People still do this like Jason did on Here Come the Brides? Summer Project #1: Cleaning the lower garage and taking down trees

Does anybody remember the TV series from the late 1960s Here Come the Brides?  

 OK.  Nobody does.  I get it.

It was based on a man (Jason) who owned a mountain outside Seattle, and who was a lumberman.  

Because his lumberjacks were lonely and, apparently were in desperate need of meaningful conversations with women about their days cutting down trees, a bunch of women were imported from somewhere or other to fill this conversation need.  The typical story of each episode was that something threatened Jason's ownership of his mountain, and the local banker (Stempel) would come close to stealing it away from him.

But all would end well.  Jason would keep his mountain.  I enjoyed this show for the two seasons it was on TV, although why I am not sure.  I've watched it recently and it's awfully hokey.  When watching it I never could have imagined that I would be living in Jason's area of the country, and, like him, dealing with trees.

Why do I bring this up?  

Occasionally in the show we would see Jason's lumberjacks cutting down trees.  They would use hand saws, of course, sometimes climbing high into trees to use them.  

When you think about the technological differences between now and then, the list is endless.  We do almost nothing in the same way that was done 150 years ago.   Men still need the same type of "meaningful conversations" with women that Jason's lumberjacks did, of course, but almost nothing else is done the same way.

Unless you want a tree cut down, that is.

When we arrived home we found dozens of downed limbs, and one downed tree that cut off our electricity for an entire week, from a storm that had come through the area in December.  We had a huge cleanup job.

It took us a few days to get them cut up and drug into the woods.

From this experience, we realized that we had a lot of dead trees on the property that would eventually fall into inconvenient places or do a lot of damage.  In addition, we had several Alders that are notorious for leaning into areas to get sunlight that can create problems when they fall.  It seemed time to have some preventive maintenance done, something that is needed when one owns a home on Whidbey Island that is surrounded by forest. 

This meant a lot of tree work.   We hired a local company that had done work for us in the past to cut down about 15 trees, cut them up, and stack the wood in our lower garage.

But to do this meant cleaning out this lower garage so we would have space for the new wood.  That was a job in and of itself, requiring three trips to the dump.

Doesn't it look nice, now?  It's so rewarding to take things to the dump and to get them out of your life forever.



Then it was time for the loggers.  And, just like Jason's crew, one of them climbed our trees and cut them.  No advances in technology could make this task any different from what it was back in Here Comes the Brides days--a person climbing high in a tree and using a saw to cut the tree down in stages.  Even though the saw is now a chainsaw, most of the rest of the job was done in a way not all that different from how Jason did it.  It was really something to watch.

 

See him up there?

 
 
 

 There goes the top of one of the trees:

 

Here is the section where the trees that were leaning into the yard were cut.

 

 The downed trees were moved to the front of our lower garage.  Technology in terms of vehicles to move the wood clearly has made this part of the job easier.

Where they were cut up and split.

Ready to dry for a season, and then keep us warm with much less use of fossil fuels.  We have enough wood now for about 6 years--from trees that were grown on our property that would have fallen anyway and damaged either our house or our garage.  Now there is room for another crop of trees.   The savings in our fuel bill will just about cover the costs for the labor. 

 

The job was done professionally and skillfully.  The man who split the wood spent the entire day doing it with an ax.  Not with a splitter.  Pounding and pounding away for 8 straight hours.  Who can do that kind of work anymore?  Who can climb trees with a saw anymore?  

Some things technology cannot help us with and so we still depend upon the same skill that Jason needed 150 years ago.