Frontiersman, January 2023

Green Power, Muscle Power
Sam Aurelius Milam III

I’m not afraid of hard work. I can sit for hours and watch it being done. Back in November of 2022, I had just such an opportunity. I watched a “tree guy”, as he was described by his female assistant, cut down a tree. Since there wasn’t a chair handy, I had to stand and watch, but I still watched the work being done.

The problem with the tree was that, over the years, it had grown at an angle such that it was leaning over an adjacent metal storage building. The concern was that, some day, it might fall on the building. It was a healthy tree but some seemingly healthy trees were blown over in that lot, a few years ago.

So, I watched as the man began his preparations. I soon saw that he was making some mistakes. I’ve noticed, over the years, that people don’t pay any attention to my advice and that, after the dust settles, nobody remembers that I told them so. It wasn’t my tree, my metal building, or my job, so I watched from a safe distance and kept my mouth shut.

The man’s first mistake was that he used only one anchor rope. I’ve watched men cut trees using one anchor rope, and I’ve even done so myself a few times. If the tree is nice and vertical, and if you pull really hard on the rope, then one rope will probably be sufficient. This tree wasn’t vertical. It leaned markedly toward the metal storage building. It also turned out, before the job was over, that pulling really hard on the rope was a problem. More about that later.

The thing that many people, even “tree guys”, don’t seem to understand about an anchor rope is that it doesn’t necessarily force the tree being cut to fall toward the anchor location. It only (hopefully, if it doesn’t break) prevents the tree from falling directly away from the anchor location. A tree can fall anywhere along or inside of the arc that’s described by the length of the anchor rope. In this case, the tree was leaning perpendicular to the direction of the anchor rope. It fell in the direction that it was leaning, right onto the arc defined by the length of rope. That arc passed through the building. The tree landed on the building. The whole point of the exercise had been to prevent that. The man should have used two ropes. Thus there would have been two arcs, described by the lengths of the two ropes. The only place that a tree can fall when it’s constrained to fall on or inside of two arcs is toward the area defined by the overlap of the two arcs. That will be between the two anchor locations.

The man’s next mistake was that he intended to pull on the anchor rope with a tractor, instead of with a come-along. I’ve cut a few trees in my life, and occasionally helped somebody else cut one. I find that a come-along is a fine way to control the tension in the anchor rope. A tractor isn’t a good way to do that. With a tractor, there’s too much brute force and not enough control.

Another mistake was the way that he arranged his anchor rope. Because of other trees in the way, he couldn’t get his tractor into the right location. So, he still had to run his rope to an anchor tree, but instead of tying it to the tree, he ran it around the tree and off at an angle, where he connected it to his tractor. With his assistant sitting on the tractor, they couldn’t even see each other. The metal building was between them. The assistant, on the tractor, couldn’t see what was happening. She didn’t know when to start pulling, or how hard to pull. Worse yet, because the rope was running around the anchor tree, the sliding friction with the tree constrained much of the tension to the length of rope between the tractor and the anchor tree. The assistant barely removed the slack from the length of rope between the anchor tree and the tree that was being cut. Another error was that the tree man didn’t yell at his assistant to start pulling on the rope until he was actually making his final cut. By the time that she got the tractor into gear and started pulling, the tree was already falling in the direction that it had been leaning.

I got involved in helping the tree guy cut the tree into pieces, and get them off of the roof. At some point in the conversation, I mentioned global warming. He said that he’d really like to do his job without using a diesel tractor, but the electric alternatives were too expensive. I’ve noticed that about people. They seem to be incapable of doing a job unless they do it with a machine. I see people using a leaf blower when a broom or a lawn rake would do. I’ve cut a lot of wood with a hand saw, when other people would have used a power saw. I own a hammer, not a nail gun. People seem unable to comprehend the idea of doing something by hand. Yet, a come-along doesn’t use either electricity or diesel fuel, and it costs a lot less than either kind of tractor.

Muscle power is a renewable resource. With 8 billion people on the planet, there’s a lot of muscle power available. Maybe the tree guy should buy a come-along, maybe even two of them, and maybe even a bow saw. Maybe we need to start considering muscle power as a “green” alternative to fossil fuel.