How to blow up a tree

The huge elm had been full of health when we built the house, but the blight took it and left a huge and rotting cadaver.  I was afraid to cut it.  As elms often do, three trunks had grown from a common stump, then together, and apart again.  The disease had shorn the heavier limbs off it by the time I had worked up enough nerve to do something about it.

Over the previous years I had cut up and burned a number of large elms, so I wasn’t exactly a babe-in-the-woods when it came to felling large trees.  Still, this one gave me the willies.  Most trees lean, and can be tipped in that general direction with a large notch, some careful cutting, and a steel wedge.   But I couldn’t tell where, if anywhere, this one wanted to fall.

A colleague, Pat Quinn, got wind of my problem.  Pat is legendary for his explosive solutions to problems.  “Rod, why don’t you just blow the thing up?  I’ve got some dynamite the County let me have to clear beaver dams out of culverts, and it’s getting pretty old.  I should use it up because it’s starting to sweat.  Want me to come up on Saturday and take care of the tree?”  I nodded, a little nervously.  Like most of the rookies and all of the kids at Smiths Falls Collegiate, I was a bit scared of Pat.  I told him I’d be ready for him on Saturday morning, though.

That afternoon I tried to cut the tree.  Even with a huge notch and deep cuts all around, the tree would not tip.

Pat drove in Saturday morning.  “I was a little nervous over some of the bumps on Hwy. 15 with that dynamite in the trunk.  It’s sweating, and those drops on the outside of it are nitroglycerine.  Be sure when you’re handling it you wear heavy gloves.  Otherwise your heart will start to race like crazy from just a touch.  It absorbs through the skin.”

I didn’t know if he was doing a number on me or not, so I tried to appear relaxed. Pat looked the tree over and decided to tie three sticks to the side of the trunk just to see what happened.  He sent me to put in the electric cap fastened to the 200’ of wire.  We would set it off by shorting the contacts across the poles of a 12v car battery.

Dutifully I carried the cap and the wire over to the tree where Pat had made a show of tying the dynamite on with his hands encased in heavy gloves.  I looked back to ask him something.  No Pat.  That’s strange.  I followed the yellow wires over a rise and found him lying behind a boulder with eyes shut and fingers in his ears.

“All right, Pat, quit foolin’ around!  I’m going to hook them up now!”  Feeling none too eager to bring cap to nitro, I nevertheless stuffed the cap into the end of one of the sticks.  Then I did not run.  I walked back to Pat’s boulder, but he made me find my own.

He fired the shot.  It went “bang”.  A bit of bark fell off the trunk, but that was it.  A couple of Holsteins looked up, but soon lost interest.

Pat got serious.  This time he jammed three sticks into a crevasse between two of the trunks and shot that.  More bark flew, but the tree barely moved.

My turn.  “Okay, this is what we’ll do.  Over there on the other side of the house is a pile of clay.  Bring over a pail-full of it while I cut a mortise into the trunk to hold the next shot.”

I fired up the saw and made a plunge cut straight into the back of the trunk.  It went in all 30” of the bar’s length.  I pulled it out and made three more cuts into the punky wood, until I had created a 4” mortise straight into the heart of the tree, just at the level where I had cut the wedge before.  Then I hit it with the axe and wonder of all, the square plug of rotten elm popped right out.

Pat looked really apprehensive at this, but I pushed in three sticks of dynamite and a blasting cap.  Then I used half a pail of clay to seal the hole.

The shot wasn’t particularly loud.  It was more of a roar, but the hundred-foot tree seemed to lift slowly above the stump about four feet.  Then it stopped and turned horizontal in mid-air before it did a spectacular belly flop into the neighbour’s quarry.  It hit so hard most of the trunk broke up into chips.

When the dust had settled and the last few branches had found their way to earth, there really wasn’t anything to cut up and move, so Pat and I celebrated a job neatly done and he left with new respect for the power of dynamite sealed in a tree.

The Mysterious Case of the Runaway Bronco

I dread Friday the 13th.  I have done so ever since April, 1971, when on a Shakespeare exam at Queen’s I faced a compulsory 45 mark question on three plays I hadn’t read.  Then I reeled into a Canadian history exam and had forgotten pretty well everything by the fifth hour of the six-hour ordeal.

It’s not that I’m overly superstitious.  No, my fear of Friday the 13th comes as the result of a lifelong series of catastrophes on that day, many of which have had a built-in ironic component which makes my head spin.  The mysterious case of the runaway Bronco is a good example:

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I was in the shower, a bit late for the drive to school, when I heard a loud crash.  Bet shouted, “Rod, somebody’s hit your truck!”

I stumbled outside.  There was my poor 4Runner, huddled against the curb, one back wheel driven up onto the lawn.  The left side had been creased and scratched and the mirror was nowhere to be found.

Just past my truck a Ford Bronco had wrapped itself around the hydro pole which grows at the edge of our driveway.  Coolant gushed from the radiator and perfumed the air around the wreck.  I checked the cab.  No driver.  What’s more, the interior of the truck was tidy, locked up, and with no keys in the ignition.

