Guido's Last Hurrah--The Final Episode

[Mapleman]

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.

 

[Macclay]

Mate, have you been down here? Thats exactly what those kooka's do, can see a feed from 200 ft. Awesome

 

[Mapleman]

Mate, have you been down here? Thats exactly what those kooka's do, can see a feed from 200 ft. Awesome

I worked in Adelaide for some guy called "The Flying Tree Doctor," a bloody pommy who made a face cut in a red gum while I was still in it. The guy didn't believe in using a lot of "technical" gear because he thought it took too long. Found out later he was called the flying tree doctor because he had flown out of a few trees. The bloody wanker needed a hour and a handful of pills just to get out of bed in the morning--so much for "taking too long." This was back in '82, and I know tree work down under has come a long way since then.

I did hook up later with some good blokes over in Melbourne where I climbed for two months. That's where the kookaburra incident happened. I came back to Oz in '97, but that was with a bicycle, not a chain saw. I did a spin along the Great Ocean Highway then up to Cannes--really great trip. I'm thinking to make another trip soon...

 

[Mapleman]

THE FINAL EPISODE--PART II


There were no eucalypti in California before the 1849 gold rush. Blue gums and their cousins hitched over with Aussie miners when they returned to the San Francisco area in the early 1850s. The Aussies had noticed similarities between northern California and their birth places in New South Wales and Victoria and, perhaps feeling a bit home sick, they thought planting a few blue gums would remind them of home.

One hundred and thirty years later, eucs had become an invasive species, crowding out native plants. In northern Cal where rainfall is more plentiful than most places in Oz, blue gums grow fast, tall, and twisted. They shade out slower growing trees, and their leaves are acidic, making the soil toxic enough so they beat out competing tree species. It’s the toxicity of euc leaves that stones koalas and causes groups of “environmentalists” to poison eucalypti with chemical brews like Tordon in an effort to eradicate them.

Another interesting aspect of blue and red gums is the propensity of large healthy limbs to break off on hot summer afternoons with no warning, no wind, and with no obvious cause. Apparently the heat forces more of the thick gum into the limbs, making heavy wood that much heavier. That’s why houses and other structures should never be built close to blues, reds, and some of their boxwood brethren, but as we all know, it never quite works out that way.

The Twisted Sister Winery was a newer operation, built by two yuppie investors from Miami who had been forced to leave the Sunshine State after some shady real estate transactions involving drug money, arms smuggling, and health insurance companies. They weren’t as interested in growing grapes as they were in growing portfolios and laundering money. But all of this was unknown to Guido and Geena as they pulled up in their chain saw totting Harleys on a damp, cool, and foggy January morning.

The winery had been constructed “Spanish style” with its buildings forming a square--opened at one end--around two huge blue gums. The gums had been pruned of deadwood before construction started, but heavy equipment had impacted their root zones and the eucs were in decline. The winery manager had the trees dead wooded periodically, but when a large healthy branch fell in the middle of a summer afternoon wine tasting session, the manager asked his brother-in-law Bruce, a tree climber from Palatka, Florida, to come west and remove the offending blue gums.

Bruce was fond of telling other climbers he met while working hurricanes that he’d never met a tree he couldn’t take down in forty-five minutes, and that he’d be a millionaire if all he had to do all day was take down big pines. But Bruce had never been to northern California, nor had he ever seen a giant twisted blue gum that made the pines Bruce climbed look like pecker poles. Anyway, Bruce’s trip to the Bay Area turned out to be short lived, and within a week he was back in Florida climbing pecker poles and telling people he’d never met a tree he…

Geena was chomping at the bit to do a big euc, and Guido agreed she could handle the “smaller” blue gum which leaned away from the bigger of the two. He borrowed a fishing pole from one of the winery’s Mexican laborers and with an overhead cast, sailed the line over a large limb fifty feet up. Tying a 165-foot climbing rope to the fishing line, Guido pulled the rope over the limb as Geena rigged up. Ascending to the limb was fairly easy. Guido and the Mexican laborer belayed Geena as she spiked her way up, using the tree’s lean to her advantage. But getting over the first limb would not be easy. The euc branch bulged where it connected to the trunk, and even Guido couldn’t have pulled himself up and over the limb.

After tying in and going off belay, Geena managed to toss her flip line up and over the branch, catching its snap in her left hand. She clipped the snap in and released her climbing line, and from there the rest of the tree was a “piece of cake.”

