Fatigued

I used to try and explain to people who work at desks about fatigue. It is really not something I can explain, because it has to be felt. Cumulative fatigue is felt by fewer and fewer people these days, as we come out of post-modernism into the age of slugs.

We are not farmers or hunters or gatherers much anymore, at least in this country. It is what it is, or as my Dad would say;" It doesn't make you bad" We are sitters and expecters and anger bearing devices, ready to explode with the energy given us at birth, misdirected into seat after seat after seat. We are told to sit still then shown how we can make money at it and then we start to, in our thirties, usually, resent getting up. No wonder road rage is epidemic. We have no social world,e xcept for those we know from nearby seats, or connected to our phones and internet.

Yesterday I took out a 140' Fir tree. It was the second of two we removed in this one yard. It was hard, but I knew what to do. It still takes its toll. There is a stupidity that takes over, after that much time aloft. By the way, the client has four more trees in his yard, equally as big. There was a reason for removal, but lets get into that in another blog. I got yelled at by a neighbor, told all about root systems and how trees nearby will blow down now. I felt like asking when was the last time someone yelled at him while he was doing his job, but I also felt like making him go away, so I sad; Yep, yep, you betcha. Put the earphones back on as he yelled some more. Poor sitter.

Stupidity may come from the root word, stoop. As in stooped from work. I can hardly make my fingers work. It is difficult to formulate thoughts, twenty hours after I threw the last limb. I feel a kinship with the folks who work day in and day out, but no way could I ever keep up with one of the poor souls who do hard manual labor each day. I am too soft. Sore spots materialized hours after work.  Today one felt like a stress fracture, where the spur ties on above my left ankle.

I read an article in the latest TCIA magazine, a trade magazine for tree folks. It talked about the phrase"Industrial athletes"  to describe our industry. Why not just call us professional athletes, and get real? If you do something physically demanding, and can do it well enough that it makes you money, you're a professional. I defy anyone to do it for an hour and not call it athletic. Its not industrial, but it can be industrious.

Not that all trades using the human body are athletic, but tree work involving climbing trees is. I did work from an aerial lift (often called a 'bucket' or 'cherry picker') for most of the year I did line clearance. In that, I felt like an industrial athlete. My low back got real sore, because my legs did the same constricted dance all day. I tried to invent a bucket that uses the legs more actively;but nothing came of it. I was told it would be difficult to sell anything with such a backlog of implied liability waiting to pounce on it. We sue each other for the incorrect use of tools all the time, after all. And the line clearance industry is no exception.

"Your honor, he made me use a tool that forced me to stoop!"

Climbing, especially on rope, but even on spurs, is physically demanding in some strange ways. It is not really aerobic, except the brief ascent, which can be a good pump, especially on rope. But there is a lot of weight bearing, rope coiling and retrieval, and stress.  The blood pools and coagulates while you wait for a pile to get moved out of the drop zone. Each piece that falls with force (these are the ones that simply drop) has the potential to kill or maim a ground worker. It can also destroy property. Insurance pays for things, but you cannot cut a tree down using an insurance policy; just as a warranty does not start a car on a cold winter morning.

So many things have to work well in a well done job. Communication, if you are lowering things, or simply want a saw serviced. The saw. The carabiners, clips, ropes, personal protective equipment (PPE) like hardhat, glasses, or ear protection. Lowering is as much a skill for the ground crew as it is for the one aloft. Common sense is incredibly uncommon. We use ropes, and knots, for very little except shoes in American society. At seventeen, I was shown the trucker's hitch and a bowline (bolun). I had to learn both again several years later. 

Twining and weaving string may have been the first thing hominids used as a tool (Richard Leakey said so). If so, then a knot is the first human technology, and we have forgotten it, nearly. Except for those doing macrame and knitting. And tree pruners. Each knot has a purpose, or at least an intent. I learned about stopper knots after I caused damage using a clove hitch while lowering a heavy limb without one. The knot, stable as hell under most kinds of tension, simply unrolled. It was Hawaii, in 1989, and my employer was not amused.

One could say our relationship began to unravel at that point too. He was in a hospital bed, broken up about as bad as you can imagine, and he told me what a dick I'd been to do that and do a job he had not sold, all on the same day. The job hadn't been sold, but it had been bid. If I had looked at a certain mark on a certain paper, I'd have known that. It was about my first month working in Hawaii, and I hardly knew the island, barely knew ten trees, and had five guys under me. I had to stay busy. It was a huge condo complex, and had hundreds of trees we were doing, several hundred we were not. I was just glad it was not a removal. I was contrite, and things never were the same. He expected from me what I had always expected of my workers: perfection. Incidentally, he was one of the best climbers I ever saw, and even ten years my senior, could outrun me in trees. So it wasn't likely I'd ever have cause to point out one of his foibles.

Men knot together for different reasons. We had a rapport from the start,like long lost cousins. If he hadn't fallen from that tree, roped in so it fell right onto him, crushing this and that... We might have been some kind of team. We were both as competitive as hell, in love with tree work, and seemed to need to prove something. Not in a bad way, just, hell, if someone thinks they can beat me, ok, lets race. That was our attitude when we showed up at work every morning. No wonder we both ended up working solo; not as crew leaders in some big outfit.

"I never made a mistake like that when I was a foreman" he said over the phone. The rope that had been stretched taut in me, ready, working, at that point curled up and slackened. I still get a knot in my stomach when I think of it. How could I have been so stupid?