Timber

The tree had to come down.

Of this fact, there is no disagreement or doubt. For the past several years a box elder tree has been growing up near the corner of my house.

I probably should have pruned it when it was barely a sapling sticking up out of the patch of phlox and snapdragons in the flower bed outside my window.

However, when it comes to green and growing things I have something of a soft spot.

If I am to be completely honest, I actually quietly cheer on dandelions and tufts of grass that grow up between the cracks of pavement where society tells them that they don’t belong. I admire the plucky weeds and brush that forge their own way and work diligently to turn a parking lot into a prairie if given enough time.

At the same time, as a homeowner, I am faced with the not-so-subtle reality that trees too close to a house or other structure are not a great idea. Much like children sprout up from elementary school to starting college in the blink of an eye, so too did my happy little box elder turn from a twig to a towering tree.

When I was a child, my parents bought my sister a horse. This necessitated clearing a large portion of a yard to become a corral for the horse to call home.

At the time, my brothers, sister and I were far too young to be of any help. Night after night, my father would come home from work and change his clothes and grab his axe and bow saw and work at clearing the pitch pines which thrive in the sandy soil of southern New Jersey.

It would have probably been much faster to have used a chainsaw, but in many ways the range of power tools available to residential consumers is far greater now than it was in the early 1980s. In that time, at least where I grew up, the only people who had chainsaws were professional loggers or people with more money than sense who liked to pretend they were.

Whack! Whack! Whack! I can still hear the axe head biting into — what was to my youthful eyes — a massive pine tree. Each hit would shake free a shower of needles and pinecones.

As an adult, I recognize the trees I thought of as huge when I was a child were probably only between 25 and 35 feet tall and not all that wide at their base. Still, taking down a tree by hand is tough work. At times, my dad would get help from friends who would pull on ropes to try to guide the trees away from falling on things like our swing set or pool. We were routinely warned to stay out the way and to run if things went bad and the tree began to fall in our direction.

Things were a lot wilder back in the 1980s, and perhaps with 8 children my parents felt they had some to spare.

I was thinking of this while sweating on Saturday afternoon while waiting for the battery on my chainsaw to finish charging and my children to come out and help me. After getting back from covering the start of an ultramarathon and then hanging out in the middle of Hwy 13 to get pictures of the VFW ATV/UTV ride, I had decided to tackle some long-overdue yard projects.

With our roof set to be replaced in the next few weeks, getting rid of trees and shrubs that were too close was a high priority. While I will leave the larger, dead trees in my yard to the pros (they are coming later this fall), I felt confident in my ability to show the box elder who was boss.

There are reasons why I work behind a desk and put words together into sentences for a living. I was appreciative of those reasons as I worked to take down a stubborn tree that was oddly more dense than it had any right to be, I thought of my dad’s axe, safely hanging in a shed hundreds of miles away in New Jersey. While inefficient, there is a certain amount of catharsis to be found in swinging an axe over and over into the wood.

Hard work is the poor man’s therapy session. By the end of the day, the tree was down and a trailer loaded and brought to the city brush pile of branches and leaves. And while tired and sore, there was a satisfaction of getting the job done.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News. Contact Brian at BrianWilson@centralwinews.com.