and I rode up to Tanner’s Corner, where Rudy was clearing a half acre of yellow pine. Tangled red ponytail sticking out from underneath his hard hat, pink safety goggles, hairy face so full of sawdust it looked like he’d been breaded. He had his Husqvarna 362XP gnawing out the hinge on a fifteen-foot stub when I leaned my bike up against his truck, but he let it idle when he saw me.
“If you come any closer, I’ll take it you want to be killed by this tree,” he yelled above the motor. I stood back while he made the back cut. We watched it fall. Rudy turned off the saw and lifted his goggles. “You expecting your man back anytime soon?” he asked.
“Seems like you’re having a hard time holding on to ground crews,” I said.
“Must be due to my bad attitude,” he said.
“I don’t think he’ll be back,” I said. “But I need work.”
“Any experience?” he asked.
“Landscaping, tree planting, firefighting, flagging, clearing debris. I’ve taken down my share of trees,” I said. “And I have a college degree.”
“Oh my,” Rudy said. “Slumming it with the hill folk.” He knelt and began to oil his saw, judiciously dripping it from an unmarked plastic bottle.
“I’m saving money to go back to Seattle,” I said.
“What did you go to college for?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Sounds like you got scammed,” he said. “Do you know your knots?”
“Of course I do,” I said.
“I’ll probably yell at you. It’s not that I’m proud of it, but that’s just how I am.”
“If you yell at me, I’ll walk off the job,” I said.
Rudy screwed the lid back on the bottle of chain oil and stood up. He wiped his hands on his shirt. He pulled wood chips from his beard. Coarse red hair crept from his cuffs and his collar, laced with sawdust. He reached in and scratched. “Might as well start today,” he said. “It doesn’t appear that you have anything better to do.” I stashed my bike. He handed me a hard hat.
While I watched, Rudy set his climb line on another yellow pine, and strapped on his spurs. Then he threw his body upward, making his way up the tree by launching himself up into the air, an eel, gaining inch by inch up the rope. He moved as a current, sending his Blake’s hitch up ahead of him, until he reached the lower branches, twenty feet up. Then he dug his spurs in, hugged the trunk like a bear cub, and went higher, using the small handsaw in his holster to cut twigs and small branches out of his way. Finally, he looked down at me. “Turn a quick-hitch on my climb line and send me up the Echo for limbing,” he called. So I sent him up the little saw. I tied on the bull rope, and he hoisted it up. “Come-along’s hooked onto a cherry tree,” he said, swinging in his harness and pointing into the woods. I took the highway of a fallen pine and found it.
Fifty feet up, Rudy tied his bowline, then drew back and launched the end of the bull rope. A long white arc, it sailed through sun and shade, snaking down into the forest. I went for it, pulled it out of a greenbrier. I hooked it up to the come-along by wrapping a klemheist three times around, then yelled up to Rudy, and waited to hear his saw begin working. When I heard him knock out the wedge, I fit the steel handle into place, and cranked it hard as he made the back cut. Three clicks forward, two clicks back, then two, then one, rowing it to and fro until it was almost too heavy to pull. Rudy dug his saw in again, while I heaved back, and then the rope went nearly slack, and I cranked hard and fast and looked up to see the top of the tree moving. Far up in the sky like it had nothing to do with me, the fringe of green began to flinch and duck, and I dropped the handle and got the hell out of there. I skidded sideways down through the saplings, then turned to watch it go. The pine toppled, dizzy and slow in the first moments, then picking up speed. It hit like a trampoline, the matted pelt of branches and trunks leaping up together, then shuddering back to earth, crushing one another, making new hollows and