One of the rewards of starting my sawmill buisness has been the different people that I have met. Well, the other day I met REALLY different character.
First of all this guy lives on 40acres of swamp land that is intermixed with stands of hardwoods. His house is a broken down mobile home that looks as if it is going to fall over in the next breeze. Yet when you pull into his drive you'd think you were driving up to a mansion. He has landscaped both sides of the lane with gorgeous plants, shrubs and flowers. He has no electric power and says he never will. He is going totally solar, which I think is a great idea if you can generate enough to run the lights. His plan is to clear cut out on area that mainly has cherry and sasafrass growing in it for building what he terms a "spiritual area". I've agreed to buy the cherry (mostly smaller logs <16") of which he has about 1.5mbft.
Anyways, yesterday I showed up to load the logs only to find out that he hasn't even started dropping them yet. He says no problem, he'll have them all dropped in 20 minutes. He then runs out with saw in hand and starts madly dropping trees without even making felling notches. Trees and limbs are coming down left and right and at one point I even think one is coming my way so I take off faster than I thought I could run. At this point I decide it's time to back off and watch from a distance. Just a few minutes later I watch in horror as this guy jumps into his tractor/backloader and proceeds to run over his chainsaw with the front tire. I'm screaming at him to stop but he can't hear me so he puts it into reverse and backs over it again, cuts the wheels to the right, pulls forward and runs over it yet again! When I finally get his attention, he looks at his saw, lets out a few choice words and then gets back in the loader.
After we got the logs loaded, he told me that last week he had a tree fall on him and his whole side and ribs are black and blue. He also goes on to tell me that his blood pressure is in the dangerous zone and that he has a hernia the size of a goose egg! But none of this is going to stop him- he has work to do.
I told him next time, please have the logs cut and bucked then I'll come over to pick them up. Pretty scary.
