One of the last items I purchased in the US was a chainsaw. Afterall, how can you be a farmer without one right? While not completely unheard of here, they arent common here either and for good reason. For the price of a cheap gas powered saw, I can hire a man to work for two weeks and one man can cut a lot of wood with a machette in two weeks.
I have two trees selected for removal today. For my ecologically minded friends, both trees were already dead, and any birds living in them were served eviction notices 3 weeks in advance.
The first was a huge old royal palm maybe 40 feet high. The palm had been dead a long time and was filled with woodpecker holes and the stump had begun to decay. I have used a chainsaw before, watched my grandfather and uncles drop trees, but I had never actually done it myself. To make things more interesting, the trunk of a palm tree is very different from any kind of tree I grew up with. You dont get anything done by waffleing around so I started up my 18" saw and followed the instructions I read in a book.Apparently, the eviction notices worked because there were no active nests in the tree, but plenty of watermelon sized holes from former residents. I sent the Haitians down to gather up any availiable wood for use on the grass chopper shack and we got a pretty good pile.
Tree number two was actually 3 trees with 2 large, useful, dead trunks. The trunks came down nice and easy, and I ended up with 3 eight foot sections of nice 18 inch hardwood logs. I set the logs up and started cutting them the long way to make posts for the grass chopper shack, when I looked up to see I had an audience. I dont know if these guys have ever seen a chainsaw before or what but I had 6 guys all standing there watching. So I did the only thing I could do, I gave them all a job to do and soon we had 8 nice posts all piled neatly at the construction site.
Felcita took the day to drive to Nagua to buy supplies and parts for the used diesel grass chopper moter. Around 5 I look up from my work on the milk barn roof to see the truck pulling into the drive with a HUGE load of sacks on it. I asked her to buy us 20 100lb sacks of cow food and 4 sacks of calf food for a total of 2400 lb of sacks on our poor Mitsubishi L200 pickup truck. I headed off with the intention of saying something I would most likely be apologizing for later but found her almost in tears before I got there.
The story goes something like this: She went into the feed store and ordered the sacks to be delivered. Following that, she does some more shopping for other critical supplies, like parasite medicine, a saddle and bridle for Mr. Ed, and some milk buckets. She pays her bill and steps out side to see that her truck is already loaded with over 1 ton of materials. Having heard my lecture once before on the evils of overloading trucks, she was very upset but the owner refused to unload the truck. At this point she had no choice but to drive the truck home with 3 or 4 times over the rated capacity.
As Julio and I unloaded all 2400 lbs and stacked them in the shop two things occured to me. First, this is only one weeks worth of food. Second, I am real thankful for cheap labor here because I dont want to move 2400 lb a week myself. While it is difficult to know how much damage there was to the truck, the rear leaf springs were more than flat and the hub cover on the aluminum die cast wheels popped off. Felicita said she smelled a burning smell on the way home but I dont even want to know about that.