Besides bombing a half dozen of the longer branches, "all" Geena needed to do was place a bull line high in the tree so a tractor could pull the euc into the open end of the grass square the winery had been built around. After timber hitching the bull rope thirty feet from the gum’s top, she pitched a second climbing line into the other euc for Guido, then did a speed repel to the ground. As she de-rigged from her gear, she looked over toward the other blue gum. Guido was conversing with one of the winery’s employees. It was a woman with long dark-brown hair, wearing a short leather skirt.

 

[TreEmergencyB]

mapleman,
he keep the stories coming it wouldnt belong here if you were talking about a painter or a plumber, but guidio is a climber unlike some of the people who post here. Remember an arborist is a tree care proffesonial not just a climber this is Arborist Site right? Anyway good story i liked it and hope u got some more.


ps. are you a sugar, silver, or red maple?

lol

 

[Mapleman]

mapleman,
he keep the stories coming it wouldnt belong here if you were talking about a painter or a plumber, but guidio is a climber unlike some of the people who post here. Remember an arborist is a tree care proffesonial not just a climber this is Arborist Site right? Anyway good story i liked it and hope u got some more.


ps. are you a sugar, silver, or red maple?

lol

I'm a curly rock maple, tried and true...

 

[outofmytree]

<------------------Guido-holic

 

[tree md]

X2

 

[Mapleman]

THE FINAL EPISODE--PART III


“Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm,
Into this life we’re born
Into this life we’re thrown,
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out alone,
Riders on the storm.”

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” especially one of Irish-Mexican descent, totting a large chain saw. Our readers may recall we first met Short Skirt Sue in Part X, and later in Part XII. But Geena had never met Sue, although she had heard all about Sue’s predilection for tree men, and of Sue and Guido’s on-again-off-again affair. True enough, in the year Guido and Geena had been together, he had not seen Sue and had kept his philandering and womanizing to a minimum, at least by his own ill-defined standards. Nevertheless, once Geena coiled her climbing line and Sue returned to work, Guido felt the full fury of a scorned woman and her chain saw, straight from the depths of hell.

“That was Short Skirt Sue, wasn’t it Guido?” Geena screamed. “What’s she doing here prancing around like a floozy in heat? How’d she even know we’d be working here today?” Geena yelled, all the while making stabbing motions with a 056 at Guido’s chest.

“She works here, damn it, that’s all there is to it. That thing’s sharp…put it away before you hurt yourself…use it for taking down the gum why don’t yer,” Guido said with a smile, pushing the saw aside and pointing to the euc Geena had just bailed out of.

“Oh I’ll use it for a removal all right, Stumpy,” Geena said, aiming the Stihl at Guido’s groin, her voice just above a whisper.

Guido looked at the 056’s sprocket a few inches from his family jewels, then glanced up at the sky. The morning’s light drizzle had intensified, and Guido took advantage of the rain.

“Let’s get our gear out of this friggin’ weather and break for lunch, all right? We can go back to that diner we passed on the way up here and talk about removal techniques.”


Waiting for the rain to let up before returning to work is not an option if you’re an urban lumberjack in the Northwest. If you’re up in a tree in the middle of a big removal and the clouds let loose, you either haul up your slick suit or work wet. Those who prefer not to work in the rain are six- or seven-month climbers, at best, because the big stuff happens in the winter, and the winter is when it rains and rains and…

In a typical winter work week, working for one of the more high profile tree outfits in San Francisco, a climber will use a saw with a 32-inch bar or bigger, in the tree, four days out of five. Many tree services have a least two saws permanently fitted with three-foot bars, and usually a 090 laying around in a basement or storage unit with a 84-incher. A week before the road trip, Guido had used just such a 090 on a crane job over in Pacifica. He did have the presence of mind though to have Geena start it on the ground and set the chain brake before sending it up to him.

After a ninety-minute lunch and make-up session, Geena and Guido returned to The Twisted Sister Winery. Geena boxed and hinged the blue gum she had laced out, then let one of the winery’s tractors pulled it over into the open end of square. The winery’s management was planning to landscape and tile the square after the eucs were removed, so it was of no consequence that the euc furrowed the wet ground for its entire length.

The rain still fell in a steady rhythm as Guido snapped on a yellow rain jacket and rigged up to do the larger of the blue gums. The line Geena had hung for him was thoroughly soaked and useless as a climbing aid, so Guido flip lined his way up the trunk, hinging and compression cutting branches as he went. All Geena had to do was keep his climbing line free, as the brush and wood stayed on site. The winery’s Mexicanos, although not trained in proper arboricultural techniques, were nevertheless--“muy listo in la cabeza” (very ready in the head) and would have no trouble carving and splitting up the trunks into firewood. And they had been around long enough to know that euc splits easier wet than dry.

