Kaveman
Treehouser
Some moons ago, a younger Kaveman stood at the base of a big pine. I checked my ropes and harness for the third time since I wrapped the trunk, passed my coffee cup off to Ali with a nod of thanks, and stepped onto my picks.
It's a clear, cool morning, and with the smell of ponderosa filling my head, the work goes quick and easy. Ali has the rigging line set up to speedline the brush right into the back of the Kodiak.
I take the top and call for lunch, now that I have a table. Burrito, banana, and a Gatorade come up on the climb line, and go right down the climber. Cigarette break, coarse banter with the boys on the ground, then time to reset the rigging and prep for chunking the big bit.
First short log went like in the books, and I rigged up for the next piece, another Tuesday at the office. Till the set screws holding the right gaff to the shank of my climbers, decided that they had had enough of quietly rusting in their holes, and quit.
In the resulting pivot and fall, I managed to jerk my saw into BOTH my lines. At full rip. A ported 660, 32" bar, full comp chain. I don't think it noticed that my flipline was steel core.
According to maths that I would do later, I experienced the longest 1.73 seconds of my life as I free fell approximately 75 feet.
When the static in my head cleared away, I opened my eyes to a different world. One where my mortality wasn't a distant concept, but where Death was VERY real, and had stood so close as to kiss. Where for a brief moment in time, the whisper of the wind in the pines, became the howl of a gale, blowing through the empty, entropic, eye sockets of the Reaper himself.
I've wrecked motorcycles in epic fashion, rag dolling 300ft through sagebrush, rolled a truck 17 times down a mountainside, ive been sliced, stabbed, shot at, and very nearly blown up. I was nearly cut in half by a mobile home, when the jackstands collaped like dominoes during a relevel. None of that mattered. That fall changed how my whole universe worked. I'd seen Death, been close myself a few times, but that day, finally, it was REAL.
While I'm leaving out an awful lot, I'm sure you can get the feeling I'm trying to get across. Maybe you can't, because it certainly didn't sink into me before that day.
Young man, I still deal with that, and to put it crudely, I took my fall when you were still a gleam in your daddy's eye, jumping from nut to nut, trying to avoid the shower drain. Now I've got a wife and two daughters, as the first of my responsibilities. I've gotta make it work, despite the nearly crippling, spine gripping terror that seeps into my soul, still, to this day, when I'm aloft in a big Pinus Ponderosa (phuk yew @stig lolz), and the wind kicks up and things feel an awful lot like that day so long ago. I'm reminded of the cost of complacency every time my shoulder grinds and pops, and aches, and throbs, or locks up and won't move, sometimes for hours. I did that all to my self, and there's no one else to blame.
But what the Phuk do I know? I'm just some hillbilly from the mountains of Arizona, with too many chainsaws.
It's a clear, cool morning, and with the smell of ponderosa filling my head, the work goes quick and easy. Ali has the rigging line set up to speedline the brush right into the back of the Kodiak.
I take the top and call for lunch, now that I have a table. Burrito, banana, and a Gatorade come up on the climb line, and go right down the climber. Cigarette break, coarse banter with the boys on the ground, then time to reset the rigging and prep for chunking the big bit.
First short log went like in the books, and I rigged up for the next piece, another Tuesday at the office. Till the set screws holding the right gaff to the shank of my climbers, decided that they had had enough of quietly rusting in their holes, and quit.
In the resulting pivot and fall, I managed to jerk my saw into BOTH my lines. At full rip. A ported 660, 32" bar, full comp chain. I don't think it noticed that my flipline was steel core.
According to maths that I would do later, I experienced the longest 1.73 seconds of my life as I free fell approximately 75 feet.
When the static in my head cleared away, I opened my eyes to a different world. One where my mortality wasn't a distant concept, but where Death was VERY real, and had stood so close as to kiss. Where for a brief moment in time, the whisper of the wind in the pines, became the howl of a gale, blowing through the empty, entropic, eye sockets of the Reaper himself.
I've wrecked motorcycles in epic fashion, rag dolling 300ft through sagebrush, rolled a truck 17 times down a mountainside, ive been sliced, stabbed, shot at, and very nearly blown up. I was nearly cut in half by a mobile home, when the jackstands collaped like dominoes during a relevel. None of that mattered. That fall changed how my whole universe worked. I'd seen Death, been close myself a few times, but that day, finally, it was REAL.
While I'm leaving out an awful lot, I'm sure you can get the feeling I'm trying to get across. Maybe you can't, because it certainly didn't sink into me before that day.
Young man, I still deal with that, and to put it crudely, I took my fall when you were still a gleam in your daddy's eye, jumping from nut to nut, trying to avoid the shower drain. Now I've got a wife and two daughters, as the first of my responsibilities. I've gotta make it work, despite the nearly crippling, spine gripping terror that seeps into my soul, still, to this day, when I'm aloft in a big Pinus Ponderosa (phuk yew @stig lolz), and the wind kicks up and things feel an awful lot like that day so long ago. I'm reminded of the cost of complacency every time my shoulder grinds and pops, and aches, and throbs, or locks up and won't move, sometimes for hours. I did that all to my self, and there's no one else to blame.
But what the Phuk do I know? I'm just some hillbilly from the mountains of Arizona, with too many chainsaws.
