NuclearNed
Raconteur
I could tell by the glint in Carl's eye that he fully intended to harm me in an all too literal way. His grip on his running chainsaw tightened noticeably, and he took a purposeful step towards me. I staggered a step backwards in retreat and wondered who would take care of my wife once I was gone.
This was all the result of a series of events that had begun days earlier. I had been on an overnight business trip to a town a couple of hours away. That night my wife was home alone while a series of massive thunderstorms raced through the region.
As I've mentioned plenty of times, my house was built right in the middle of an old-growth forest. There are a large number of massive house-crushing trees towering directly over my bedroom. During fair weather, this makes for an incredibly picturesque front yard. However, the first time the wind blew after my wife and I moved in, I got to see firsthand massive trees creaking and swaying ominously over my roof. It gave me a better feel for some of the reasons the previous owner had decided to leave. Before I moved into my new house, I might have said that I kind of enjoyed a good storm from time to time. Now every gentle breeze makes me cower in the bathtub while I wonder if it was prudent to build my outdoor fire pit where all the vengeful trees could watch.
The morning after the storm, my wife sent me a short email saying that a tree had fallen during the night. She didn't elaborate. It's normal for a few small trees to break every now and again, so I figured this was nothing out of the ordinary. I guessed I had a couple of hours of work waiting on me when I got back home. I couldn't have been more wrong.
As it turned out, during the storm an enormous oak decided it had had enough of living. It fell and crashed into an ancient poplar, which under the enormous weight snapped like a twig about thirty feet off the ground. As the two large trees continued their freefall, they took out a half dozen smaller trees. A mountain of broken tree parts ended up in the small road that leads to my neighbor's property, blocking it completely. It was treemageddon. Splintered and crushed trees were scattered on the ground everywhere. The next afternoon I drove up wide-eyed and observed the raw tree carnage, noting to myself that the wife couldn't write an accurately descriptive email if her life depended on it.
As I was trying to figure out how to get a handle on enormity of this mess, my retired neighbor Carl walked up. Carl is an excellent neighbor, but is a man of few words. Quite frankly, I'm in reverent awe of Carl. I have way too much geek in my blood for it to ever happen, but as I grow older I hope to gain a few of his qualities. Gruff and grizzled, he is the type of guy who in another life would have made a prosperous career of battling vile Nazis, clubbing baby seals, or putting entire villages to the sword. He's built like the love child of a Sasquatch and a Sherman tank, and looks like a well-worn saddlebag with a scruffy beard. In short, he's the living definition of man's man. Only a fool who didn't value his own well-being would ever screw with Carl.
And yet Carl has his soft spots, which he never intentionally reveals. For instance, a few times I've caught him loving on my old dog, Coda. One time he thought I had my back to him not paying attention, but I quietly watched in amusement as he baby-talked to her and gave her a good old-fashioned rub-down. If I didn't know otherwise, I would have guessed that animals would instinctively fear Carl, but Coda is wholeheartedly infatuated with him. She is always completely under his spell, and was wagging in doggy ecstasy, drooling across his knees with wild abandon. Then he noticed me watching and the hard edge instantly returned. He glared and growled, two things at which he excels. I quickly got back to whatever it was I was doing and decided it would be best to never bring up what I had seen.
So as I surveyed my tree mess, Carl made an incredibly generous offer: he would help me cut up the tree in exchange for all the firewood. This sounded really great to me, and for the next several weekends we worked together. I'm no slouch, and I've spent my share of time cutting up firewood, but I know that I still could learn a thing or two from older, wiser guys. Carl is one of those men who through years of difficult experience has learned how to work harder and faster than most, and is an expert with every kind of tool. The end result was that I was constantly bouncing around like an eager-to-please pup, feeling like I barely knew how to do anything right, and trying to pick up a scrap of knowledge at the feet of the master. For the most part, he patiently tried to hide the obvious fact that he would have been finished days earlier had he not been burdened with me "helping" him (or, as he might put it, "getting in his way.")
