Wood Chips
By Ryan Gossen
Sometimes in spring, the sound of a chainsaw triggers territorial instincts in me and I poke my head out the door like a prairie dog. I walk over and check the work. I don’t say anything about missing protective gear or bad cuts, but if they're not painting wounds on live oaks, I'll have one of those conversations where it's a middle-aged, barefoot dude in shorts complaining to a man covered in sawdust and sweat. I feel like a Karen, but I’m not going to lace up my logging boots to have this conversation. Today I want something else from them, something they would love to give me. I want their wood chips.
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It's hard to overstate how inconveniently shaped a branch is. It’s pretty much just good for waving around in the air. It’s heavier than you think on the ground. It wants to rotate, balancing awkwardly on two laterals and the base to create a gravity puzzle for someone with a chainsaw. Start with the laterals on top. Push through to cut them at the union because if you just wave the saw around, you’ll get slapped in the face. The way to avoid getting your saw pinched is to cut the side under compression first and the side under tension last. If the branch is on the tree, the top side will be last. If it’s on the ground, the bottom side is.
The pieces are dragged and fed to a monster that deconstructs the branch and sprays the inside of a steel box with wood chips. A wood chipper makes the loudest sustained sound imaginable. When it starts up, the language barrier that exists among the crew is gone. Everyone wears ear protection and uses visual signals for communication, except for that one guy who can whistle louder than the wood chipper. Nobody wants misunderstandings when the chipper is running. The ground crew worries about catching their sleeves or gloves, but it's the climber who truly lives in fear of the chipper.
Here is what they fear: the climber sends down a branch, which snags the climbing rope. A ground dude feeds the branch to the chipper, and the rope goes in and gets caught on the feeder drum. The feeder drum moves slowly but has a lot of power. It is steady and irresistible. Things get interesting when the rope meets the blades, which spin so fast that the climber is ripped out of the tree and skips across the ground like a flat stone on smooth water. If it’s a big chipper, it won’t be stopped by bones, just a temporary lowering in the pitch of the droning roar.
“Rope-in-the-chipper” is a well-documented accident. You can find OSHA analyses and recorded simulations using a rescue dummy. The rope goes in and the dummy is dragged slowly for a few yards, limp and heavy. One can imagine an injured climber scrambling frantically to remove their harness or cut the rope before the blades catch. What comes out the other side is mostly a lot of white stuffing, but I wonder what was done with the remains of men who went into chippers. Like branches, they are on an accelerated path, bypassing a natural decline and decomposition to arrive at an instantaneous return to the greater biological system, if the living will allow the remains to stay in the pile.
The alternative would be to sift through every blood-soaked chip, and who's going to do that? They will probably get a few pieces, for official purposes. The rest? Well, it’s already in the truck. Life goes on.
This is one reason the relationship between climbers and ground crew can be tense. The world looks different to someone in a tree. All that has to happen for them to die are natural, understandable things: tying the wrong knot, misjudging the way something will swing, nicking the climbing line with the saw… The climber’s rope being fed into the chipper is one of these plausible mistakes, only it’s made by someone else, someone whose body is safely on the ground, mind focused on the effort of their own labor.
Good, experienced ground crews are precious and unappreciated, hard-to-find unicorns possessing a special combination of physical stamina, financial desperation, and reliability. The only way to get this at scale without chattel slavery is to facilitate illegal migration. Legalize them, and they become too expensive and have rights. Stop them at the border and the work won’t get done at all. Provide a permeable but risky border and you get the best of both worlds. If someone doesn't like the world that results, blame the migrants themselves. (I know, it sounds too ironic to work.)
After chipping, the crew needs to get to the next job, but they’re pulling a full load of chips. Every chipper crew has this problem: you need a place to dump, but it’s never where the jobs are, in the fancy neighborhoods.
The delicate, hesitant gardening done by these homeowners has no use for fourteen yards of chips. They want a 20-pound bag of finely shredded mulch from Home Depot to cover their tulip bulbs. No trace of that mulch will be visible in a year, which is fine. It’s better than chemical fertilizers. But what the trees want is a healthy litter zone. That’s the layer of ground that isn’t packed down dirt but sticks and leaves, settling into decomposed material over the mineral substrate. Your trees don’t like clear boundaries, they like gas exchange.
Most things I did as an arborist removed biomass. Tons at a time. These heavy, waving sculptures in the air held carbon while the soil below was depleted year after year. Homeowners, in their one act of land management, like to remove leaves and sticks from their lawns. Even the lawn trimmings must go into giant paper bags from Home Depot. The more meticulous homeowners will include the partially decomposed leaves, already becoming soil. The top of the bag is rolled down in such a way that it does not come open if it happens to topple over. Do not, DO NOT, overfill the bag or you will not be able to close it correctly. Are you getting this? Leaves could spill everywhere.
