The Pecan I Climbed After He Took the Truck

The standing half would have to come out too, sooner or later. But it would hold me today.

I tied my line off the old way, the way Daddy taught me, a doubled rope with a Blake’s hitch.

There are faster systems now and I use them most days. But that morning I wanted Daddy’s way, and I will not pretend I can tell you exactly why.

Since the tree was coming out anyway, I strapped on my spurs. You never spike a tree you mean to keep.

A spike wound is a door for rot. But this pecan was done, and the spurs would let me move around the trunk without fighting for every foot.

Tully hung the rigging block. I took it up on my saddle and went up to a spot about ten feet above the split, where the standing half could take the load.

I choked the sling around the trunk and clipped the block on, and Tully ran the bull rope up through it and back down.

At the bottom he set Daddy’s Port-a-Wrap on the trunk and took two wraps around the horn with the tail. That way he could let a two hundred pound piece of wood down as slow as a bucket of eggs, with his own hands, and never have it pull him off his feet.

“Ready?” I called down.

“Ready,” he said.

Here is the thing about a leaner on a roof. You cannot just cut it. If you cut it at the split, the whole forty feet of it comes down on the house at once, and the roof takes all of it.

The weight has to come off the far end first, a little at a time, so the roof gets lighter with every piece.

So I walked out the standing half until I was over the roof, and for the last few feet to the break I leaned Tully’s extension ladder against the eave so I could step down and check the crack with my own eyes, and I tied in a second point to a limb above me, and I started at the tip.

The tip of a pecan is all small wood. I cut it in arm loads, tied each one to the lowering rope with a running bowline, called it, and made the cut.

Tully let it down across the yard and away from the gutters, and then he untied it, and dragged it to the pile, and sent the rope back up.

Tie it, call it, cut it, let it down. That is all tree work is, really. Do the same small thing right four hundred times.

By noon we had the brush off the far end and the limb was showing its bones. Every twenty minutes or so a car would slow down on the street.

Every so often a door would open across the way and somebody would stand on a porch with a coffee cup and watch.

I did not pay them much mind. When you are forty feet up with a running saw, you do not look at the porches. You look at your hands and your rope and the wood.

The wood got bigger as I came in. Pecan is heavy. Green pecan with ice on it runs better than sixty pounds a cubic foot, and once I got back to the pieces as thick as a fence post, every two foot section was going over a hundred pounds.