By Law I Cut You Dead or Alive

Today I had to put down two beautiful trees. Healthy but hanging over a bit to the property of the neighbour who put in a compliant with the township. The by-law officer – who didn’t returned my call – found too that it looked dangerous and hit the home-owners, I just rent the place, with a bylaw stating it didn’t appear to conform with municipalities property standard bylaw.

Afraid by the tone of the letter the home owners decided to cut the trees. Another sign the township doesn’t care about trees. They just pull a by-law out of the hat like a magician does with a bunny. In both cases shocking because you don’t expect it. File a complaint would be an option but against a township what do you do. At the end it will cost you money and they don’t care. Maybe they forget sometimes that we pay them. I wonder if the by-law officer who came and looked knows about trees. I really doubt that. They said it was dead but are dead trees able to get leaves??

Maybe they don’t know that there are trees that loose their leaves in winter. Now in a time we are aware about cutting trees, even put yellow ribbons on then to remind everyone that those trees were there before us.

They didn’t choose to be in a subdivision. If they were able to tell stories we would have been able to fill gaps in our history.

Now it is 10.00AM and with a friend we discuss how to put them down. I feel sorry for them and take my last pictures. Bye, Bye old fellows. Thanks for the shadow on hot summer days. Now I have to put the air conditioning a knot higher. Viva la nature.

We put a yellow cord around the tree – I wished it was a ribbon – and tapped the tree on the bark. Discussed witch way it would fall one of us is pulling the cord, the other one is warming up the saw. Now its cutting time.

The sound of the chainsaw cutting the tree sounded like cutting a limp. For me it felt that way. Then I heard a snap. I was pulling the cord with all the power I had, but the tree decided to fight back and pulled me. I was yelling to my friend; “I can’t hold it, I can’t hold it”, but he was not able to hear me because of the sound off the chainsaw. Luckily for me there was another tree near by and was able to strap the rope and myself to it. The tree was putting up a big fight but started to fall down anyway. Not the way we planned but 30 minutes later it was lying down cut in tiny pieces. Even lifting a 3 feet piece was almost impossible. No sign of rotten wood or a dead tree. They let me cut a full grown healthy tree.