The Pecan I Climbed After He Took the Truck

None of that was in his face on Opal’s lawn that morning. He had a number in his head, and the number was three hundred dollars a day, and it was across town.

I carried the saddle back across the yard. Tully watched me buckle the leg loops and cinch the waist.

“You’re going up that?” he said.

“Daddy did trees bigger than this with less than we’ve got,” I said.

“Not over a roof.”

“Over a church,” I said. “A little country church out by Beggs, with the whole congregation standing on the lawn. You’d have liked to see it.”

Tully looked up at the pecan. It was the biggest tree on the street. Sixty feet tall if it was an inch, with the standing half still holding most of its crown, and every twig of it coated in clear ice that threw the sun back so bright you had to squint.

I went to the pickup bed for the rest of what I needed. My throw line and the twelve ounce throw bag.

A hundred and fifty feet of half inch climbing line. My hitch cord. A rigging block and a sling. A hundred and fifty feet of five eighths bull rope for the lowering line.

Daddy’s old Port-a-Wrap, the aluminum friction device that clamps around the trunk so a groundman can let a heavy piece down slow.

And the saws. My little top-handle saw with its fourteen inch bar, for one hand work in the tree.

And my bigger saw, the one I would send up on a tag line for the thick cuts at the end.

Opal came out on her back step in her coat over her housecoat. She was a small woman with her white hair pinned up, and she held on to the porch rail with both hands.

“Honey,” she said, “is that man coming back?”

“Not today, Mrs. Kimbrough,” I said. “But we’re still going to get it off your roof.”

“How?”

“The way my daddy would have,” I said. “It just takes longer.”

She looked at the tree, and then at me, and then she said, “Then I’ll put on coffee,” and went back inside.

I dressed the way I always do on a storm job, in my orange hi-vis jacket, my tan canvas bibs, and my white climbing helmet, with my hair in one long braid down my back.

The first thing was the ice. You do not climb an iced tree in the shade. By eleven o’clock the sun had gotten up over the house across the street and onto the crown, and the ice was letting go in sheets.

It came down off the twigs like somebody pouring gravel on a tin roof.

I stood back by the fence and waited until the worst of it had fallen. Then I took the throw bag and aimed for a solid union about fifty feet up in the standing half.

It was a big crotch, thick and sound, well above the split and well away from the crack.

It took me four throws. On the fourth the bag went over clean and came sliding down the far side.

I pulled my climbing line over behind it and checked the union from the ground with the binoculars for any sign of the crack running up into it.

It was sound. Pecan cracks along the grain, and this crack had run down from the old crotch into the trunk about eight feet, not up.