Homeowners with high self-esteem can be identified by the ranks of identical paper bags, formed parallel to the curb with the precision of a platoon of Sarduakar. Look at that guy’s leaf bags, that’s a family of achievers.
Soil compaction is the first thing to stress the trees. Mature trees can store a lot of nutrients, but when topsoil is removed, it’s replaced by sod and everything, anything that sod requires. Deep, drought-tolerant taproots are abandoned in favor of shallow feeder roots that capture lawn watering. Now the tree must switch to the McDonald’s diet fed to the lawn. Phosphorus supplements, straight nitrogen, weed killer… There is a dead spot on the lawn where the neighbor’s dog graced it. Call in a lawn maintenance professional in an octopus truck with hoses coming out of both sides. Lawn fertilizer hits the tree like methamphetamine. Sudden, vigorous growth shades the lawn, but the leaves are a little yellow this year, a little more next year. Yellow is a pretty color, who doesn't like yellow? But one summer, the city bans lawn watering because there is a drought, and a third of the tree is suddenly dead.
I am summoned to remove the dead parts. With the deadwood removed, the tree looks healthy to the untrained eye. All the branches have leaves. In my mind’s eye, I can see a bigger, well-balanced tree with ghost limbs, but what stands there now are just a couple of laterals off the main stem, pulling it hard to the right. Trees can rebalance. If what caused the decline is corrected, this tree could add anchor root material and begin to grow into the empty space. But what is wrong with this tree is its location, so I expect more decay.
The homeowner is not pleased with my diagnosis. They know how conscientious they have been by keeping up with the leaves, by hiring a certified arborist. Not everyone on this block cares so much. I give options. Restore the yard or plan to replace the tree. I rattle off the names of drought tolerant, native species appropriate for the area. I talk about when and how to plant a tree. A tree that is planted here will be better adapted to these conditions, even the same species. You just have to wait 200 years.
We leave the job site with a full truck and drive around looking for a place to dump. It’s tense; another job is waiting and climbers may already be in the canopy dropping limbs that must be moved. Every trimmer knows a place, an abandoned lot, the edge of a side road. It’s illegal, but the dump is an hour away and they charge by weight and the business model does not support that. Just find a place, hope no one’s looking, back it up, and drop the gate. Wherever they are, the chips will compost if left in a pile. You can see steam rising from them if it’s cold. A network of fungus will permeate them in a week or so, covering the inner chips in white mycelium that will produce everything that is missing from the suburban topsoil.
Driving to the next job a couple of tons lighter is an incredible relief. Maybe we’ll get this last one done while it's still light.
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Today, I keep a compost bin that needs leaves added from time to time. Since I don’t rake my leaves, I periodically walk down the street in the early morning, abduct a Home Depot bag, and put it into my compost with coffee grounds and leftovers, but it hasn't been enough to reverse the decline of the big cedar elm, which began when our house converted from a septic system to city wastewater. The cedar elm has grown from that septic field since the house was built in 1960, and now I’m asking it to subsist exclusively on moisture from the sky and nutrients from the natural biology of the soil. If the soil were healthier, the tree might make it through this transition, but it needs a litter layer. It needs wood chips.
Standing in the street, I get the attention of one of the ground crew, who has to shut down his saw to come over and talk to me. I ask him if he wants to dump chips in my yard. He has to wait to talk to the crew chief who is up in a tree, but that afternoon I get a visit. They back the truck down my driveway and leave a pile the size of a couple cars.
I enjoy owning a big pile of woodchips. I walk around it in the morning with a cup of coffee as it cooks. First, it smells like firewood, then it smells like menthol. It becomes more and more granular, the farther down I shovel. Then it is gone, distributed across the yard and melted into the ground. I miss it and I will probably chat up the next crew I see on my street.
When I stopped trimming trees for a living, I began to compulsively manicure the trees in my yard. A small dead branch, illuminated when the others leafed out, was a reason to pull out all my gear and ascend into the canopy. There in my saddle, I sat and just felt the rope pull on the high branch, bobbing in the breeze like a buoy on an ocean of wood and air, safe from the synthetic fear of my desk job.
I leave most dead branches alone now. It’s habitat for insects which are food for birds, and I like the jagged silhouette of a branch torn off in a storm. My trees never needed my help, they don’t know that they are my trees. I still climb them, but I don’t run my saw. It’s been decades since I was a professional arborist and now I am more concerned with my own decay. Sometimes I even think about how to plan for my death.
I don’t like the options I see for what’s to be done with my body. They are all solutions to the problem of garbage, like Home Depot bags in rows by the curb. I’d prefer to be left standing, adorned with all my deadwood, in deep litter, inhabited by raccoons and bees.
But if that's not an option, I’d accept being sprayed into a pile of woodchips.
