Tuesday, November 9, 2010

The morning entertainment.


So.  I was sitting at the desk in our living room, half-heartedly working on homework in the few hours before class, listening to the wind outside the apartment and the drone of a chainsaw somewhere outside the window.  Marit wandered in and looked out the window.  “There’s a man in that tree,” she announced.  So, of course, we opened the window to watch.  What else would you do on a rainy November morning when you’re supposed to be working on a development project?

Pretty soon we were enthralled.  See, this wasn’t just any man in a tree.  No.  This was a man in big rubber boots, climbing around the tree directly outside our apartment with a big orange chainsaw, which was attached to a skinny white rope, which was looped haphazardly around a branch and dangled down to the ground.  He was climbing around, balancing himself precariously in crooks between branches and then chopping them off.  When we first looked, he was cutting toward himself, his legs splayed between two branches on opposite sides of the tree trunk, forearm balanced on the branch he was currently removing.  Somehow, though, he stayed in the tree, even as the branch went crashing to the ground.

And so it continued.  We began to yell “Timber!” and applaud when branches fell.  A small crowd gathered underneath, comprised mostly of little kindergartners with umbrellas, who would gasp and cheer every time a branch tumbled down.  Sometimes, when a position got too precarious to move from with the chainsaw in hand, the man in the tree would lower it to his friend on the ground, who would catch it by the blade and hang on until the man in the tree readjusted and pulled it back up.  He lit a cigarette on one of these breaks.  He cut down the next three branches while smoking.

At one point, the chainsaw got caught.  He tugged at it for a while, but to no avail.  However, his friend on the ground had an idea—he threw a stick at the man in the tree’s back to get him to pay attention, and then tossed up an extra rope.  Next thing we knew, the man in the tree had shimmied six feet up the branch like a monkey, his arms and legs wrapped around it, somehow climbing over the chainsaw which was protruding alarmingly from the half-sawed-off branch, and tying the end of the rope around it.  He slid back down—again, somehow missing the chainsaw—and caught himself in the crook of the tree.  Then, grabbing the chainsaw again, he yelled something, and his friend began to pull the rope.  With the help of our friend, the little old man who owns the shop at the bottom of our apartment building, they tugged on the branch until it loosened up enough for the man to get the chainsaw unstuck.  Then it was back to business as usual… or as usual as this business could be, I guess.

We’re still not really sure what the point was.  Nor are we sure if that was really the safest method they could have come up with for the dismemberment of the tree… eh.  But all the branches are successfully lobbed off and lying on the ground outside the apartment.  The kindergartners have dispersed, and the two men are now going at the wood with a hatchet.  It’s probably wood for the winter, though why they chose this tree to decapitate, I’m not sure.  I kinda hope the trunk comes down too.  Right now it looks like a head of broccoli with all the fluffy part chewed off—just bare, hacked-off branches on a narrow stalk.  I hate seeing trees get cut down.  But at least this one was pretty entertaining.

On a side note, Julie just dumped salt into her coffee instead of sugar.  Mass chaos ensues.  Welcome to life in Apartment Lucy…

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