A Smiths Falls Police cruiser arrived. The officers looked as bewildered as I about the absent driver.

About this time a little guy strolled up the road from Quattrocchi’s vegetable warehouse, a block further down the hill.  “I’d just got in with a load a’ potatoes from New Brunswick when I saw those poles and wires-a-dancing, so I left my truck to come up and see what’s happened.”

Constable Jim Ecker asked, “Sir, did you see the accident?  Did you see anyone running away from the vehicle?”

“No, all I saw’s the wires, but they were really jumping around there for a bit.”

The stranger walked over to the wrecked SUV.  “Say, now, that’s a 1986 Ford Bronco.  I had one a’ them.  Thing kept jumpin’outa park whenever I left ‘er parked on a hill.  Finally it got away on me out front o’ my sister’s house and it rolled into a swamp and we never did find it again.  Brand new tires on’er, too.  I missed those tires.”

Constable Alison Smith piped up:  “Sir, are you suggesting that this vehicle might have been parked up the street, and that it jumped out of park and rolled down the hill until it hit this pole?”

The man looked at the wrecked Bronco, looked up the street, considered the slopes, the distances, the angle of deflection off my Toyota, and nodded his head in the affirmative.  “Yep.”

Constable Ecker ran the plate and discovered that the Bronco was registered to the pastor of his church.  He called and interrupted the clergyman’s breakfast.  He promised to come right over, and soon parked his Crown Victoria behind my stricken 4Runner.

“I lent the Bronco to my daughter to use while her husband is out of town.  They live in an apartment up the hill,” gesturing up Church Street towards the town hall.

“What’s her name and phone number, Reverend?” Smith asked.

“Would you mind not calling her?  She worked the night shift and is probably just getting to sleep now.  Why don’t I call my insurance company and the tow-truck and we let her sleep?”

The officers decided that this would be all right, so a genial and very knowledgeable tow truck owner soon arrived and separated the Bronco from its splintered adversary.

It fell to me to notify my insurance company of the accident.  The local answering machine referred me to another in Kingston, into which I dictated my message.

“Dear Sir, Madam, or machine:  This morning at approximately 7:30 a ten year-old Bronco got away from its owner and ran down the street, plunged through an intersection, sideswiped my 4Runner and killed itself on the hydro pole in my driveway.”

I left my contact numbers and soon a smart and very competent woman called to guide me through procedures. The repairs were soon done to my satisfaction, the rental Ford went back, and I thought I had heard the last of the matter.

Then, three months later, a letter arrived from the insurance company:

“Dear Mr. Croskery   re:  Animal Collision, April 13, 1997.  We hope that you have found the repairs to your vehicle satisfactory…”

Animal collision??? This left me in a quandary.  The nice lady on the phone couldn’t possibly have mistaken a 1986 Bronco for a horse.  So was she joking?  I couldn’t tell, and worse, I didn’t know how to respond.  Do I clear up her “misconception” and make myself the butt of the joke, or do I let it go? Torn by indecision, I finally wimped out and said that everything was fine.  Maybe that gave her the best laugh of all.

When I told the guys at the Marina about this, my Newfoundland friend Les said that he had the same thing happen when he hit a moose with his Blazer.  About three months later a letter came, this one about a “collision with a flying object.”

“Well, that moose was a’flyin after I ran into ‘er, but maybe they’d used up all the animal collisions in Ontario and gave us what was left over.”

The Battle of Apple Hill

Irwin Smythe drove his Cadillac down the ramp one Friday evening in early August, got out, slammed the door and stalked down the dock without a look at anyone. Every ounce of his 340 pounds radiated outrage. He had the bearing of a man, not just angry, but on the verge of a heart attack.

After a while, the groceries and his wife Eleanor stowed aboard their houseboat, Irwin took the car back up to the parking lot and made his way back down to the porch, where he unloaded his tale of woe.

Irwin and Eleanor had bought this bass boat, one with a zillion horsepower, a trolling motor, and enough electronics to knock out a submarine. He had rented an extra slip for it at the marina, so that it would always be ready for them to use. But Irwin hadn’t finished at this point. He decided that the sun was too hot for Eleanor when they were fishing, so he had a bimini top built for the boat, with special supports to hold the shade in place at the 70 miles per hour the thing could do.

Irwin wanted only the best, and this went for tackle and bait, as well. He tried all of the catalogue specials, and they had worked reasonably well throughout the month of July, but August bass wanted frogs, and so Irwin gave up on artificials in favour of the real thing. He even modified one of the wells on the boat to make a vivarium for frogs. Though he killed them before he put them on a hook, up to that time Irwin’s frogs lived in air-conditioned comfort in his black, metal-flake, Ranger bass boat.

Notwithstanding his expensive equipment, Irwin got his frogs the same way the rest of us did, by catching them in the parking lot. None of Irwin’s high-tech toys paid off like his two-dollar butterfly net. With his bulk, Irwin needed the net to catch the frogs, but with it he proved a crafty and successful frogger.

