A QUICK RECAP AND COMMENTARY ABOUT GUIDO’S LAST HURRAH
You may remember before the flashbacks to Guido’s youth and to how he met Geena, and also to stories about Geena and Short Skirt Sue, our reluctant hero (some would say anti-hero) and Geena were on a motorcycle/work trip “up north,” meaning north of San Francisco. They had left The Taco House with their Harleys loaded with tree gear. The first job was the Digger pine crane job at the Geyers, northeast of Healdsburg, CA. The second job was two gnarly blue gums at a winery near the town of Sonoma, and that’s where we’ll eventually pick up the story. But first a little commentary and a trip to Oz.
It has been suggested in a couple of posts over at the “Female Climbers” thread that a forum devoted to professional tree workers is not the proper place for a series of stories about a climber named Guido. It was suggested that fiction about tree work belongs somewhere else, especially if it’s not PG and has elements of grandstanding, ie, drawing attention to oneself.
1) Though in some cases names, places, and establishments have been changed and/or melded into something other than what they originally were, I can assure you Guido is/was an actual person and that all references to tree work and climbing actually occurred just as written. (This includes the climb to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge, the escape from jail using dental floss, and the barefoot climber repelling upside down at the jamboree.) I wrote from memory using: stories I’ve heard from direct sources; second-hand stories; and things I have experienced or done myself. I relied on my imagination to flesh out characters and to provide auxiliary info. Because someone is not able to accept that 16 foot redwood logs are lowered from trees using blocks; a guy climbed a dental floss rope out of jail; or a climber repelled using his toes doesn’t mean it didn’t happen or can’t happen, it just means the doubters are limited by their own inabilities and lack of imagination.
2) As to the PG and grandstanding comments not being appropriate on a forum dedicated to tree professionals. I think we’re all adults here. If alluding to sexual matters and drug use cannot be tolerated in an adult forum, then we’ve certainly become a bit too sensitive. I did a quick search of some older posts--things like politics, talk show hosts, and “R” rated subject matter proliferate on this forum. And as to the accusation of drawing attention to oneself--you’ve got to be joking. Because you write about personal work experiences, that’s grandstanding? What about people who post videos or photos of themselves taking down a tree? Or climbing one? Is that in the same category?
3) For any lowlife thinking of ripping off this material and pitching it as his own--read article 16 of the ArborSite regs. When written material is posted in/on a public forum, ie, the internet, copyright laws apply. Not that any of this is gonna make anyone a dime...
THE FINAL EPISODE—PART I
Guido love climbing big eucs. Most climbers--at least Californians--don’t. Now Aussies and Kiwis, that’s a whole different matter. Guido climbed for a while with an Aussie from Toolangi, a town northeast of Melbourne. His name was T-rex, and he was the boldest climber outside of himself Guido ever met. They worked together in the Oakland Hills after a series of rare killer frosts toasted a forest of blue gums in the East Bay. They had both hired out as contract climbers as it was a big-removal state contract with helicopters flying out the wood from wherever logs could be stacked flat in the hilly terrain.
When the contract was up T-rex invited Guido to Oz, and Guido took him up on it. It was the late 70s, and after T-rex picked Guido up in Melbourne and drove him to the Dandenong foothills where he lived, Guido felt he’d entered some parallel universe. Giant blue gums, many over 200 feet, dominated the hills. And stories persisted that somewhere in the back of the beyond there was a eucalyptus globulus pushing 350.
Guido didn’t get into anything that big, but he did do a euc takedown almost half that size. T-rex had a customer who lived up a long dirt driveway that wound up a hill. Near the top stood a 150-foot blue gum showing signs of root compaction due to construction when a garage had been built near the tree five years earlier. The top of the euc was half dead, and the tips of most of the branches showed signs of die back. The tree needed to come down, in pieces, before it was too dead to climb. T-Rex thought it would be a nice intro to Australia for Guido.
Flipping a core up a big blue gum can cause some climbers to weep. Long shards of peeling bark hang from the trunk and can snag a flip line, forcing a climber to squirrel around to the snag and free his rope. The trick is to lean into the tree and leave enough slack so you can flip your flip line with an outward and upward curl, allowing the core to travel away from the trunk and over stubs and hanging bark. Guido was pretty adept at it and speed climbed to the first branch, never sinking his spikes farther into the trunk than the cambium.
The garage was out of bombing range as long as limbs didn’t come down tip first and do a header, catapulting their butts out an additional twenty feet, so Guido limbed the blue gum out all the way to the top. The euc was one of those cooperative ones, with a lean down the driveway--no roping, it just needed to be taken down in pieces. Guido used his 038 which he had brought from Cal through Australian immigration in his backpack.
Taking the top in one piece, Guido notched his face, aiming for a large tree at the bottom of the drive. The top broke and sailed slow-motion to the ground, forcing a wave of air out and down the dirt driveway. Repelling off a foot long stub, Guido set up for his next cut. As he tied in with his flip line and pulled down his climbing rope, a dozen kookaburras landed in the surrounding trees lining the driveway.
The wood diameter at eighty-five feet measured close to twenty-four inches, and the twenty foot piece he was ready to bomb leaned fifteen degrees into the line of fall. After the piece left the trunk, did a one-eighty, and splattered on the ground, the kookaburras swooped down like F-16s to the euc log. Guido had clipped his saw into his belt and leaned away from the trunk, his gaffs snug in the wood and his core rope tight at his hips. He stared down at the birds scurrying the length of the shattered hollow log he had just cut. It was a kookaburra all-u-can-eat grub buffet. Guido was slightly mystified as each end of the hollow log where he had made his cuts was solid wood. He shrugged it off and flipped down to his next cut. The kookaburras continued to feast on the fat white grubs even as the next piece of blue gum left the trunk and hurtled down towards them. They waited until the piece was twenty-five feet overhead before scattering. It looked as though they had done this kind of thing before.
Guido took another twenty foot chunk before tying into a stub and repelling to the ground. Once there, he inspected the hollow log. The upper and lower three feet of the piece had been solid wood, but in between the solid wood the trunk had only a ring of two and a half to three inches of sap wood--and a few hundred grubs. That meant the twenty-four inch trunk had been three-quarters hollow at ninety feet up. And Guido had climbed another fifteen feet above the hollow, blew out a euc top that weighed two and a half tons, and had went for a ride as the trunk below him rocked and rolled. He reflected on all of this as he scooped up a couple of grubs. He’d heard of a climber or two who had sailed to his death taking out large amounts of solid wood above a hollow section of trunk--the trunk snapping at the hollow from the force of heavy weight above it breaking free and rocking what was left standing. Guido looked up at the kookaburras looking down at him and winked, then swallowed the grubs.
