It’s almost worth of FailBlog: I cut down a tree in the backyard. Those two clauses would be enough to make many worry. “Did it fall on your house?” “Did it damage your neighbor’s property?” I miscalculated, but nothing so awful.
The tree — diseased and dying — was a mite, just a tiny bit too tall. A few inches. Of what significance would a few inches be in our almost infinite galaxy? For the want of a nail and all that…
When the tree fell (after much tugging and physical cajoling, for I didn’t want it to fall on our neighbor’s fence), the top portion caught a branch of a neighboring tree.
And there it remained.
Today, I took care of the problem, but not without some trepidation. As it stood — or rather, half-stood — I didn’t know which way it would finally fall. Cutting from the bottom seemed most logical: eventually, gravity would serve to create a fulcrum out of the weakened part of the tree, pulling it in on itself.
It worked. But not after I literally cut through the entire tree, a nerve-wrenching experience. I could see the tree lurching this way or that, cracking me in the thigh, breaking a leg, an arm, a whole bag of bones. I cut through to the mid-point, then made paranoid careful cuts: squeeze the chainsaw’s trigger, a little cutting, then a retreat.
In the end, I won: no broken bones, and the wood is now is now curing. And I’m finally coming down from my chainsaw-testosterone high.