At the end of our driveway, right in the corner of the neighbors property, was a massive eastern white pine tree. It was planted when the house was built, making it older than Kristin and I, and had a trunk wider than me. Today it was removed.
It was an extraordinary process: four large trucks arrived, blocking our driveway and much of the street. They started by erecting this unusual cherry picker to take down some of the lower branches and to (I presume) make way for the bigger crane.
The foliage was so dense it was hard to see exactly how they dismantled it, but the crane you can see was ‘catching’ the large branches and eventually trunk sections as they were cut. The guy doing the cutting was somehow attached to the tree and not using a second crane. Maybe he climbed up? I bet he had nerves of steel.
It took most of the day – at least six hours. Most of this was taking down the top half or so, and the rest was much faster. The noise was endless and extremely loud, much of which came from the industrial wood chipper that they fed the branches into (the red machine on the right). Trucks came and went periodically, probably taking away woodchips.
The biggest noise was toward the end when they picked up and dropped the trunk pieces too big to grind – almost as long as a car – into the back of an another truck. Each drop sounded like a bomb going off, vibrated the house and scared the hell out of our cats.
But that was nothing compared to the cacophony of the robotic stump grinder:
The guy standing next to it controlled it remotely. It took quite a while – at least half an hour – for him to finish grinding the stump below ground level, and the noise was like a million wasps surrounding the house.
And then they were done! A dozen or so guys and a small fleet of trucks packed up and left. I can only imagine how much the entire operation cost.
I know the neighbor was sick of cleaning up pine needles (which were incredibly abundant last year) and concerned about branches or even the tree itself falling, but it’s a shame such a regal and aged tree is now just… gone. I’ll miss it, and I hope he plants something in its place.