Of course, I didn’t realize just how dangerous a chainsaw was until I’d seen them in action for awhile. Still, I loved the work and, when taking down and cutting up huge elm trees, chainsaws are hands-down the best tool for the job. In fact, once school was done and paid for, and I quit that job, I never touched a chainsaw again.

How one minor lapse, one time, can lead to a world of hurt. I never lost my respect for just how dangerous a tool a chainsaw is. It didn’t even break the skin.īut the other, and I think even more important part, was that I was the only person I knew who never stopped being afraid of them. It ripped my jeans to shreds, but I managed to pull it back such that it left only a slight red mark behind. I once had the saw kick back and the spinning chain slapped my thigh. I am the only person I ever met, who did this work for any length of time, who doesn’t have a scar or much worse, from a chainsaw. I did this work for three seasons and almost all day, every day, I was using a chainsaw to do it. By the end of the day it was easy to get careless, sloppy.

We worked six days a week, ten hours a day but the money, at twenty dollars a day, was great. This required still another range of different sized saws. Once all the pieces of a tree were on the ground, they had to be cut up so we could load them into the dump trucks to be hauled away and burned. Luckily, the car usually parked behind it was out. That metal door folded like so much tissue paper, although with a far louder sound. I remember the time we roped a large, heavy branch, cut it and watched in horror as it swung in a long arc gathering speed until the butt end smashed into the homeowner’s garage door like a medieval battering ram. From there the ground-man would slowly lower it to the ground, ideally avoiding the houses near-by. For those, they’d tie a rope to the branch and cut it loose. The saw you use to cut the stump flush to the ground is a much larger beast than the lightweight versions the climbers used taking down the top of the tree in pieces. The essential tool for this job was the chainsaw. It wasn’t just a matter of cutting them at the base, jumping back and yelling “Timbre!!” We were also working in an urban setting, which meant taking trees down that were between houses. This meant they were still filled with sap and water, making them far heavier and harder to deal with than a dead tree that had had a chance to dry out.

While that wiped out virtually all the mature chestnut tress at the time, at least it left behind an appropriately named and beautiful wood: wormy chestnut.īecause we were taking down trees as quickly as the beetles were detected in them, most were still healthy and robust. Not only was a beautiful tree lost, the lumber that could have been harvested was lost as well - unlike the trees killed by the chestnut blight of the early 1900s. Usually, these trees showed no sign of infection. In an effort to stop their spread, the moment beetles were detected in a tree it was removed and burned. They had been infected with the tiny beetles that caused Dutch Elm Disease.

50 years ago, I was putting myself through college working with a tree crew outside of Chicago taking down huge, majestic elm trees.

Magic trick gone wrong death chainsaw