Damage and Disaster at Don's Dock
I was recently in Trenton for a three-week basic parachute training from 23 jan to 10 feb. One of my weekends off, I decided to profit from my proximity to my grandparent's cottage. I called my GPs to see if I could go up there. I had visited my brother in Toronto the weekend before, and we had tentatively planned to go up to the cottage the following weekend. Unfortunately, Nana and Papa were flying out to Regina, so they could not come up to the cottage with Paul and I. No problem, the boys will enjoy themselves free of adult supervision! (What could be risky with two mid-twenties boys up on the ice with chainsaws, ladders, tractors and axes?) So I picked Paul up at the train station on Saturday morning after driving N and P to the glamourous Kingston Airport at a martial hour of the morning.
We got up to the cottage after stocking up on supplies in fair Verona, where we laid our scene for about 30 minutes, before moving on past Easy St, Verona and pushing on to the cottage. I'm convinced that living on Easy St is not as easy as it sounds. I looked at the houses, and it didn't look any different than the others. Maybe it's easy inside the houses? A promising avenue for more research.
Moving on, we soon got to the cottage. I was convinced that I could drive into the cottage from the county road. There was no snow on the ground in Kingston. Well, with a big monster red or black testosterone truck I'm sure I would have made it in. Unfortunately, I'm the ambivalent owner of one Honda Civic. Say what you want about the Civic, but an ATV it is not. Needless to say, the 5 inches of melting snow prevented me from driving in. We hauled the water, food and beer into the cottage and began the slow process of heating the place up. It was fun hanging out with my little bro. We went for a long walk in the woods. We played chess. We drank hot chocolate. We listened to some Spirit of the West. We drank more hot chocolate (with stale marshmellows). We kept logs in the fire. I braved some wicked weather to make hamburgers on the barbeque. And we quickly got bored. So we drafted a water-tight plan to defeat our boredom the next day. We had a few brewskies and hit the sack.
The plan was to cut down an old 50 foot pine tree that had been overhanging the dock in a most threatening way ever since it lost its life in a valiant fight against the 1998 ice storm and a subsequent disease. This pine, despite its heroic past, was the victim of our ambitious plan to fill our morning with some good old fashioned hard labour. At our cottage, we have two principal ways of filling the time with work: We either cut down inconvenient trees for firewood, or we move inconvenient stones to more convenient places. This has the advantage of keeping us from relaxing much of the time, and gives us the satisfaction that we have accomplished something of undisputed insignificance.
So, usually its me that climbs the ladder with a chainsaw in one hand, cuts off branches while holding onto the swaying trunk of the tree 25 feet in the air. However, with age I have gotten smarter and less careless. So this time, I delegated the climbing task to my little brother, who most economists agree, has a lower life-value than I have (using current day indicators). However, he did not have to climb with a chainsaw. After having spent 45 minutes in a fruitless effort to lasso the tree half-way up, Paul finally agreed that we should try climbing up there and lassoing it by hand. This put an end to our cowboy pretensions. Paul climbed up the tree and roped the tree. We built an ingenious system to pull the tree down in such a way that it would not hit the dock on its way down. Notice that Paul is a fine arts major at Ryerson and I am an arts grad from Waterloo. Neither of us have those engineering genes that should have been passed onto us by virtue of our father's and grandfather's engineering profession. So we failed to clue into the simple physics of the equation. We figured that pulling the rope would be sufficient to sway the tree off of its natural course towards the dock. As I finished the cut in the enormous tree, the tree began to fall and the rope immediately slacked off. As soon as the rope slacked, we lost all influence on its direction. It came crashing down and glanced off the side of the dock, breaking numerous boards. We cut the tree into pieces and hauled the pieces off the ice. The dock damage would have to wait until another weekend for proper repairs.
Meanwhile, I had the difficult task of explaining to my grandfather, who was still in Regina, that we had succeeded in bringing down the tree AND damaging the dock. The whole point of cutting the tree down had been negated.
However, the two enterprising brothers had enjoyed a fine day of lumberjacking. The moral of this story is to get an engineering degree, or at least have engineer supervision when one is undertaking precision lumberjack tasks. My experience has taught me a new-found respect for gravity. I think we take gravity for granted far too often. And our dock suffered the consequences of this neglect. In the wake of the post-traumatic stress that I have brought upon myself, I will never look at a pine tree the same again. Mea culpa.
We got up to the cottage after stocking up on supplies in fair Verona, where we laid our scene for about 30 minutes, before moving on past Easy St, Verona and pushing on to the cottage. I'm convinced that living on Easy St is not as easy as it sounds. I looked at the houses, and it didn't look any different than the others. Maybe it's easy inside the houses? A promising avenue for more research.
