Tree Work

And so it begins.  Tree Guy came yesterday to start work on the fallen oak.  The sheer size of the task before him must have been daunting, especially working alone.  It's a multi-phase job; all of the branches with leaves must be removed first and hauled out of the way.  Since Joel disked the south pasture and nothing is growing there, I let TG cut the fence so he could pull the branches across the driveway and into that field to start a new burn pile, and it's going to be a doozy.  Like children with their noses pressed to the candy store window, the goats lined up on their side of the fence and begged.  Every so once in awhile TG would throw a branch into their pen and they were on it like piranhas, stripping the leaves in a matter of minutes, leaving the skeleton bare.  There is considerable danger involved in what might seem a simple job of cutting up the downed tree.  The huge trunk is resting on unbroken branches and could roll, or those branches could break and the trunk would drop; definitely something that should be left to professionals.

Tree Guy worked several hours, sweating buckets alone in the hot sun.  As we walked around later and he showed me what he'd accomplished, which was a lot, and collected his well-deserved atta-boys, he mentioned the many, many full-sized acorns already on the tree (another sign of an early winter?).  TG told me his grandparents were members of one of the coastal tribes of Native Americans and, as a boy, his grandmother had had him collect gunnysacks of acorns every year for porridge and bread.  Some time back I had a conversation with a woman from the Miwok tribe who told me it took a year to make flour from acorns.  Collecting, drying, shelling, leaching, drying again, and then grinding by hand...unimaginable tedious work.  TG also told of going with his grandparents to the ocean to collect edible seaweed and sea urchins, and stories of hunting and fishing, of course.  TG works at his own pace on his own schedule.  He said he'd be back Tuesday or Wednesday.