If A Tree Falls In the Woods...

In what has become a biennial event, the red oak borer beetle has taken out another one of our oak trees.  It has been weakened for several years.  This spring it gave up the ghost.  It stands a skeleton of it's former glory.  The oak tree to the right of it was subservient to it, leaning over to gain some access to sunlight.  Now, perhaps, it will resume a more stately shape, until the borer beetle takes it out, too.

The dead tree once served as one side of the base of the zip line, or shoot to shoot, as we called it.  Our kids zipped down the cable many times, coming to an abrupt stop at the American flag on the barn.  I think that if the tree knew that the kids were counting on it to hold up the base of the zip line, it might have held out a few more years.  But the kids are grown and the big tree that served as the launching point of the zip line succumbed to the red oak borer beetle several years ago.  Time marches on.

I put off cutting down the tree as long as I possibly could.  However, big limbs started falling out of the tree and onto the barn.  A couple limbs arched precariously over the fence, threatening to fall on their grandchildren's trampoline.  I figured the neighborly thing to do was to take the old tree down.  I called a tree service from my hometown.  The proprietor's sister and I graduated from high school together.  He and his wife do this business on the side.  They came while I wasn't home one morning and put the tree on the ground for a price tag of $500.  I feel like that was a reasonable price.

Compare the photo above with the photo below.  It is a weight off my mind that the tree was felled.  There was really only one direction that it could go, and they put it on the ground in the prescribed location.  With the bucket truck and two chain saws running, it took them no time.  They did seek permission from my neighbor and they accessed the tree from my neighbor's back yard.

As we always request, the tree service laid the tree on the ground.  We'll cut it up ourselves and then I'll split it for firewood.  As the old saying goes, "Firewood warms you at least four times.  One to cut it down, Two to split it, Three to stack it, and Four to burn it."  We use a chainsaw rarely, so I always borrow my Dad's or on an occasion or two, I would rent one for $50 per day and would bring it back the same day.  The hardware store no longer rents them out, though.

Since it isn't very smart to buy a machine with a small engine that isn't used frequently, I was reading reviews for a battery-powered chainsaw.  This one had very good reviews, so I jumped on it.

It's an 80 volt chainsaw with an 18 inch bar.  When I paid the tree service for the work, I asked him his opinion of these saws.  I guess I should've asked before buying, but he told me that they use them in his line of work all the time.  He said you'll be tired out before the chainsaw loses its charge.  He told me as long as I kept the blade sharp and bar oil in the reservoir, the saw would make me proud.  I asked if the saw was too small to cut up the tree?  He told me no.  He said he cut the tree down with a smaller chain saw.

That's just what I needed to hear.  I'll be charging up the battery and will cut up the tree so that when cooler weather comes around in the fall, I can pull out my double-sided ax, wedge and sledgehammer and get busy splitting firewood for the winter.  As bad as I hated to see the tree go, we were smack-dab out of firewood.  And that reminds me, I need to call a chimneysweep.  We haven't had our chimney cleaned in several years.  It's almost laughable that I'm talking firewood and chimneysweeps when it is 107 outside!