The bass had been biting, and the parking lot was running temporarily short of frogs. Irwin decided that there was some nice moist grass a couple of miles down the road, in a rural suburb known as Apple Hill. Irwin vaguely knew the developer from his real estate dealings, so he got the fellow’s number from his secretary, and had a word with him on his car-phone about his bait-supply problem. The developer told Irwin to go ahead and send his crew over to pick frogs.

Irwin’s “crew” this Friday afternoon had consisted of one man, Irwin, still in a white shirt and tie, but with tennis shoes and a pair of fluorescent green Bermuda shorts. Eleanor chose to relax in the idling Cadillac with the air conditioning set at glacial and the CD player whispering Vivaldi.

Irwin had removed one of his socks when he changed his shoes, because we had taught him that the most efficient and humane way to transport frogs was in a woollen sock, slightly dampened. (The wool wicks the moisture off, thereby cooling the frogs and keeping them more comfortable.) Eleanor’s bottle of Perrier lay empty and abandoned on the hood of the car.

Mrs. Emily Penney was returning from an expedition to a craft store in Westport, thinking half about her new garden sculpture by Doef, and half about what to serve her future son-in-law for tomorrow’s dinner when she encountered, parked on the grass at the approach to her home, an idling, white Cadillac. A large, dishevelled man with a butterfly net , ludicrous trousers, and one sock, was hopping around her lawn, waving the net at what appeared to be pieces of clover, then pouncing, only to come up with delight clutching a small, quivering object, which he would promptly thrust deep into the bowels of an executive-length sock, tie the sock, and repeat the process.

Mrs. Penney watched this for some moments, then, realizing that the pursued were frogs, rather than some sort of loathsome insect, decided that she must do her part to save the wetlands of Ontario. She drove up behind the idling Cadillac, shut off her Subaru, and slammed the door behind her as she strode to confront this intruder.

This broke Irwin’s concentration, and he looked up with annoyance after missing a nice green leopard.

“Those are my frogs.”

“What?” Irwin asked.

“I said, those are my frogs. This is my property, and those are my frogs. Would you please leave?”

“Lady, I just talked to the developer, Stan Miller, on my car phone on the way through Portland, and this lot is still for sale. You don’t own it, the corporation does.”

“Those are still my frogs.”

“How can they be your frogs? They’re not on your land, I’m not on your land, and the frogs are all jumping into the ditch as we speak. Now what’s your problem?”

“Those frogs have grown up in Apple Hill. I live in Apple Hill. We are fellow residents, and we are not about to have you hooligans from a campground come over here to traipse around our lawns with butterfly nets.” Mrs. Penny ran out of breath at about the same time that she ran out of invective, and so subsided with a puff. We could imagine Irwin’s face turning from pink, to red, to bluish black. Perhaps he remembered to breathe in time, because we hadn’t heard any ambulances.

Anyway, Irwin backed down, with little grace, one might guess, still clutching a half-dozen spotted hostages. Her voice rang out once more: “Give me back my frogs. You may not kidnap them to use for your purposes.” Irwin clutched the sock to his chest, climbed into his car, and backed out to the road in a cloud of dust. Mrs. Penney, satisfied that she had done her bit for the environment and all of the loathsome creatures in it, drove her Subaru in triumph the remaining fifty feet to her driveway.

We felt badly for Irwin, and a little frightened for his health. This was the angriest we had ever seen him, and he normally had blood pressure that a giraffe would respect.

So we hid our smiles and started a discussion about who owned the frogs. Bloody-minded crew that we were, we could find no one to argue the Apple Hill side, so we decided to ask for a judicial review.

Out of Irwin’s earshot we approached His Worship, Justin Paul with the facts of the case, and asked him for a judgement. Jack did a creditable job of describing how Irwin must have appeared chasing frogs with a butterfly net, and Justin had a hard time containing his mirth, especially when Jack, an unconscious mimic, re-created both sides of Irwin’s dialogue with Mrs. Penney. Finally, the judge announced his intention to consider this in chambers, and went off to his boat for an afternoon nap.

A few days later, Justin announced that he was prepared to deliver his judgement on the case of Smythe versus Penney. We all gathered round and His Worship began:

“In Ancient England there were common lands where the villagers could graze their cattle on the grass, and take them home to milk later. The precedent for this case comes from the ancient English common law which governed the possession of cattle and other livestock ranging upon the common land.

“Mrs. Penney’s claim to the frogs depends entirely upon the state of mind of each frog at the time of the dispute. Before the law there are two possible states of mind for an animal: animus fruendi, and animus revertendi, that is, the impulse to flee, or the impulse to come to its owner, when called. The villagers proved ownership of their livestock by calling their animals off the common.

“Mrs. Penney does, indeed, own the frogs. All she has to do is call them. Any and all of the frogs which come when she calls them, belong to her. If they do not come when she calls them, or if they flee at her approach, they are fair game for anyone else on the common.”

We greatly admired this judgement, particularly his informed use of Latin, but by now Irwin had cooled down, was catching bass on surface plugs, and Eleanor thought it probably would be best not to disturb him with the news. Still, we liked the ring of animus revertendi, and we still talk about the Battle of Apple Hill.

Copyright, Rod Croskery, 1995