As the rain and afternoon wore on, the tree gradually shrunk until Guido deemed it was of sufficient dimensions and weight distribution to lay it parallel to the blue gum Geena had dispatched. He had left several limbs on the trunk when he ascended as they had been too large to free fall in one piece without hitting a tiled roof that covered a walkway bordering the grass courtyard. Once Guido had nailed the top and tied into the rope Geena had set, he repelled down to the first of the remaining branches and limb walked out twenty feet. He made a small under cut then feathered the top cut so the limb broke slow, and once it was thirty degrees from the horizontal, he revved the 056. The branch broke free and hit the ground at a forty-five degree angle, the bushy tips springing the butt back towards the trunk. The next branch was on the opposite side of the tree.

One of the perks of climbing is the opportunity to do a Tarzan swing. It’s not something you’ll find in ISA manuals nor is it OSHA approved, but let’s be honest girls and boys, most of us have availed ourselves of this adrenaline inducing activity. Guido was a great aficionado of Tarzan swings. He never passed one up. With his tie in fifty feet up, he oooh-waaahed over to the opposite side of the trunk, grabbing a side limb close to his next setup. Water sprayed from the climber’s knot as Guido pulled slack out of the line.

“Why let a little rain dampen the chance to let it all hang out,” he thought, firing up the 056.

 

[Mapleman]

THE FINAL EPISODE--PART IV


“Can you picture what we’ll be,
so limitless and free?
Desperately in need of some stranger’s hand
In a desperate land…

This is the end
My only friend, the end."


February the second, Groundhog Day, broke clear and cool. The three-day storm had passed to the east, and after sitting out a day to sort out their affairs, Geena and Guido motored down to Sausalito to do the last job of the road trip--a redwood take down. The tree was on the smaller side for a redwood, topping out at only 120 feet, but 12kv lines passed close to the trunk forty feet up. Normally, this would not be cause to remove a healthy tree, especially a redwood, but root compaction had hampered the tree’s vascular system and the tree was in steady decline.

The removal was fairly straight forward. The redwood was already limbed out to the sixty foot mark on the 12kv side of the tree, so Guido limbed his way up the opposite side of the trunk to that point, then climbed another twenty-five feet, set his tie in and a lowering line, and repelled to the first branch over the lines. He had rigged the lowering line over a branch on the opposite side from the utility lines. By tying off branches about halfway out and making side cuts, he was able to swing everything away from and over the lines. Once clear, Geena shot the branches straight down.

Taking the spindly top in a twenty foot piece should also have been uneventful, and it was to any non-tree professional watching the job out of earshot. Guido rigged a block even with his thighs and core roped in a foot or so above the block. He had already tied off a pull line, and now ran a second line through the block and above his flip line, butt tying the top with a “Budweiser” or “Coke bottle” knot--a half hitch underneath a timber hitch. The half hitch was tied over a stub so once the top broke free and cleared the block, the half hitch would pull tight with no slippage. The cuts were made, obviously, between his core rope and the half hitch.

Geena had tied the pull line off to a cum-a-long that was hitched to a sling around a large bay tree. She ran the lowering line through a Port-a-Wrap tied to the base of the redwood opposite the 12kvs. Guido left a three-inch hinge, clipped in his 038, and leaned back while Geena cranked the cum-a-long with her left hand, holding the lowering line with her right. The top broke clean and flew out and down, catching on the half hitch six or seven feet below the block. Guido was ready for the ride, loosely bracing himself against the tree to absorb the shock as the top slammed into and rattled the trunk. Geena released the pull line from the cum-a-long and slowly lowered the top to the ground, and that’s all there was to that, or so it appeared.

Geena and Guido had been bickering from the moment they’d arrived on the job, and it only got worse as the job progressed from the simplicity of lowering branches to the more complex removal of the top. Normal simple discussions on where to rig the cum-a-long and how many turns to take on the Port-a-Wrap became shouting matches, the spectra of Short Skirt Sue looming in the background. Guido smiled once the top was grounded because now he could keep his saw revved, piecing out the redwood in four to six foot chunks and drowning out Geena’s bit*hing. And so the rest of the morning progressed, Guido chunking, and Geena cutting and stacking brush, rolling chunks, and fuming…

 

[Mapleman]

THE FINAL EPISODE—PART V


It’s often the little things that will get us in life, rather than the bigger stuff we prepare for. So it is with tree work. We double and triple check all our rigging and knots, while often paying little heed to how we clip a saw into our saddles.

