The tree, the fence, and gravity

Chalk it up to inexperience, poor judgment, or a slight miscalculation in angle of force, or whatever. A tree that needed to be removed did come down, but not where I wanted it, preventing me from enjoying the ego-satisfaction of prevailing over large and powerful things in my quest for a peaceful garden and lots of free firewood.

The storm-damaged Norway maple in our back yard was leaning northwest - toward Plum Street - but I had convinced myself that I could make it fall east - inside the fence and toward the garage. And maybe I could have done it by topping the upper branches from the fully extended ladder, but I had a bad feeling going up high on the ladder with a chainsaw, even on a calm, non-windy day like today.

So I went with plan B - cutting a deep notch halfway through the trunk about eight feet up from the safety of a step-ladder. While my comfort level was increased and the notch was nearly perfect, there was no way this tree was going to fall where I wanted it. I was cutting below the major leaning parts of the biggest limbs, so my exquisite notch was to no avail.

Live and learn. When I'd cut back toward the notch all but two inches through, it became obvious which way that tree was going, and there was nothing I could do about it. All the weight was on the wrong side of the fulcrum in the middle of the trunk. This simple bit of mechanics should have been apparent from the start, but wishful thinking clouded my perception of life's most consistent fact: gravity.

After placing a second step-ladder festooned with red flags and DANGER signs in the middle of the street and alerting my neighbor Joe to the hazard, I went ahead and finished the unfortunate cut, and that baby came down fast as lightning, right through the fence, which it crushed like paper.

It could have been a lot worse. The foot-and-a-half thick trunk missed the back corner of the house, missed the little plum tree with a bird house occupied by a family of sparrows, and even missed - by about half an inch - the dawn redwood sapling (metasequoia glyptostroboides) that I planted a couple of years ago. But it made matchsticks out of that one section of fence.

Cleanup was simple. I would have had to cut the tree into pieces anyway, I just ended up hauling the pieces a little farther across the yard. Tomorrow I'll nail two new 2 x 4s to the posts and find some one-inch boards to replace the ones that got smashed to smithereens, and we're back in business, fence-wise. The tree will yield about a cord of wood, I reckon, which is nothing to sneeze at, but it's still the one that got away.