Moving on, we soon got to the cottage. I was convinced that I could drive into the cottage from the county road. There was no snow on the ground in Kingston. Well, with a big monster red or black testosterone truck I'm sure I would have made it in. Unfortunately, I'm the ambivalent owner of one Honda Civic. Say what you want about the Civic, but an ATV it is not. Needless to say, the 5 inches of melting snow prevented me from driving in. We hauled the water, food and beer into the cottage and began the slow process of heating the place up. It was fun hanging out with my little bro. We went for a long walk in the woods. We played chess. We drank hot chocolate. We listened to some Spirit of the West. We drank more hot chocolate (with stale marshmellows). We kept logs in the fire. I braved some wicked weather to make hamburgers on the barbeque. And we quickly got bored. So we drafted a water-tight plan to defeat our boredom the next day. We had a few brewskies and hit the sack.
The plan was to cut down an old 50 foot pine tree that had been overhanging the dock in a most threatening way ever since it lost its life in a valiant fight against the 1998 ice storm and a subsequent disease. This pine, despite its heroic past, was the victim of our ambitious plan to fill our morning with some good old fashioned hard labour. At our cottage, we have two principal ways of filling the time with work: We either cut down inconvenient trees for firewood, or we move inconvenient stones to more convenient places. This has the advantage of keeping us from relaxing much of the time, and gives us the satisfaction that we have accomplished something of undisputed insignificance.
So, usually its me that climbs the ladder with a chainsaw in one hand, cuts off branches while holding onto the swaying trunk of the tree 25 feet in the air. However, with age I have gotten smarter and less careless. So this time, I delegated the climbing task to my little brother, who most economists agree, has a lower life-value than I have (using current day indicators). However, he did not have to climb with a chainsaw. After having spent 45 minutes in a fruitless effort to lasso the tree half-way up, Paul finally agreed that we should try climbing up there and lassoing it by hand. This put an end to our cowboy pretensions. Paul climbed up the tree and roped the tree. We built an ingenious system to pull the tree down in such a way that it would not hit the dock on its way down. Notice that Paul is a fine arts major at Ryerson and I am an arts grad from Waterloo. Neither of us have those engineering genes that should have been passed onto us by virtue of our father's and grandfather's engineering profession. So we failed to clue into the simple physics of the equation. We figured that pulling the rope would be sufficient to sway the tree off of its natural course towards the dock. As I finished the cut in the enormous tree, the tree began to fall and the rope immediately slacked off. As soon as the rope slacked, we lost all influence on its direction. It came crashing down and glanced off the side of the dock, breaking numerous boards. We cut the tree into pieces and hauled the pieces off the ice. The dock damage would have to wait until another weekend for proper repairs.
Meanwhile, I had the difficult task of explaining to my grandfather, who was still in Regina, that we had succeeded in bringing down the tree AND damaging the dock. The whole point of cutting the tree down had been negated.
However, the two enterprising brothers had enjoyed a fine day of lumberjacking. The moral of this story is to get an engineering degree, or at least have engineer supervision when one is undertaking precision lumberjack tasks. My experience has taught me a new-found respect for gravity. I think we take gravity for granted far too often. And our dock suffered the consequences of this neglect. In the wake of the post-traumatic stress that I have brought upon myself, I will never look at a pine tree the same again. Mea culpa.
posted by Lt Smash at 7:27 PM
6 Comments:
I suspect motherly supervision could also have been of assistance and perhaps would have avoided the damaging consequences of ill-considered, hasty and reckless behaviour by those who ought (by dint of much upbringing by said mother) to have known better! At least with a mother present there could have been plenty of warning language such as "be careful", "don't fall off the ladder", "have you buttoned up your coat?" and "are you wearing your extremely-important-to-the-next-generation protective chainsaw gear?"
Well Anonymous, you sound like you would make an excellent mother. Maybe you would like to become an associate mother of mine, and supervise my next lumberjacking episode?
I really don't think this time we were being reckless. I think we were just stupid. By this time, I think I am qualified to judge between my recklessness and my stupidity.
I believe the rule-of-thumb is that to accurately distinguish between ones own recklessness and their (I prefer) "error in judgement", it must be weighed either from the distance of several years or the age of thirty two, whichever comes first.
But I may be mistaken. :)
That's assuming that, despite stupidity, recklessness or errors in judgement, one actually reaches the age of 32.
brother of Uncle Al-nonymous:
What is life changing about turning
32? or is it an event that "wisens one up"?
Observational suggestions:
1) Amateur lumberjacks should restrict their activities to Ontario pines and leave their chainsaws at home when visiting BC. Misplaced felled Douglas Firs makum toothpicks out of dock and corpses out of errant lumberjacks.
2) Absent engineering experience on site could be addressed in another fashion - too late for Paul but JD could consider taking a page from his cousin's notebook and marrying an engineer. Could solve a number of problems.
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