University of Oregon arborist John Anthony stares up at the sickly, 70-foot Catalpa tree with eyes that have seen perhaps a hundred trees fall to their deaths in his 22 years here, but not once to their liking.
He straps a hard hat over his long, graying blonde hair and mounts the grated steel basket of the man lift, toggling his way up to the first set of braches. He is wearing a bright yellow tether, hooked to the side of the lift with a carabineer and safety line. Once the skinniest and most accessible twigs have been cut with a swift sweep from his compact chainsaw, Anthony carefully extends the lift to the top of the naked, spindly deciduous spire.
“There’s a big old split here I didn’t even see!” Anthony yells towards the group of Facilities Services workers and casual onlookers forming a semi-perimeter around the tree. Civilians are being held back at a safe distance by warning signs and a length of neon orange tape where the tree is being cut down between Hendricks and Johnson halls.
With one hand operating the small saw and the other bracing a gnarled branch, he makes the cut and guides the falling debris away from the second healthy Catalpa growing 10 feet away. By doing so, the second tree will not be scathed by the chunks of its falling neighbor and be cast to the same fate.
As the pieces of tree hitting the ground become larger and gain more inertia from the fall, they begin to explode on impact.
“Did you see that one break apart?” John asks no one in particular, all the while knowing that such fragile wood is the result of extensive decay that has rotted out the tree’s insides.
The Catalpa has had a history of limb failure, and because of periodic trimming over the years, had ended up with a lot of unbalanced weight on one side. In one clue to the tree’s ailing health, pavement bulges beneath the tree, which has led Anthony to theorize that the asphalt pathway stunted root growth. The grounds workers at the scene are glad to remove it in the summertime before changing seasonal conditions took its toll on the tree’s already questionable future.
“With the winter and the ground saturation, it could’ve ended up anywhere,” Facilities Services maintenance coordinator Vince Babkirk says.
Bees have taken up residence in the available cavity, so in addition to working the saw, Anthony periodically sprays insecticide into the orifices and braces himself as the bees panic and fly in every direction. The hazards of his job are enough that the last thing he wants to worry about is being attacked by an enraged swarm of stingers seven stories up in the air.
Babkirk looks slightly nervous as he stands in the small crowd, watching Anthony with a keen eye.
“John is really good at his job,” Babkirk says. “He is very thorough, and we’ve had six or seven discussions about how he’s going to take the tree out.”
Babkirk is somewhat placated because – at 8 a.m. on a cloudy day of summer term – few pedestrians are milling around campus.
“At this time of day, we don’t have to worry about people coming out of buildings,” Babkirk says.
Tangled in the tree, Anthony waves, like he is snapping a branch in half, signaling that he is ready for a break
“I could really use a yogurt,” Anthony says when he returns to the ground, wiping sweat and sawdust from his eyes.
When he climbs back into the lift half an hour later, even more branches of gradually increasing thickness hit the ground with dull thuds. The tree is now a 50-foot stump with a halo of branches and heart-shaped leaves surrounding its base.
Anthony yells something incomprehensible to one of his assistants wearing a yellow hard hat, who darts across the lawn and heaves back a much larger chainsaw with a three-foot blade they call “Big Red.”
The saw fires up after a few stubborn chokes, and its louder, meaner grind begins to echo off of the EMU brick. The racket attracts more curious spectators as Anthony begins to disassemble the trunk several feet at a time, cutting notches in the direction he wants the pieces to fall and then slicing at a downward angle from behind.
The arborist places the rattling and spitting saw on the lift’s floor and repositions himself. When enough pieces have been cut off the top to take the trunk out from its base, Anthony ties a rope around the top and feeds it to three Utilities Services workers who hold it taught 100 feet away. He spends a minute wrestling with the saw to make the finishing cut, and then the trunk begins to wobble and heads towards the ground with increasing speed.
Unlike the Pin oak removed near Gerlinger Hall early last week, the Catalpa will not be milled into lumber because its particular type of wood warps and cracks when it dries, making for a very poor building material.
“I’ve never seen any commercial uses for Catalpa,” Anthony says.
The tree will instead be cut into manageable lengths and chipped into mulch by an independent landscaping company hired by the University. The mulch will be mixed with grass clippings and other yard waste into a “hot” compost pile.
Anthony returns to earth covered head to foot in sawdust and hands his saw to a waiting assistant like a professional golfer hands his club to a caddy after the tee. No one applauds, but the air is thick with appreciation and awe. He walks over to the sprawled line used to pull the tree down and begins to neatly coil it between his palm and elbow, gazing emotionless at the various lengths of branches and trunks littering the turf as a result of his handiwork.
Other groundskeepers shyly move in and begin loading manageable Catalpa chunks into the backs of trucks. Anthony is the caretaker of over 3,000 different trees on campus, every one of which he would like to see thrive. However, engrossing himself in the second of several tree removals slated for this month is tolerable for the him because he understands that to truly love and appreciate trees, one must sometimes help them fall.
