a bloody mess (literally)

so, i have several large trees on my property…

…a lot of them i planted personally as a kid. meaning they’re now in their 40’s, and some aren’t doing so well.

one such had a branch that has literally been half hanging for two years. like, pre-pandemic era issue. but some major winds were causing issues in this corner of the yard and i realized that if i was gonna take this stuff down (some of which is really big) it has to be done BEFORE the new side yard fence is installed, as right now said trees are in the backyard, behind the fence, but with the new fence line being moved, they’ll end up in the side yard soon, meaning falling them would destroy the new fence, which would be pointless.

so first was the large barely hanging branch. it was large enough that i fell it in two big sections – the first of which had to then be broken apart into four medium segments, and finally about twenty small pieces. the part still attached was the “meaty chunk”, about eight feet long (at least) and around eight inches in diameter at the base. the top part of what held it on was dry and sawed quickly, the next part took a bit. this was all being done with me atop a six foot ladder (being held by the ufc) and while holding a fully extended ten foot pole chainsaw. when the branch started to fall it ricocheted off the stub of the branch i’d taken down below it (but couldn’t cut flush because of the angle) sending it into a trajectory straight towards me.

that’s when time slows down.

both hands were on the saw and were needed to keep it from falling as it was still running. most people’s natural instinct (myself included) is to deflect anything headed towards our face, but if i did that the way it was going it would fall to the left and directly onto the skull of the ufc. THAT i couldn’t let happen, so i got the chainsaw up in the tree, took the shot to the head, and then caught it in my left hand as it started to drop off my shoulder. in between shouts of “that was my face, it just hit my face” i got the ufc to move, dropped the branch where she had stood, then pulled the saw out of the tree. never dropped the saw, never cut anything that wasn’t supposed to be cut, and my neighbor’s fence came out without a scratch. my head, on the other hand…

three separate wounds – the cheek, the ear, and the scalp…all pretty good bleeders. needless to say, that was pretty much it for that project for the time being. by the time you read this i should have finished and even started on that side of the fence. but for the day it was going down (wednesday, jan 19, 2022) that was all she wrote.