Timber!
Over the last year, as part of my succulent education, I watched an Agave Americana on my back hillside grow its once-in-a-lifetime seed stalk to a height of about thirty feet. The base of the Agave looks like the Queen Victoria Agava but the scale of stalk quickly outsized the Agava plant. The base is about three feet high and perhaps two feet across, but the base of the stalk grew to about ten inches in diameter. This stalk seemed to appear out of nowhere like so many of the seed stalks around the property that I have referenced before. Before that stalk grew, just outside the dining room window closest to the Agave Americana another succulent had sprouted earlier in the year. This was a giant Aloe plant that rose about ten feet on a stem and then blossomed out as a large set of Aloe leaves from which a beautiful and colorful seed stalk sprouted up another six or seven feet so that the blooms were at eye level in our dining room picture window that looks out toward the ocean. So, we went from one giant bloom that seemed to want our notice to another beyond it that took its place with really Dr. Seuss-like branches and leaves or seed pods. I looked the plant up in my succulent handbooks and learned that it was a one-time-only show of reproductive strength and it was a mighty impressive erection at that.
The first person to take particular notice of the “tree” was Lennie who took numerous pictures of the plant with the sunset and ocean in the background. It was quite a setting even though I knew that the stem would not last so very long. I asked several horticulturalists and gardeners about whether the stem was dead and needed to be cut down. I kept getting told that it was not and that it should be left alone. Small birds sat on the branches often and I once even saw a full-grown hawk sitting up there surveying the landscape for his next victim. I am not sure how a hawk is able to judge whether a given stem or tree is strong enough to hold him, but it seems they do and this particular hawk sat up there for quite a while with the tree showing no signs of distress at his weight. When the Santa Ana winds came and went in November, I watched the tree closely, expecting that it might affect it. It did not. Time passed and I ignored the tree for all the reasons that everyone and everything seemed to be telling me that it would stay where it was for some time.
This week we had quite a storm that was preceded by two days of very strong winds. The combination of the strength of those winds and the passage of time and aging of the Agave Americana changed things. The tree was moving around quite a bit in the wind and I began to worry about whether it might fall into the house and damage the guest room balcony. Yesterday I decided that it would be time soon to take down the stalk. This morning I awoke to see the tree leaning at about a 30-degree angle….towards the balcony. By my calculus, if it fell, the top of the stalk would, indeed, hit the balcony and possibly damage the new glass railings I installed earlier last year. I can only handle so many deck and railing repairs at once, so I decided that action was needed. Besides, we actually have guests (Gary & Oswaldo) who enjoy sitting on their balcony in the evening, enjoying their wine.
So, I went to the garage and dusted off my electric chainsaw. At this point I had used it only a few times, but I was pretty confident in handling it. As I walked down to the Agave, the hillside was showing the dampness of the prior two days of rain. I figured that would work in my favor since I somehow thought the stalk might be somehow softened up by the rain. That was stupid. Then I went up to the stalk and knocked on the trunk I realized that this was far more like a tree than a stem. That trunk was solid wood with absolutely no sign of softening from the rain. I tried pushing on the trunk to see how moveable it was and found it was solid and unmoving, despite the 30% lean it was assuming. Just then I saw one of my workmen come down the hill to start his day of deck work. He is generally game to help me. He surveyed the situation and suggested that we needed to get a rope on the tree to keep it from falling into the house. He and I joked about how someone needed to video this just in case we did something really stupid. My kids would never forgive me for not getting on tape a potential America’s Funniest Home Video. The possible funny outcomes ranged from putting the tree squarely into the house to having the trunk jump off the stump and knock me in the jaw or worse. This was a potentially serious predicament and I was determined to get the job done, but also to avoid serious injury in the process.
My guy got a strap on the trunk, but couldn’t budge it and was left to hope that he could run away from the house faster than the tree could fall into the house. It was a pretty weak plan. Then another one of our guys who was more experienced in tree cutting than both of us combined came down the hill. He immediately saw the solution and got a long 2×4 and brought it over. I assumed he was thinking of using it to push the strap up the tree trunk, but silly me, he used it to directly push the tree trunk upright from its lean and with the other guy on the strap, managed to push it far enough so that it bent downhill instead of toward the house. That was impressive enough to cause me to hand the expert the chainsaw and I watched as he professionally cut a notch on the downhill side and then cut the trunk from the back so that it fell with a thud on the lower slope, away from anything it could harm.
Did I mention there was a thud? This was not the lightweight stalk I had initially thought it to be. This was a genuine tree with a thick and woody trunk. If I had wondered about that even after the thud, I then set about using the chainsaw to cut it up for removal when my day laborer comes tomorrow. Just cutting off the dozen branches made me aware of how sturdy this tree really was. Those branches were far heavier than I had suspected. Then I started in on sawing up the trunk.
When I was in college, I worked two summers at the Cornell Plantations Arboretum. In the early summer, one of our tasks was to clear out the deadfall from the winter in the two gorges (Cascadilla and Fall Creek) that bound the University campus. The way that worked was that the full-timers would man the chainsaws and cut up the dead trees and we, the summer help, would hump the 75-100 pound logs up the gorge to the area where we could load them on the trucks. Until you have humped 100 pound logs on your shoulder up a gorge all day long, you haven’t lived. I know the heft of a good sized tree log.
As I cut up the Agave Americana tree, I was amazed at how familiar the heft of those log pieces felt to me. There is a stack of 40-50 pound logs on that hillside for my day laborer to haul off to some distant cliff on the back of my property where I will ask him to toss these pieces. My days of hauling them uphill are long gone, but it still felt good to yell “Timber!” And then wield the chainsaw to cut this little Agave stalk up into manageable pieces. I have new respect for the Agave Americana.