morning now. I do feel nostalgic for that time, about 15 hours ago, when I felt truly and completely happy.
Tonight we're going to watch a basketball game at a local sports bar (Nuggets-Lakers playoff game 3—we're up 2 games to 0). I hope tonight will be another joyous experience I can feel nostalgic for tomorrow morning!