Too Much Of A Good Thing

Fall is undoubtedly my favorite time of year to be on Cape Cod. I know this seems backwards to a lot of people because when they think of the Cape they think of beaches and no one living above the Mason-Dixon line goes to the beach after August. But that is precisely why I love the Cape in September and October - you still get wonderful weather (warm days and cool nights, probably the best weather of the year, certainly for golf) and none of the crowds. If I could get this deal year-round I would seriously consider relocating. The only problem is the window to enjoy it all closes quickly. New England has a reputation for unstable weather but that really only applies in the fall and spring seasons. One day it is in the high 60s and the next it never reaches 45 degrees. You never know when the bottom is going to totally drop out on the temperatures and since the beach house isn't winterized we can't risk the pipes freezing, so we close it down around Columbus Day. It's annoying to have beautiful weekends which would have been perfect for a quick getaway after the place has been closed for the season but considering I know how awful it is to do plumbing under that house I am also on board with any plan that leans more towards safe than sorry. Still, when I saw we were getting a warm-up mid-week I knew I had to get to the beach while the getting was good. But it wasn't all fun in the sun because I had some work to do.

Last time he was down the beach my father noticed that two of the trees near the house had started to grow into one another. Specifically, one of the trees behind the deck had a limb which was so large it spanned the width of the deck and was now stunting the growth of an evergreen tree planted in front of the house. To be honest, it was a little sad to see this evergreen try and keep growing around this thick branch. The top of had begun to curve and stop growing in the right direction, making it look like Charlie Brown's Christmas Tree. So, I volunteered to go down and trim the large branch to give the evergreen more room. Obviously, now that my back is finally feeling better I had the ulterior motive of getting a little golf in at my country club on Cape Cod which is neither a country club nor on Cape Cod, but I was also willing to do this task because I happen to love the tools I would need to complete the job. I've often said the easiest way to get people to complete a seemingly boring task is to give them fun tools to do so and in addition to the very fun electric Gator and new clippers, cutting down branches means using one of the best tools I ever bought - the pole saw. I don't know why I enjoy using this particular gardening tool so much, but any time a person has needed some branches cut down I have usually been very quick to offer up my services. That may change going forward.

I think one of the reasons I like the pole saw so much is that it is very sharp and tree branches are usually pretty thin, so it doesn't take a lot of force to take down most of the branches, thus it feels like you get a lot of work done in a short amount of time. Turns out that is not the case when you have to take down a tree limb this large. Sure, the branches going off the limb still cut away without much prodding, but getting through the actual limb was quite a larger challenge, requiring a lot of repetitive sawing with a tool that probably isn't meant to attack something this thick. The Gator would have made it easier but there was also the matter of getting to the part of the branch I wanted to cut because even though cutting the branch down at the point where it met the tree would have been the fastest solution it also probably would have meant I spent the rest of the next two days rebuilding a new deck because this limb would have come down with some force behind it. Not wanting to do that I instead opted to cut it down in sections and be careful not to make the sections too large since I would also have to haul them away. This meant a lot of tedious cutting with the tree saw and the going was slow. If you ever want to destroy someone's love of a particular tool I recommend making them use it for hours because after a while I would have given anything to be able to let someone else take a turn for a few minutes.

The solution to my problem was quite obvious - a chainsaw on a pole. As it turns out they make those (of course they do) but the really good ones are very expensive, as they should be. A normal chainsaw should only be handled by people who know what they are doing, so the idea of a chainsaw on the end of a pole vault is rather insane if you take a step back and think about it. Even renting one for a couple hours feels like a recipe for disaster. Either that or I would like it a little bit too much and leave every tree in the yard stripped to the bare essentials. So instead I kept plugging along with my pole saw and Gator, eventually getting the limb down and away from the evergreen. It took longer than I wanted but the good news is that once it was down you could already tell the evergreen was going to have plenty of room to work with. I wanted to cut down a few more branches that I am worried about, but I would have to go up on the roof to get at them and the combination of heights and me probably being heavier than the recommended weight tolerance quickly put an end to those thoughts. The good news is that it will be a long time before that branch grows back and starts interfering with that evergreen again. And that is a really good thing because as much as I like using the random tools available to me, I think I am all set with the pole saw for the time being.