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treefall in gnat season
Thursday, April 27 2017
I've got a great remote workplace project to start work on, but it's so big and complicated that it's hard to know exactly where to begin. So in the meantime I've been doing little procrastinations. For example, today, I found myself cutting up a over four dozen pieces of pipe out of a piece of ten-foot stock. These would be the glue pieces allowing me to connect 44 fittings to make my third reticulate menorah, this one a bar mitzvah gift to my nephew.
As I was working on this, I happened to notice that a state police car had stopped out in front of the house and the state trooper had lit a roadside flare and was looking up in the trees. It's always a bit creepy to have the police poking around nearby, so I lost my ability to focus on anything but what he was up to. As always with the police, this particular officer chose to spend most of his time in his cruiser. But why was he just sitting there a hundred feet below our driveway? And why were there no cars coming up Dug Hill Road? Eventually I heard noises consistent with tree removal. It seems that in nearly-windless conditions, a large red oak had cracked off from its stump near the end of the Schnellers' driveway (they're our downhill neighbors) and fallen across the road. It had also damaged the power line, though the interruption to our power had been a few stuttery winks of the lights totalling than a second. I'd remembered that happening, accompanied by a "boom!" and thought it was thunder. That must've been the sound of the tree falling over. Later I walked down to the treefall to see the state trooper standing there without much to do as a couple woodsmen cut it up. Mostly the only thing they were talking about as they did so were the persistent gnats that buzz directly in front of your face at this time of year. These gnats don't seem to bite very often or at all, but their presence is extremely annoying, particular to those unfamiliar with them. I returned yet another time just after sundown to see if there was any recoverable firewood, but the pieces were all either huge or tiny, and I didn't want to have to spend a lot of time cutting things up with a chainsaw.
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