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MOBY CEDAR

Call me Ahab. You know how trees are. Generally quiet, rather set in their ways, rooted in place, heedful of the seasons. Eminently peaceful, they are nevertheless right at home in a storm, and know very well how to handle themselves.

Their apparent docility is deceptive, however; there is a great deal of power muscled up in a tree, and not just of root and grain and pliability, but also of weight and reach, not to mention hardness in contrast to such soft limbs as grace our own trunks. There is as well a woody malevolence knotted somewhere in every tree, to which lumberjacks often allude in their tales of good trees gone bad.

In the main, though, trees and humans get along very well together (witness the park), except where trees are worth money, when a new factor sets in that, though lamentable in the extreme, and worth volumes of words, has no place in this anecdote. When humans such as myself cut trees down for legitimate reasons like mine (I know, I know, they're all 'legitimate'), the trees are for the most part very cooperative and fall right where careful cutting aims them.

But in lumbering, as in all else, pride goeth before a fall. Not long ago in this very venue I was patting myself on the back for felling a series of scrub trees right where I wanted them; so on a recent evening it was in that mode of not necessarily quiet pride that I, with Keech as my assistant, approached the unsuspecting cedar down by the road that had its hair twisted in the big phone cable that serves the whole mountainside, the tree also making a nuisance of itself by cutting off the sunlight to our lower garden in summer and our roof in winter.

I got out some rope, the shortest piece in the toolshed ("We'll need no more," said Pride); I sussed the tree out briefly ("I'll get it to fall right there," said the Big P). The trunk was puny, only a foot in diameter (Big P: "Piece of cake"), I made the right cuts about a yard off the ground (so the tree will regrow as a high hedge) to get it to fall precisely...there.

So when the moment was right and the tree was wavering as planned, Keech gave a mighty heave on the rope, and the rope snapped like the old, cheap, rotten hemp trash it was, leaving Keech flat on the ground while I with one hand attempted to keep the now ominously and ambivalently wavering tree upright while the other hand sought to free the maliciously jammed chainsaw from the powerful jaws of the now rabidly aggressive trunk-- the tree seemed then to grin that grainy grin that certain trees (especially cedars) get when they scent human vulnerability-- then, though there was no breeze, the tree rocked a bit further this way... then a bit that way (Steven King should have been there for a new idea), as if toying with us soft and bendable beings, so easily mashed by hefty trunks.

I could hear the woody beast creaking with glee as it played with our doubts awhile; then at last with a kind of grainy laughter it flung itself in full abandon onto the big phone cable, which it pulled into a pretty precise 90 degree angle apexed at about two meters from the ground, the other end of the severed trunk still resting on the stump.

In the adrenaline rush that instantly followed, Keech and I tried to push the trunk upward a bit... and it slid right off the slick stump and arrowed down into the ground with a wham and a sort of nyah-nyah sneer, right where my foot had just been ("Pretty good reflexes for a 62-year-old," drawled the Big P).

I then realized that although I had calculated everything else correctly, (excepting of course the total incompetence of the rope) I hadn't factored in the lopsidedness of the upper branching which, now that I thought of it, had tended greatly out toward the road, like a thin waiter holding out at arms' length a tray containing half a ton of asparagus.

I found a mote of comfort in the fact that this wasn't happening in a crowded suburb where all the neighbors would be watching Ahab and Ishmael get gobbled up by Moby Cedar.

So after Keech, I and the Big P had sussed out the new scenario, Keech got atop the stone wall where he could use the chainsaw to sever the tree about a meter below where the branches started, cutting from the upper side downward, I figuring that the weight of the crown beyond the cable would lift the cut toward the saw and flip the crown off the other side of the cable, but Keech thought it would be better to cut from the bottom up, thinking the trunk would be heavier, so he did and the sneaky tree sure enough jammed the saw in there like a bulldog with your favorite slipper.

So, getting deeper into the part of Ahab, I got out there and hung bodily from the trunk to pull it downward and free the saw (all the while eyeing the poor rubber-band phone cable and wondering how many thousands of dollars it would cost to repair when it broke, but perhaps even more importantly, how long it would take to live down breaking the entire mountainside phone cable) as Ish-- Keech tried to wriggle the saw out from his perch atop the wall.

Finally we got the saw free, and Keech cut the tree from the top this time: the crown twirled neatly around the cable and slammed to the roadway, missing me by a pine needle as the trunk instantly but unsuccessfully tried to make me three feet tall ("Pretty agile for a 62-year old," droned the Big P).

I thought it all rather well done, myself, being still intact after the tree was down and the cable was back up. The chapter ended with Keech (also still intact) and I walking toward a house bathed in a now brighter sunset.