James Thurber got to have The Night the Bed Fell (and if you don’t know this story, or the others that go with it, rush out at once and find a copy of My Life and Hard Times, which is one of the most sustained pieces of American comic reminiscence I ever read). I got to have The Night the Tree Fell.
On the night of January 28-29, 2001, about twelve-thirty in the morning, my wife heard this huge swishing thump outside the front door. She thought it was a branch that had fallen onto the roof from one of the pecan trees next the house, but when she threw on a robe and looked outside, she found that the big hackberry tree at the foot of our front walk (visible here) had fallen completely over, blocking Avenue H completely but not, by a mercy, tearing down the power or phone wires.
Since it didn’t seem to be a good idea just to leave it lying on the wires, I phoned the city’s electric department, and they sent out a crew—who then performed a concerto for four chain saws that went on from two until six in the morning as they cleared the street.
Clearing the street, however, was all they did. They piled up the limbs on both sides the street for us to struggle with, and left the trunk where it fell (which isn’t too surprising, given the trunk weighed a good ton and measured several feet around). Also not surprisingly, we didn’t do much about it for a while, since I don’t own a big chain saw or a trailer to haul wood with. Some of the middle-sized branches went away with a man who stopped one day and asked for some of it to burn in his stoves; he heated entirely with wood, he said. We were pleased for him to take whatever he would, and he hauled off two pickup loads.
This still left us with an awful lot of wood, though. My wife wrestled for weeks with chipping away at bits of it, a yard bag or two a week, which was not unlike trying to clean the street with a toothbrush.
The city’s semi-annual large-brush pickup was looming, and we were nowhere near having matters chopped up enough that they would haul it all away. At last, one of our longtime friends from Lonestar Mensa offered to come over and work with us on breaking down the trunk into manageable pieces before the city crew went round. He ended up about half-ruining his chain saw, a fourteen-inch-blade electric Poulan, which really wasn’t up to the job it was being asked to do. Nonetheless, with that and with a sledgehammer, engineer’s hammer, and a couple of wedges, we broke an awful lot of it into pieces the City did take.
The pile cleared, we could get back into the water meter (covered by the brush heap), and slash down the overgrowth of grass and weeds that grew up through the mess. The pieces of tree that were too big to move, we got rid of across a couple of months by simply putting up a sign saying, “FREE WOOD – JUST HAUL IT AWAY.” Why people want to burn hackberry wood is beyond me, but I’m not going to quarrel with it, since it dealt with our problem without costing money. We ended up planting a couple of rescued crape myrtles at the foot of the walk (visible at left above, guyed with fluorescent yellow seine twine). With luck, in a season or two they’ll provide us a nice frame for the walk.
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