A Tree Topples

A neighbor -- they live in the same position on the block, one street away from us, but we've never met -- is having a tree removed from their front yard. It is healthy, and huge -- towering hundreds of feet above the other puny deciduous trees on the block; one of the many Douglas Firs planted around the city. Sad to see it go -- it seems a waste to cut down a perfectly good tree. (I drove by the yard yesterday: it is a small 1-1/2 story bungalow in poor repair, with the trunk of the tree taking up most of the yard, and roots have broken the concrete front walk in half. No doubt this house, like several others in our area, is about to undergo massive renovations into a narrow 3 story ugli-manse.)

You cut down a huge tree, in a city neighborhood, by climbing up it and cutting off all the branches one by one, having first tied a security rope around it so the branch swings down (rather than falling). Then you lower it to the ground, and climb higher. After the tree has become a denuded mast, you top it in successive pieces until there's just a stump in the ground that someone will have to burn out.

We didn't realize at first that's what the chain saws were doing -- there has been enough construction in the neighborhood that I just tune out the noise. You can see above how tall the tree used to be (they had already cut some of the highest limbs and the guy was working his way down again by the time I took this).

And here is a little video (I took many, but usually happened to be filming when the chain saws were humming but only bit of greenery were being removed. You can hear my sigh of frustration early in this bit, when I thought that once again I was filming a lot of nothing). Some fifty? seventy? feet were left poking up in the air overnight. This morning they are at it again.

Maryhill: Addendum and Erratum

Addendum:
I had wondered if our Sam Hill had anything to do with the expression, What in the Sam Hill --? and looked it up on World Wide Words, my source for all things etymological. He is not. No one is quite sure where the expression started, despite some folk etymologies pinning it to a General Sam Hill in Guilford, Connecticut in the late 19th century. He cannot be the source, either, as the expression dates back in printed form to as early as the 1830's.

Erratum:
Others in the household spent some weary hours on wikipedia and other online sources last night, and they learned that while Queen Marie of Romania may have been considered a bit lax in her morals at the time, by modern standards she was reasonably staid. So the household disappointedly concludes that another of the three reputedly scandalous relationships between Sam Hill and his female supporters was merely platonic.