Fragments From Floyd

Well, the yard between the house and garden looks like the aftermath of Mt. St. Helens. Three large pines, three medium walnuts, and the large walnut being toppled here lie just where they hit the ground the day before the arctic blast and snow came in last Thursday. Winter has a way of changing one's best laid plans, and sometimes, we just accept that parts of our job list are in temporary cryogenic storage.

I am standing on the hillside up above the garden, looking beyond the walnut into the pasture along Nameless Creek. This image is number 6 of 8. With the camera set on "continuous", the first shot shows sawdust flying and the bar just hitting the hinge, but the trunk was still vertical. As the trunk falls left, Craig shifts away to the right. In the last shot, the trunk is still in the air, left foreground, and Craig is following it with his eyes til it hits the ground.

"That's the only drug I do" he told me. "What a rush!"

I brought him in to see his TreeTrimmer Action Shots. I'll put the eight images on a CD and give it to him when he comes back to finish up. He says he'll have to get one of his kids to make it play: "I don't even know how to turn one of those things on."

It is a nice sequence, very like a freeze-frame movie segment. Sorry I can't post all of them for a click-through.