So fun story (unfortunately I don’t have photos of this fun story, but luckily for you I have a drawing app on my phone)!
A few weeks back, on the second mill trip, Steve had been cutting a tree down for us to turn into glorious lumber. Unfortunately, instead of falling down like a good tree should, this tree decided to hold on to another tree, leaving all that precious wood still standing vertically and yet dangerously willing to crush us should we mess with it. We had no choice but to leave it behind and move on to more willing trees.
That is until a few days ago when we heard that the tree had given in to the demands of gravity and its beautiful beautiful wood was now at ground level. I happily climbed the mountain it once guarded to harvest its mass when, to my surprise, it was not going give in to my demands easily.
The tree, it seems, had desperately tried to deny us its wood by throwing itself headlong into what we call in pidgen “place no good”(translerated).
Still, some of the best wood was within reach, if only I could figure out how to liberate it from the rest of the tree without it continuing into the deep woods. The base of the tree was lifted up to my head while the place I needed to cut the tree was just on the other side of safety.
It was one of the Kovol guys who saved the day. He suggested we use vines to tie the base of the tree to another tree, that way I could cut it without it running away.
And so, as I made the cut, the head of the tree continued its path while the base of the tree remained, though still threatening to follow the head in rebellion.
We weren’t out of the woods yet though! We now needed the tree to lay nicely on something vaguely flat-ish while not tied to other trees. And so we came up with this plan:
Me and another guy stood on one side of the log and pushed. One brave soul stood below it and was using a stick to lever the bottom up (he had a small tree to prevent him getting pushed into the abyss in case our side was especially enthusiastic about spinning). The fourth guy stood by with a machete, and while the tension was at its highest, he cut the vines and let loose the 20 foot log like he was launching a catapult in a cheesy medieval movie (do they honestly expect us to believe that they had to cut a rope every time they wanted to launch a missile? Or maybe medieval catapult builders were in the pocket of the rope makers…I digress…).
And so, when the vines were cut Philip’s undeveloped rafters were saved from certain doom!
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