remember the tree, that magnificent maple i've mentioned before? the one i worried and was relieved about a little when that freak storm drove through the region the day i bought the property almost a year ago?
it split during a recent storm, dropping two of those enormous boughs on my house.
they did not significantly puncture or break the house (in contrast to the line, a mile or so north, along which a genuine tornado did cause trees to rend many houses and render many uninhabitable), but, remaining substantially attached by their own split timbers, rested there on my roof heavy and still as trees.
i called the insurance company and tree services and took the next morning off work.
there have been some drainage difficulties with the gutters since i moved in a year ago. i had managed, last fall, to manually clean all the loam and saplings out of the back gutter and flush the downspout, right under the erstwhile maple boughs, by standing on the roof of a rear addition, but have lacked the sufficiently-long ladder -- or the will to experiment with potential belay anchors -- to get to the gutters in the front.
so, while waiting for adjustors and estimators to arrive, i seized my moment: from the roof of that addition i scaled the fallen boughs, and, with some somehwat-more-straightforward experimental belaying, managed to clean out the front gutters. it wasn't nearly as bad as anticipated. a lady who lives a few doors down came out to express concern over my amateur antics on the roof, and since then several neighbors have insisted i wait, to climb around the roof, until they are around and have already dialed 9 - 1. but the once was enough. mission accomplished. a silly victory, but satisfying.
two classes of tree-removal guys came by. the first, comprising a bunch of muscular young guys in pickup trucks and khaki shorts, said they could safely remove the two fallen boughs from the house using ropes and made no mention the rest of the tree; the second class came with clipboards and estimate forms in shirts with embroidered name and pickup trucks with the company logo on the door; these looked around quietly and said "you know the whole tree has to go," before looking for crane placement possibilities.
(i have seen a crew take down a more vertically-oriented silver maple -- probably one of the same generation as this one -- with ropes and a cherrypicker, tying each section of bough off to another part of the tree before sawing it free and slowly lowering it to the ground).
the gentleman from Walt's Tree Service explained. once those two boughs were removed, the bulk of the mass of that branch of the main trunk would be gone, leaving nothing to counterbalance that of the many extended boughs of the other branch. in such an unbalanced state, the tree would certainly topple soon.
i went with Walt's.
the crews from Walt's came in and secured those split limbs,
then took out
some incidental trees
to bring in
and deploy the crane.
the crane blew one of its enormous tires on some ironmongery buried in the yard, so the whole time the tree guys were planning, sawing, climbing and chipping, and the crane operator was lifting, and swinging and lowering, the crane, itself, was suspended on its extended support legs and a man from michelin was there replacing the blown tire.
then, they ascended with their vorpal chainsaws in hand, and,
with a snickersnack here
and a snickersnack there,
made short work of clearing that tree's other boughs away until nothing remained but
to lift off the first branch,
which, as you can see here, is about the size of a nice maple tree itself,
and then lift and pull the second until its skein of split wood and bark broke free:
several families of squirrels were displaced during these proceedings -- at a rate of about one family per major branch (significant parts, the squirrel-nest holding parts we must presume, of each were hollow, if not to say rotten) -- some with comical scrambling, some with acrobatically improbable, panicked flights from the terrors of ropes, cranes, chainsaws, gravity, engines and men, generally into further terrors and challenging situations. a neighbor worried about baby squirrels being fed, with their home branches, into the chippers (not pictured here: two wood chippers and several trucks full of maple chips . . . perhaps with baby squirrel dressing, and most of two crews working consistently to hew each bough down to reasonably-sized pieces and heave them into the chipper). but from the scrambling i saw, i doubt any able-bodied squirrel might have ridden the timber that long.
the split trunk was, finally, emasculated and cut down to a table-flat stump at the height of the wire fence, much of which has been incorporated deeply into the trunk for some years, bearing a blackened scar perhaps from the lightning stroke that first split the trunk.
there is some, minor, damage to the roof, siding and gutters. working on that now.
my favorite thing about that effort, so far, was when a contractor making an estimate gestured to a crack where plaster wall meets plaster ceiling, inside, nearest the impact -- a crack in a nondescript 90-degree junction of two planes to my untrained eye -- and said, "what you've got there is artisanal plaster; not too many guys doing that these days," as though it were the cherub-infested ceiling of versailles.
having only paid homeowners insurance premiums for about a year now, i feel like a big winner . . . but am a little suspicious of that feeling.