Guido banged out fifty feet of the trunk in eight or nine cuts, varying the depth of his Humboldt with the size of the piece and the height from the ground. The chunks lay in a stack almost perfectly aligned--Guido was on top of his game. He had always had the ability to block out negativity and drama when doing tree work, and he dreaded breaking for lunch and coming out of the tree as he was “in a zone.” However, although listening to Geena would not be conducive to staying “in the zone,” he needed a bigger saw.

Guido made his final cut with the 038 then clipped the saw’s wrap around tubing into his ladder snap--so the saw hung horizontally--before spiking down the tree. Geena had been on her game too, and piles of brush, their butts facing downhill, were stacked behind a couple of cones next to a curb. When Guido hit the ground, and before he could even step out of his saddle, Geena grabbed and yanked him into a bear hug. Then she pulled a small baggie of white powder from her pocket.

“Let’s snort and make up,” she told Guido. And that’s just what they did, skipping lunch in the process.

Guido needed to shorten the trunk another twenty feet in order to fit it into the available landing zone he and Geena had been using to take down the redwood. He clipped the rear handle of his 056 into his belt and spiked up to five feet below the top of the trunk. The wood diameter at his point was close to three feet, and the 056 was mounted with a 32-inch bar, so Guido would have to squirrel around the tree to match up his cuts. After making his Humboldt and sliding out the pie, he started his back cut, leaving two inches of holding wood on the side of the trunk facing him. After thumbing off the saw, he hung it from the rear handle. The tip of the 32-inch bar hung about a ten inches below his feet. He squirreled around the backside of the tree to match up his back cut. And that’s when the bar’s sprocket tip contacted the 12kvs. Two weeks later Geena had set up a table at the Marin City Flea Market. The table was full of chain saws and climbing and rigging gear.


Eight of Guido’s former ground men carried his coffin. He was buried in his climbing gear and Wescos, his 038 at his side. His gravestone read: “There’s old tree men and there’s bold tree men, but there’s no old, bold tree men. Guido Zambroni: January 28, 1947-February 2, 1982.”

We had the wake at--where else--The Taco House. I entered a little late, my Wesco’s tapping on the hardwood floor. I walked straight to the jukebox and plunked in two quarters. Rick James started blaring out the lyrics to “Super Freak” as I took a stool at the end of the bar…

 

[tree md]

 

[asthesun]

painful. i watched a lightning bolt shoot out of a guys boot once when something similar happened. not the way i wanna go.

 

[pdqdl]

Well that turned out different than I expected.

I figured that hanging out with jealous women bearing chainsaws would be the end of him.

 

[oldirty]

to guido. one hardcore 4 bridge motherf#cker. rest in piece man.


thanks for the story mapleman. great read.

 

[Mikecutstrees]

Crappy way to go. Thanks for sharing the story though. Good reminder to pay attention to the little stuff. One of my mentors and heroes died this year tragically and it sucks. Climb safe everyone..... Mike

 

[Mapleman]

That ending happened to someone exactly as I wrote it, including his old lady selling his gear two weeks later at the flea market. Geena may have been jealous, but she was not homicidal. And Short Skirt Sue, she's still breaking young tree climbers into the ranks as far as I know...

 

[Mapleman]

to guido. one hardcore 4 bridge motherf#cker. rest in piece man.


thanks for the story mapleman. great read.

Dude,

I just landed some contract work over in southern NH. Maybe we can get together for some brewskees and tall tales. I got some stuff that's probably too over the edge for this forum.

 

[Mapleman]

Crappy way to go. Thanks for sharing the story though. Good reminder to pay attention to the little stuff. One of my mentors and heroes died this year tragically and it sucks. Climb safe everyone..... Mike

Yeah Mike,

Although there was a bit of horseplay involved in the story, I knew the end from the start. And I thought it was a good way to say just what you said: No matter how good you are, this is too dangerous of an occupation to let your focus drift. I like what someone else said--I think it was TreeMD: "Today I'm not going to die." And conversely, today is a good day to live.

 

[tree md]

Yeah Mike,

Although there was a bit of horseplay involved in the story, I knew the end from the start. And I thought it was a good way to say just what you said: No matter how good you are, this is too dangerous of an occupation to let your focus drift. I like what someone else said--I think it was TreeMD: "Today I'm not going to die." And conversely, today is a good day to live.

I think TreeMDS said that. Funny tho, the first guy I ever worked for, the one who sent me up my first tree, would always say "what a good day to die" before going up. I asked him about it and it is a Native American expression. It is what they would say before going into battle. Didn't mean that they had a death wish but if they did go they were squared up with their maker and was not afraid to go.