As our work began one Saturday, I could detect that something was slightly different in Carl. We had gotten all the smaller branches cut and moved away the previous weekends, and were now down to the main portion of the oak. About thirty feet from the root ball there was a large fork in the trunk. One side of the fork rested on the ground, while the other side of the fork was perched precariously over the prettiest little native pine tree I've ever seen. This upper portion of the oak was massive and probably weighed as much as a dump truck. If it had been left up to me, I would have never in a million years been able to cut the upper part of the oak without completely destroying the pine, but somehow the night before Carl had done it. He was absolutely beaming with pride, which meant that his scowl was slightly less scary. Though he's usually stuck for words, he made a point to tell me how difficult it had been to save the little tree.
So we began our work for the day. Carl was going to begin cutting into the main portion of the trunk. My task would be to roll the heavy logs he cut down the hill to the road where we would move them into his truck. Carl made the very first cut into the main trunk, producing an enormous log that probably weighed as much as me. I wrangled the log so that it was lined up with the path I wanted it to take. I took great care to make sure the log was steered well away from the little pine, and began to slowly roll the log down the rocky hill.
A large chunk of my soul withered and died as the log unintentionally slipped out of my grasp.
The micro-instant my fingers lost contact with the log, it took a small bounce which rotated its bulk approximately 45 degrees from where I had aimed it. In slow motion, it bounced from one rock into another as it steamrolled its way down the hill directly towards the pine. A voice in the back of my head drew my attention to the fact that I could no longer hear Carl cutting the next log; I didn't have to look at him to know he was watching the whole thing unfold. Helpless, I watched as the log bulled through the pretty little pine, scraping off all the limbs and bark on one side. Somehow it didn't break the tree, but still the damage was done. I spun around to catch Carl's reaction. I heard a loud pop which, judging by how tightly his jaw was clenched, I could only assume was one of his molars breaking in half.
I was a dead man. Carl was slowly and inexorably bearing down on me. I had the feeling that afterwards when Carl explained to my parents and wife that I had been a dumbass in need of a good killing, they would nod in complete agreement. I resigned myself to my fate.
And then he stopped. After a brief pause, he turned around and resumed cutting the tree.
Days have passed since then, and I've had a chance to think about it. I'm not real sure why I'm still kicking, but I have a theory. I like to think that during that moment's pause, right before Carl was going to plunge his saw into my skull, an image of Coda entered his mind. He realized that as worthless as I am, if he killed me Coda might eventually miss her Daddy and become inconsolably sad. Carl simply couldn't bear the thought of doing anything that would grieve my dog.
Like I said, he has his soft spots.
This was all the result of a series of events that had begun days earlier. I had been on an overnight business trip to a town a couple of hours away. That night my wife was home alone while a series of massive thunderstorms raced through the region.
As I've mentioned plenty of times, my house was built right in the middle of an old-growth forest. There are a large number of massive house-crushing trees towering directly over my bedroom. During fair weather, this makes for an incredibly picturesque front yard. However, the first time the wind blew after my wife and I moved in, I got to see firsthand massive trees creaking and swaying ominously over my roof. It gave me a better feel for some of the reasons the previous owner had decided to leave. Before I moved into my new house, I might have said that I kind of enjoyed a good storm from time to time. Now every gentle breeze makes me cower in the bathtub while I wonder if it was prudent to build my outdoor fire pit where all the vengeful trees could watch.
The morning after the storm, my wife sent me a short email saying that a tree had fallen during the night. She didn't elaborate. It's normal for a few small trees to break every now and again, so I figured this was nothing out of the ordinary. I guessed I had a couple of hours of work waiting on me when I got back home. I couldn't have been more wrong.
As it turned out, during the storm an enormous oak decided it had had enough of living. It fell and crashed into an ancient poplar, which under the enormous weight snapped like a twig about thirty feet off the ground. As the two large trees continued their freefall, they took out a half dozen smaller trees. A mountain of broken tree parts ended up in the small road that leads to my neighbor's property, blocking it completely. It was treemageddon. Splintered and crushed trees were scattered on the ground everywhere. The next afternoon I drove up wide-eyed and observed the raw tree carnage, noting to myself that the wife couldn't write an accurately descriptive email if her life depended on it.
As I was trying to figure out how to get a handle on enormity of this mess, my retired neighbor Carl walked up. Carl is an excellent neighbor, but is a man of few words. Quite frankly, I'm in reverent awe of Carl. I have way too much geek in my blood for it to ever happen, but as I grow older I hope to gain a few of his qualities. Gruff and grizzled, he is the type of guy who in another life would have made a prosperous career of battling vile Nazis, clubbing baby seals, or putting entire villages to the sword. He's built like the love child of a Sasquatch and a Sherman tank, and looks like a well-worn saddlebag with a scruffy beard. In short, he's the living definition of man's man. Only a fool who didn't value his own well-being would ever screw with Carl.
