“You getting pretty good with that chainsaw up at your camp?” he asked.
“Not so bad, I guess.” Despite my minimal experience, I was proud of my growing mastery of the whining, ripping thing. I hated the stink, but even that had its uses: the blue smoke kept bugs away. “But I—”
“Well, let’s get to it. First we gotta unload the gear.”
There was a lot of gear. The most important tools of the trade are the ropes: huge coils of inch-thick oiled sisal that chafed my forearms as I dragged them off the truck’s dented steel bed. I could hardly carry them. Earnest had brought along a bundle of leather straps with steel fittings, thick as draft-horse tack. Back to the truck for the chainsaws. I grabbed the first one, about the size of mine, then saw the other two: engines the size of a lawn mower’s, bars longer than my arm.
“I’ll saddle up if you bring the rest of the stuff,” Earnest told me.
I lugged the saws to a part of the lawn well away from the tree and laid them out in a neat array as Earnest instructed. These were the surgeon’s tools, and they needed to be ordered and ready to his hand. Back to the truck for cans of gas mix and chain oil, a hard hat and headphones for me, a metal toolbox, smaller ropes.
“Saddling up” meant putting on gear that would delight a leather fetishist. He started with a heavy belt around his waist, two thick straps connecting front and back through the crotch, leather suspenders that crossed his chest and back, carabiners here and there rattling from grommets. Then he buckled leather greaves onto his shins, each mounted with a steel spike that extended well below the inner arch of his boot. A heavy canvas strap about ten feet long, with clips attached at intervals and at each end: He hooked one clip into a steel loop on his belt and slapped the doubled-up remainder of the strap over his shoulder. As he girded himself, he meticulously inspected each strap, buckle, fitting.
“I’m a relic,” he explained. “This is how they did it in the Stone Age. Nowadays, a team of guys come in with a cherry picker, go up and knock off a branch here and there. Ground guys chip the little stuff as fast as it comes down, blow it right into the truck. Load the big stuff on with a grabber. I can’t afford the equipment, only way I get clients is by undercutting their prices. And having the skills to do the ship-in-a-bottle jobs.”
Under the tree, he explained that I was going to be his rope man, who has two primary duties. One is to send things up to the tree man as he needs them: chainsaws, other ropes, whatever. You tie them to a slender rope and he pulls them up. I figured I could manage that part.
The other is handling the big ropes to direct the fall of the branches he cuts off.
“How do I do that?”
“It’s easy. I climb up to the branch above the one I’m cutting, put the rope through a crotch so it works like a pulley. You hold one end of the rope, I tie the other end to the one we’re going to drop. When the branch starts to go, it’ll swing, and your job is to hold it up until it swings to where it’ll fall clear, won’t hit the house. Or power lines.”
The idea appalled me. “Earnest. I’ve never done anything like this in my life. I don’t think I should—”
“Yeah, if you get it wrong, it could be a major fuck up. I’ve had helpers drop em right through the roof. One guy brought down the phone lines for half a block.” He cackled, putting on a redneck twang: “He don’t work for me no more.”
“I’m not strong enough!”
“Outdoor living has built up your constitution. You’ll be fine.”
I protested again, but he wasn’t listening. Burdened by his leathers, he waddled over to the tree, carrying one end of a light rope that I’d coiled on the ground. He swung his canvas strap around the trunk at shoulder height—the tree was easily four feet thick—clipped it to his waist belt on the other side of his body, leaned back hard against it, and began to climb. He stepped up, stabbed his ankle spikes firmly into the wood, shifted his weight to his feet, leaned in, flipped the strap up, leaned hard against it, stepped up again, jab, jab. His arms and shoulders rolled and swelled each time he hoisted himself. With the leather and metal fittings and muscles, he looked like a Roman gladiator girded for arboreal combat. In less than a minute, trailing his thin white rope like spider silk, he was at the first big juncture of branches, level with the peak of the house roof.
“Okay. Big rope.” He flicked a ripple down the little line. I lugged over the carefully coiled rope, and Earnest gave me instructions on how to tie the right knot. “No. Yeah. No, no! The other way—under. There. No, the other loop.”
“You should have shown me before you went up!”
“Oh, come on. You like the challenge, admit it.” He was in irrepressible high spirits, coffee in his blood and a mountain of a tree to take down.
Once I had it right, the big rope rose up and up until it was in Earnest’s hands. Seeing him up there, I began to understand the true size of the tree. Each of its main branches was thicker than the trunk of the biggest tree on my land, and looking up into it felt like standing in a centuries-old church, vaulted and ornate. It was dying but still had enough green on it to make this inner landscape a lovely, dappled, airy place. We earthbound people tend
