The tree assassins

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The government sentenced them to death for the simple crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It goes against my grain to cut down a perfectly good tree. Trees are our true friends out here on the prairie, buffering us from the relentless wind, sheltering our homes and our livestock. Prairie life would be downright desolate without trees.

However, our township board was right: The volunteer trees that had taken over the ditches near our house had become a nuisance. It had become difficult for large objects such as grain combines or Shaquille O’Neal to pass through the ever-shrinking alley of greenery. Let the trees have their way and soon you won’t be able to traverse the leafy lane with anything larger than a skateboard.

I have a photograph of our farm from the early 1900s, about 25 years after my great-grandfather, Charlie, homesteaded here. Our grove is comprised of spindly, frail-looking trees, none of which are much taller than the head of a workhorse.

Charlie probably had to nurse those trees through dry spells by carrying buckets of water. Perhaps he cajoled and pleaded with them, murmuring, “C’mon, trees. Grow up and gimme shelter.”

And now, I was being ordered to murder some of the descendants of those trees. Charlie’s hand-carried water and muttered incantations worked — a bit too well, it seems.

There are some jobs that are just so icky that they need to be contracted. This was definitely one of them.

I engaged a team of hatchet men to whack my wayward trees. The crew of tree assassins I hired was called Quality Tree Service and led by a guy named Larry.

Before he began, I asked Larry some hard-hitting questions. Does the “quality” in his business name mean he only services quality trees? Or is it his service that has quality? What level of quality are we talking about? Fair? Good? Excellent?

Larry’s answers were evasive, but a guy shouldn’t ask too many questions of a man who’s holding a screaming chainsaw, so I dropped the topic and let him get to work.

Larry brought with him some pretty nifty tools, the main one being a woodchipper the size of a 747. His woodchipper quickly digested every log it was fed, up to and including some that were nearly the size of a giant sequoia.

It sounded like 50,000 rabid woodchucks were inside the chipper, furiously chipping and chucking. The movie “Fargo” would have ended differently had they used Larry’s woodchipper.

Larry had brought along a pair of young men to assist him. They were shirtless, tan and muscular; in other words, the kind of guys who give us males a bad name. They were the type of men who would elicit wolf whistles from female construction workers, reducing us guys to mere sex objects.

Not that such a thing has ever happened to me, mind you. I actually wouldn’t object to a little objectification.

Another cool tool in Larry’s arsenal was his boom truck, an apparatus that’s also known as a cherry picker. Larry climbed into its bucket and gently soared among the treetops, lopping off overhanging branches with graceful swipes of his chainsaw.

Riding in the bucket of a boom truck looks like a ton of fun. I think it would be nice if I got a boom truck for my birthday (note to my wife: hint, hint).

Larry said the arm on his truck has about 45 feet of reach. With my luck, the first time I’d operate such a thing, I would make a major error in judgment, and the arm would hurl me over the distant horizon like a gigantic pitching machine slinging a screaming, bespectacled baseball. The boom truck would then be needed to pluck my sorry carcass out of the crater that would form upon impact.

During a break in the action, I asked Larry what was the strangest thing he had seen as a professional tree assassin. He replied that he had felled a dead cottonwood tree some months ago and had begun to chip it when he saw some fur in a hole at the top of the log.

It was a raccoon. A very live, very frightened raccoon.

Larry and his crew poked the masked squatter with sticks until it saw the wisdom of vacating the premises.

“He would have gone through the chipper if I hadn’t seen his fur sticking out of that hole. His day would have ended pretty badly,” Larry said.

It could have been worse. For instance, they could have told the varmint it was his turn to run the boom truck.

Jerry Nelson is a recovering dairy farmer from Volga, South Dakota. He and his wife, Julie, have two sons and live on the farm where Jerry’s great-grandfather homesteaded over 110 years ago. Feel free to email him at jerry.n@dairystar.com.