And yet Carl has his soft spots, which he never intentionally reveals. For instance, a few times I've caught him loving on my old dog, Coda. One time he thought I had my back to him not paying attention, but I quietly watched in amusement as he baby-talked to her and gave her a good old-fashioned rub-down. If I didn't know otherwise, I would have guessed that animals would instinctively fear Carl, but Coda is wholeheartedly infatuated with him. She is always completely under his spell, and was wagging in doggy ecstasy, drooling across his knees with wild abandon. Then he noticed me watching and the hard edge instantly returned. He glared and growled, two things at which he excels. I quickly got back to whatever it was I was doing and decided it would be best to never bring up what I had seen.
So as I surveyed my tree mess, Carl made an incredibly generous offer: he would help me cut up the tree in exchange for all the firewood. This sounded really great to me, and for the next several weekends we worked together. I'm no slouch, and I've spent my share of time cutting up firewood, but I know that I still could learn a thing or two from older, wiser guys. Carl is one of those men who through years of difficult experience has learned how to work harder and faster than most, and is an expert with every kind of tool. The end result was that I was constantly bouncing around like an eager-to-please pup, feeling like I barely knew how to do anything right, and trying to pick up a scrap of knowledge at the feet of the master. For the most part, he patiently tried to hide the obvious fact that he would have been finished days earlier had he not been burdened with me "helping" him (or, as he might put it, "getting in his way.")
As our work began one Saturday, I could detect that something was slightly different in Carl. We had gotten all the smaller branches cut and moved away the previous weekends, and were now down to the main portion of the oak. About thirty feet from the root ball there was a large fork in the trunk. One side of the fork rested on the ground, while the other side of the fork was perched precariously over the prettiest little native pine tree I've ever seen. This upper portion of the oak was massive and probably weighed as much as a dump truck. If it had been left up to me, I would have never in a million years been able to cut the upper part of the oak without completely destroying the pine, but somehow the night before Carl had done it. He was absolutely beaming with pride, which meant that his scowl was slightly less scary. Though he's usually stuck for words, he made a point to tell me how difficult it had been to save the little tree.
So we began our work for the day. Carl was going to begin cutting into the main portion of the trunk. My task would be to roll the heavy logs he cut down the hill to the road where we would move them into his truck. Carl made the very first cut into the main trunk, producing an enormous log that probably weighed as much as me. I wrangled the log so that it was lined up with the path I wanted it to take. I took great care to make sure the log was steered well away from the little pine, and began to slowly roll the log down the rocky hill.
A large chunk of my soul withered and died as the log unintentionally slipped out of my grasp.
The micro-instant my fingers lost contact with the log, it took a small bounce which rotated its bulk approximately 45 degrees from where I had aimed it. In slow motion, it bounced from one rock into another as it steamrolled its way down the hill directly towards the pine. A voice in the back of my head drew my attention to the fact that I could no longer hear Carl cutting the next log; I didn't have to look at him to know he was watching the whole thing unfold. Helpless, I watched as the log bulled through the pretty little pine, scraping off all the limbs and bark on one side. Somehow it didn't break the tree, but still the damage was done. I spun around to catch Carl's reaction. I heard a loud pop which, judging by how tightly his jaw was clenched, I could only assume was one of his molars breaking in half.
I was a dead man. Carl was slowly and inexorably bearing down on me. I had the feeling that afterwards when Carl explained to my parents and wife that I had been a dumbass in need of a good killing, they would nod in complete agreement. I resigned myself to my fate.
And then he stopped. After a brief pause, he turned around and resumed cutting the tree.
Days have passed since then, and I've had a chance to think about it. I'm not real sure why I'm still kicking, but I have a theory. I like to think that during that moment's pause, right before Carl was going to plunge his saw into my skull, an image of Coda entered his mind. He realized that as worthless as I am, if he killed me Coda might eventually miss her Daddy and become inconsolably sad. Carl simply couldn't bear the thought of doing anything that would grieve my dog.
Like I said, he has his soft spots.
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