Starting afresh.

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.
 
Brian got it pretty spot on, I never got an opportunity for much social interaction, and now when I try to interact with people I get told off, I cant really learn to interact with people in a proper way because nobody will let me get far enough to even try

I shoulda stayed in school and never bought a chainsaw
You're half way through your first country song.
 
Here is an interesting thing: I did of course write F...U..C..K..I..N..G poetry.


But the bug that Carl has placed in the system, changed it to frigging.
It also changed the capital F to a lower case one and I can't change it back.

So despite the fact that I am not a native speaker of your beautiful language, and therefore , According to our somewhat youthful member, the new and only greatest tree man in the Wold AKA miniMurph, someone without the ability to understand the unspoken nuances of his posts......................It is not my fault!!!
 
Here is an interesting thing: I did of course write F...U..C..K..I..N..G poetry.


But the bug that Carl has placed in the system, changed it to frigging.
It also changed the capital F to a lower case one and I can't change it back.

So despite the fact that I am not a native speaker of your beautiful language, and therefore , According to our somewhat youthful member, the new and only greatest tree man in the Wold AKA miniMurph, someone without the ability to understand the unspoken nuances of his posts......................It is not my fault!!!
Hence why I use Phuk, and various forms thereof. I am a child, and a mean and petty one at that, so I must get as much feeling and emotions into my swearing as possible.

Also, it's a common name in many Southeast Asian countries. A good friend, former neighbor, and dearly missed employee was named Ton-Phuk-Pong. Or that's how it was pronounced any way. I called him Spoon Man. Because his name sounded like a silverware drawer. Gads I'm horrible...
 
Swearing? Perhaps John Ciro will enter the chat
 
Here is an interesting thing: I did of course write F...U..C..K..I..N..G poetry.


But the bug that Carl has placed in the system, changed it to frigging.
It also changed the capital F to a lower case one and I can't change it back.

So despite the fact that I am not a native speaker of your beautiful language, and therefore , According to our somewhat youthful member, the new and only greatest tree man in the Wold AKA miniMurph, someone without the ability to understand the unspoken nuances of his posts......................It is not my fault!!!
Not Carl. Butch did that many years ago.
 
when have I done that? I only insist I know what I actually know, I don't know everything but I sure know more than about 75% of people, every single person I've ever worked with has learned something from me, sometimes I do have useful info, not always but sometimes I actually do, I know its hard to believe that I can know something that one other person in the world wouldn't know but it does happen sometimes

sometimes I do make mistakes too, like earlier putting hydraulic fluid in the bucket truck, I forgot to tighten down the 4 bolts and the filter cap, as soon as I turned the PTO on it started spraying fluid everywhere, normally I wouldn't forget that but today I did

That may be the case in your small community. Your knowledge may outshine that of others.

Big fish, small pond. You’re swimming in the ocean now.

There are people in here that have made such a mark on the tree industry that you should take on board their advice, however small.

There are people on here with far more experience than I. I learn most days, in fact that is a goal in my life to learn most days. I do know a lot about treework, having worked for over 20+ years as a climber, contract climber and small company owner.

BUT I am never too old to learn more. Everyday.

Stay humble.
 
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