Friday, on the way home from work, I got a phone call from my brother. He had been cutting down some dead trees around his house. We were expecting the remnants of Hurricane Friday night and Saturday and he wanted to get these down before they were blown down onto his house.
When you cut down a tree, you can usually control the direction it falls by how you cut your cuts with the chainsaw. Unfortunately this tree was pretty rotten at the bottom and broke apart and fell the wrong way, toward his garage.
This tree was probably 60 feet high, 2 feet in diameter, and only 20 feet from the back of his garage. If it had fallen all the way, his 3 car garage and all it's contents would have been completely flat. Fortunately, it came to rest against another tree. But now he had a bigger problem than he had before.
We spent the evening trying to get a rope tied near the top of this 60' tree so we could pull it over the right way. We tried shooting an arrow through a notch in the tree with a fishing line attached. We then switched to a slingshot. My brother stood on the garage roof and I held the fishing pole from the ground. It took dozens of shots, but it worked. We used the fishing line to pull up some heavier string and then used that to pull up some rope. Everything takes longer in the rain when it's getting dark.
But we had the rope tied at the top of the tree right where we wanted it. My brother pulled his 4WD pickup out to the edge of the soybean field and with a few lengths of chain, we got the rope out to his truck and he pulled. The tree lifted about a foot and the rope snapped with a snap that sounded like a rifle discharge. The tree fell right at the end of the little branch that had been holding it before. It now looked like it would fall any second. We had not made it better.
We've got a friend in the tree cutting business. We called him. No answer. My brother drove to his house, not there. Stopped by his parents house, no body home. So it was just us.
We drove the 20 miles to Lowes to get a 150' foot length of heavier rope and some 500W flood lights. Drove 20 miles back to his house and worked until about 10:00 and gave up. We had run out of fishing line, masons line, and hitting the bullseye in the dark was not working very well.
The next morning, the tree was still standing, we started working at sun-up. It took us several hours to get the new rope in just the right spot. We had to weave it over and under several other branches of other trees , it kept getting tangled, We pulled up weights to get it over some branches and then let the weight fall, we shot string over others. It was kind of like knitting a sweater with a a slingshot from 50' away above the tree canopy, sometimes with binoculars. A friend of ours stopped by with a tractor do to the pulling this time but we took so long and he had to go.
It took us about 4 hours but we had the rope where we wanted it and tried to pull qwith my brother's truck again. It lifted off the other tree. He was out at the lane with the rope threaded around a couple of trees and couldn't see what was happening. I radioed my brother to keep moving, don't stop. The tree went over center and fell exactly where we wanted it to fall.
Done with the tree, I headed home. My grandmother passed away a week and a half ago and we were having the memorial service Saturday afternoon. I was pretty dirty and disgusting from the morning's work and despritely needed a shower before the service. When I got home, the wind and rain really started. My wife, thinking we might loose electric started to fill the bathtub with water. You can scoop a gallon of water out of the tub and at least you can flush the toilet when the electric's out. It's also nice to have some water for hand washing or other things. We don't have city water or sewer or gas. When the electric's out, everything is out.
She only got a few inches of water in the tub and we lost electric. I got a crappy sponge bath out of the 3" of water in the tub, got dressed and went to the service. The church didn't have any electric and it was hot and miserable in there. We got home hot, sticky, rain soaked, and with no shower. At dusk, I got out the oil lanterns and set one up in the living room, one in the dining room, one in the bathroom we couldn't flush (fortunately I'm a guy and I've got an acre and a half), and one in my daughter's room.
After the kids were down, my wife and I went to bed, in our clothes, her in a recliner chair and me on the couch. We were just too disgusting to get into bed.
The electric came back on about 3:00am and woke us up. We got up and took showers and went to bed for real.
This morning, when I woke up, I headed out the kitchen door. I stopped just before getting a face full of spider.
I now have it in a plastic container. I'll move it somewhere else or it'll build a web in exactly the same place every night. After I took a few flash photos, it started cutting down the web. I guess it thought the flash was morning.
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