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DAZE WORK: Going to great heights to get the job done
Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, we had a next-door neighbor who had a high-rise window-washing business. We marveled at how he would go to great lengths to share the heights of his latest dirty work.
And one day, there he and a co-worker were, all over the local TV stations and the front page of the Sun Times, hanging off a high rise in the Windy City. One of their cables had snapped in the wind and the gondola was hanging at about a 45-degree angle, swaying in the breeze like some high-wire act.
They made it home safely, but it left an impression on me (I’m a little leery of heights anyway). Nope, wouldn’t tackle a job like that in a thousand lifetimes. From then on I decided the big jobs are best left to the professionals. The thought of me living in a house where I’d put on the roof or done the wiring smacks of the old Groucho Marx theory that he didn’t want to belong to any country club that would accept someone like him as a member.
Earlier this week, it was time to take down an old backyard ash tree, riddled with another 2020 malady, ash borer disease, and buckling the edge of my driveway as it leaned toward Fillmore.
Sure, I’ve taken down a few trees before, back when I lived out in Madison Township, firing up the chainsaw and heating the house with a wood stove.
But this tree was about 90 feet tall with broken branches already balanced among its good limbs. Besides that, the tree was nestled in between my back door and the garage with a chain-link fence not 10 feet to the east. Degree of difficulty? Well beyond my pay grade.
There’s a reason it’s not cheap to have a tree like that trimmed or taken down completely. Not just any Charlie with a chainsaw can tackle the job, especially in such tight quarters.
That’s why it’s necessary to turn to people like Andy Lorimer and his tree crew (Phil Lee and Tommy Kehrein) from D & S Tree Service. I had seen handy Andy’s work before in famous photos of him harnessed to an enormous tree high above a bridge in Turkey Run State Park. So I figured a little, old 90- to 100-foot ash in my backyard would pose no real challenge.
Yet it was amazing to watch the tree crew at work. There was Lorimer, perched in the bucket about 60 feet above my driveway, looking like he was using one of those Buck Rogers jetpacks we were all supposed to have at our disposal by 2000 as he glided up and down, in and out, left and right to first saw off all the smaller limbs. Within two hours all that was left was the long trunk.
The remaining big pieces -- cut into about eight-foot sections, weighing about 2,000 pounds apiece -- were each lowered to the ground with a pair of cables as Lee and Kehrein worked in unison. One chunk shook the house as it fell to earth, and I thought to myself, graceful yet violent.
The big chunks, hauled off on a flatbed, are destined to become firewood. Ash is great for baseball bats but I doubt my old backyard tree will be turned into Louisville Sluggers.
Watching this all play out from my back steps like some sidewalk superintendent, it was sad to realize that 75 years -- Lorimer actually counted the rings on the trunk for me to make the age determination (I was never sure that was really a thing) -- of mother nature’s growth could come to such a crashing halt. Ash borer disease, in its own way, is like the coronavirus of the tree world.
But it was obviously time to pull the plug. Limbs and branches had been raining down on my yard and driveway -- and once on both cars parked beneath the tree -- for several months.
The old tree was also quite the playground for our Northwood neighborhood squirrels, often seen running up the trunk and leaping over to a nearby bush. Yet we never saw a squirrel’s nest among all the timber Lorimer brought down as I joked that he had probably made some creatures homeless.
As I left the house the next day the backyard was instantly brighter. In front of me, a squirrel dug at the moist earth and sniffed his way around the base of the stump before jumping onto what was left of the old ash. He turned and stood on his back legs, looking in all directions before running under my car and out the driveway as if totally confused by the new landscape before him that now lets in more sunshine than ever before.
And like Mr. Squirrel, I miss that big, old tree already.
But just give it another 75 years or so, and there’ll be another in its place.
