Gone

This beautiful old tree is gone. It was taken down on Monday. You can see how it towers over the neighborhood, even above other nearby trees. But you can also see how it is sparse and how many branches are already dead (and we'd already removed some of the worst).

This is going to be a story with many pictures - which is funny because actually we weren't home to take most of the pictures, but between security camera footage and some house guests who left mid-day, we documented it pretty well. It was tragic but had to be done, as you'll see from the pics.

The crew showed up at about 8:20 and got right to work. They were still there when I got home at 3:00 and wrapped up around 4:00. We weren't thrilled with the outcome (I mean besides the fact that we don't have a tree anymore), but I'll leave that explanation for the end.

First round, the upper branches - they started in the driveway with the cherry-picker, working from the lower branches on up to the top:

Here they are lowering a branch:

 Even better - our friends got a video of one of the limbs coming down:

Then they left to catch their plane and we moved on to the security footage (D remembered to move our front door security cam that morning so that he could check out the action).

Here's where the sad part happened. First I need to give you a little back story. The night before, we learned that a friend of ours, who is building a giant boat (seriously, it's amazing - check it out) told us that white oak would be very useful for some of the internal floor structure. We worked out with him that we would ask that they leave us giant lengths from the trunk and that he would take them away with a flat-bed tow truck the following weekend. We'd already discussed having them leave us firewood and a cross-section of the trunk anyway, and they indicated that leaving the wood behind might reduce the price, so this seemed like win-win. Our price goes down, our friend gets valuable wood, and our tree lives on as a part of a boat. We knew that this was not in the contract, so we had to hope for the best.

D stayed at home in the morning to wait until the crew showed up, to explain what we were looking for. The foreman sadly replied that it wasn't possible because of the power lines. They would be removing the trunk in small pieces, not as one giant trunk. Bummer.

Apparently, D didn't make it clear to them that small was 6 feet or more, not necessarily the whole 20 feet or so.

And so it was heartbreaking to see this picture at 2:10 - just a giant trunk to go:

 This one at 2:25 - they just took down a giant piece! This is exactly what we asked them for, yay!

And then this one, at 2:42. Our precious trunk, chopped into tiny and unusable pieces. Heartbreaking.

Miscommunication, and nothing in the contract, so really nothing to be done. I got home early enough to talk to the crew and express my despair, but obviously it was too late. The foreman thought we could only use the whole trunk up to the split, when less would have been fine. No boat after all, it seems.

I was greeted with this view when I arrived home from work that afternoon:

They were still doing some final chainsawing and mostly just blowing away wood chips. Our security camera captured the stump grinding:

It was clear from the debris that taking the tree down was the right decision - look at all that hollow wood just waiting to come down, say this winter in a heavy snowfall?

The trunk, however, had been completely intact, sadly. I was dismayed to see that not only did they misunderstand us on the trunk, but they had forgotten to give us a cross-section. I managed to spot one fairly large piece in the truck that they removed and left for me (and for our boat-building friend, though obviously this is much less than he hoped for). I don't think it's from the main trunk because it is small, but I suppose it's better than nothing.

They did remember to leave us the cord of firewood (half a cord for us and half for our neighbors). We'll have to split it (and move it away from the mailbox - move it completely away from the house, in fact). We were reminded by a friend to let it age a year before we use it, so the moisture doesn't ruin our chimney.

I was going to talk about our other complaints but I think this post has grown big enough. I'll save those issues for next time.

Bye tree!