People at Work #14

They don't look very much like they're working in this picture, but they accomplished in a half hour what it would have taken OilMan and Dana  days. They are the guys from the county fuel reduction department. For a county that never seems to have any money to do anything, most notably fix the slowly disintegrating roads, they showed up in a spiffy new truck, and had a brand new chain saw which they weren't supposed to use to "help" us, but when they realized we had "stumps" 6 inches in circumference and five feet high they were dying to try it out. The fellow on the left cut five of them off at the ground in ten minutes. They got a good laugh out of the one that looked like a beaver had felled it. It was actually OilMan with his trusty Boy Scout hatchet. Although it took him an hour, he was quite pleased with himself. He had gone to the hardware store and purchased an axe but said it was too heavy to swing properly.

The stumps were added to the piles of branches, fed into the chipper and sprayed over the field in another twenty minutes. A third guy hopped out of the truck when the chipping began. He was developmentally disabled but dragged the branches to the chipper with great enthusiasm. I heard him say, "this is the best job I've ever had!" Now that seems like a win-win arrangement for everyone involved.

They said they would come back if we made another appointment before October. I've already seen OilMan and Dana eyeing a big tree up by the road.