LUMBERYACK

SEPTEMBER 10, 2025 – This morning I glanced at the usual news from crazy town and immediately deflected it by resuming work on my latest in-town construction project: a giant mobile easel for our oldest son’s vehicular window tinting business. He hopes to resume the enterprise after a long hiatus due to health concerns. He needed something on which he can rest securely a piece of plate glass the dimensions of an interior door and asked me to design and build the “something,” which, for lack of a better term, we called an “easel.” The glass, he tells me, is the best surface on which to cut tint film precisely. (After the glass is sprayed with a mist of H2O, a sheet of tint film is placed on the glass and held in place by suction created by the mist. The film is then cut to the desired size and shape and transferred to the window being tinted.)

Compared with the Pergola-on-a-Platform up at the lake, the Giant Easel is a large piece of cake. Except for the sturdy casters, fitted with footbrakes, and an extra box of #9 – 2 1/2” deck screws, all the materials—two hefty hinges and 14 – 2 x 4s—come from my stock of “scrap” lumber and miscellaneous hardware. Whereas the Pergola-on-a-Platform is infinitely more complex and time-consuming, the Giant Easel resembles an eighth-grade shop class project back in the day. I started off in my usual fashion—drawings in a sketchbook and refined on graph paper—but largely improvised on the fly. Here in “the city” I had the advantage of sprawling workspace—“my half” of the garage and driveway, entirely flat concrete. The finished product definitely “flies” and is now waiting to be picked up and deployed.

Given my use of power tools, albeit on a light and not too bothersome basis, given that all our neighbors were either away at work or play, I could hardly complain about the racket two doors away and across the nearest cross street. Between drilling holes and driving in fasteners with my power drill, I heard major commotion and lots of requests and commands shouted among a crew of tree-tamers. When my curiosity got the best of me, I stepped back from my project and strolled over to see what was going on.

Lots, as it turned out: three scruffy hard-working guys and their well-worn equipment: chain saws, climbing gear, hard hats, ropes, rakes, a workhorse truck equipped with a “cherry-picker,” and pulling a black and sinister-appearing chipper. The men weren’t young, and they looked as if they lived in tree houses above a trailer park. The guy running the cherry-picker had long, straight white hair flowing out from under his helmet and lots of facial wrinkles. If he was younger than I am, he certainly didn’t appear so. The guy standing nearby raking up debris wore a banged-up hardhat plastered with stickers advertising various chainsaw manufacturers. The third musketeer—a man of heft—was aloft in the neighbors’ tree, wielding the chainsaw as if it were part of his anatomy.  The fact that these old guys were still alive and not missing any limbs (pun fully intended) told me that they knew something about what they were doing.

In fact, that was my icebreaker as I approached, still wearing my safety glasses and holding my power drill. “Somethin’ tells me that you guys really know what you’re doing,” I said to the guy with the battered, stickered helmet and the white-haired guy as he climbed down from the cherry-picker.

“We’ve been at it for a while,” said the guy with the rake. “Twenty-two years for me, 30 years for him,” he nodded in the direction of the codger.

I told them I’d watched enough guys like them work to know it took lots of skill just to stay out of the hospital.

“That’s right,” said the old man. “Ya learn to keep your distance from those,” he laughed, pointing at the overhead utility lines in the alley. “Those are the most hazardous part of the job.”

I told them my favorite anecdote about “Jessie,” our “tree guy” up at the lake. We’ve hired him several times to deal with major windfalls, and he certainly qualifies as an expert. A laconic one too.

One time while he was suiting up, sitting on the ground, legs stretched out in front of him as he buckled up his climbing spikes and harness, I asked Jessie if for chuckles he’d ever attended the annual Lumberjack World Championships in nearby Hayward, Wisconsin, which attracts competitors from New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the U.S. in log-rolling, log-chopping, log-sawing, boom-running, and pole climbing.  He looked up at me with a poker face, then back down at his belts and buckles as he tightened them, then back up at me and back down to double-check his gear. When he glanced up at me the third time he said one word that told me volumes: “Amateurs,” he said.

My listeners, the tree-tamers on hand today, seemed genuinely amused by the story, but they were mindful of their co-worker who’d just topped off the tree behind us and was ready to lob off a 10-foot section of the trunk. I decided it was time to get back to my eighth-grade-level shop class project. “Take care!” I said.

“You too!”

Ten minutes later, the Giant Easel—work of an amateur—was ready for inspection by the pro, Tintmeister of the Upper Midwest.

The salient benefit of my “amateur” status is that it gives me deep appreciation for the work of people who “know what they’re doing,” from window tinters to tree-tamers. That right there is half the reason to try lots of stuff in life. If nothing else, you learn to admire of all the people whose skill, expertise and experience make the world go round.

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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson