Felling the fallen tree

I went out into the vineyard yesterday morning after the windstorms we had over the past few days. I didn't really see anything to report out there. The weather was just slightly gusty and the ground was pretty wet. Otherwise, everything looked fine.

An hour or so after I got back to the house, Walt yelled up the stairs to tell me he was going to walk down the road with our neighbor J-M. "A tree has fallen and is threatening to pull down the telephone line," he said. J-M was holding a little hand saw. We should try to get the tree off the wires, J-M said, because who knows how long it might take the phone company to send a repair crew out.

A few minutes later Walt came back up the road and said that the tree trunk was too thick and the wood too hard to be cut with the little hand saw. J-M was going to get his chainsaw. I got my shoes on and walked down the road to take a couple of photos.

That's when I noticed that an old apple tree in our other neighbors' yard was down too. The trunk was broken like a matchstick and the top of the tree, full of mistletoe, was lying on the ground. Fortunately, it hadn't done any damage as it fell.

Another apple tree neary was and is clearly leaning, but I'm not sure it wasn't already leaning that way before the storm. The property owner will have to come assess the situation this week, I imagine. Another tall tree is down on the opposite end of his property.

As for the tall, dead tree trunk that had fallen on the phone wire, J-M sawed through it at ground level. Then we were able to pull the bottom of the trunk around in a direction that made it fall to the side and off the wires, which stayed in place. J-M then sawed up the trunk. We carried large pieces of it home and we'll eventually burn it in the fireplace. « C'est ça, la vie à la campagne » was the way J-M summed up the morning's excitement.