A few more years of growth...

It always takes me a little while to get used to darkness each winter.  At first, just after daylight savings in the late fall I try to beat the sunset.  I find myself hurrying in the late day to finish up just one more thing before complete darkness.  But as winter settles in and your eyes adjust, the darkness simply becomes reality for a greater part of your time.

At the same time, Lake Superior's famed "Gales of November" have stayed true to it's name this year.  High winds, snow, and ice storms have battered the North Shore over the past few weeks.  The property has lost a number of trees due to these events.  It makes me think about the forest around the garage site.  Apart from the cleared area immediately around the garage, I have been eyeing up the taller trees and cutting them if they could hit the garage.  It's better to cut them now rather than when the structure is there!

At first it's easy to guess which trees will hit the garage site.  But the further away you get , the bigger the trees are.  The farther away and the taller the trees, the  more difficult it is to judge if they are tall enough to hit the structure.  This adds an entirely new element of simply dropping big trees.  It's fun.  Sometimes you right and every once in a while, you aren't.

This afternoon I found a big old poplar that I thought was tall enough to hit the garage.  There's a distinct climaxing moment while cutting a big tree when the game changes.  You go from cutting a tree to dropping one.  It's the point at which the saw cuts through a critical mass.  At that moment, the tree cracks, gravity officially takes hold and the hardwood leans and falls along the line I predicted.  The outcome is just as I envisioned except for one thing.  The tallest branches are a yard short of the garage!

Give the tree a few more years of growth and it would be an entirely new equation.  However, the fact is that I didn't guess it right.  On the other side of the coin, when the tree lands dead center in the middle of the garage pad I cringe.  At least it proves why I am doing this.  I think that I'd rather be wrong every once and a while...