On Sunday, HA came home from taking our guests to the airport and we started to take Luna the Big Dog™ out for a walk. We’d only taken a few steps when a neighbor came driving up the road and asked if we had “called about the tree yet.” What tree? He explained that there was a tree down across the road just mauka from our place, but he was able to drive under it as it was hung up on a telephone wire.
“Our road?” HA asked. After all, she’d just driven up the road (there’s no other way up the mountain) in Timmy the Titan, which surely wouldn’t have fit under any fallen tree. The neighbor said he’d call the road department, so we walked on down the road to see what he was talking about.
Sure enough, some time in the previous twenty minutes or so a tree had fallen directly across the road. At that spot, there is a very long span of telephone cable that runs diagonally from one side of the road to the other over the space of 50 yards/meters or so. The tree — which wasn’t huge but was, nonetheless, good sized, had landed on the cable at about the halfway point and had stretched the wire down to within about six feet of the roadway.
The situation looked dangerous. It was starting to get dark, the road is narrow (one lane), and the tree had dependent branches that would be hard for drivers to see in the dark. Further, the cable was visibly stretching and really didn’t look as though it could take the weight for long. If the cable itself didn’t break, one of the poles was likely to come down.
We were close to the studio, so I ran up the road and grabbed an 8’ 2x6 while HA and Luna waited at the road to warn motorists. We used the 2x6 to brace up under the tree to reduce the stress on the phone wire and make the tree more visible.
We are well off-grid, and there is no electric power on those poles, so I didn’t have to worry about getting electrocuted. Those cables do carry phone and internet fiber for everyone up the mountain, which is a real lifeline as cell phone service is practically non-existent (in spite, he grumbles, of the fantasy coverage maps which show that all major carriers have good service in the region). It would not be good to lose that cable.
I walked back up to the house, donned appropriate clothing and grabbed some safety gear and the new chainsaw. I returned driving the truck. It wasn’t at all clear whether the branches at the top end of the tree were supporting the tree or not. If they were, I not only risked trapping the saw as I had when cutting the north-south passage, but I also risked increasing the stress on the phone cable if I started cutting those branches off. I had to proceed cautiously, lightening the tree as much as possible by cutting off extraneous limbs while HA re-positioned our support post. Eventually, I got to where I felt I could stand on the tailgate of the truck and safely cut the tree where it rested on the cable.
Now the cable was free, but the bulk of the tree was across the road. It took some doing to cut it up without getting the saw trapped again, and we ended up having to use Timmy to push the biggest part of the trunk off the road.
The police came by, apparently alerted by multiple neighbors who had called about the tree (it’s the first time I’d seen police up here). They thanked us, which was a relief as I never know if I’m breaking some arcane law about lumberjacking on public roads. As of this morning, though, the bulk of the tree is still lying on the side of the road where we’d left it. The road is clear for vehicles, at least, and the data is flowing.
—2p