WEATHER STATIONS

down a dead chestnut tree. Apart from the fact that I hated having to cut down such a
beautiful old beast, it was money we simply couldn’t spare, but there was no avoiding it.
If the tree fell, it could demolish our neighbour’s garage or crash through the back of our
house.
That job took a full day, with three men, a cherry-picker and a tractor and trailer.
The house was showered in sawdust that floated into the air in gritty clouds as the tree
surgeons started high and worked their way down in a roar of chainsaws, lopping off a
piece at a time and either dropping them or lowering them on ropes. That old chestnut
ended up spread out across our garden in its component parts, as if waiting to be
assembled again.
I watched as much as I could, trying to learn how they did it. I figured, I never
knew when I might need to cut down a tree myself. They wouldn’t take the logs in part
payment and I couldn’t keep them in the garden — they’d take up too much space and
wreck our back lawn. Something else we wouldn’t have money to fix for a few years. I
didn’t have the chainsaw, or the skills, to chop the huge logs into pieces I could burn. So
I kept a few chunks, let a friend of mine take as much as his car could hold, and let the
tree surgeons drive off with a large tractor trailer full of logs from our tree.
That was in 2010, just before we had the worst winter Ireland had seen in
decades, when I ended up burning logs almost every day for about four months. Logs I
had to buy. I was well bruised from kicking myself over that winter.
And then the other tree died. I could appreciate the irony. One of the things I’d
looked forward to about finally owning my own property was planting a few trees with
the kids. Instead, there would be two less trees in the world because of me. We were hit
with several weeks of windy weather and I anchored the brittle mast of dead wood as
best I could with a couple of ropes, worried that it would fall before I had a chance to
control that fall. In the meantime, I started to do a bit of research online, learning how to
cut down a tree. There were a number of helpful demo videos on YouTube — and many,
many more that showed the accidents that could happen when idiots with no expertise
or experience tried some DIY lumberjacking. Smashed roofs, walls, cars, cut and crush
injuries . . . there seemed to be no end to the damage you could do with relatively little
effort.
I also found out that it was impossible to hire a chainsaw in Ireland. Presumably
because of the aforementioned idiots and the amputated limbs that resulted. But I was
still confident. This wasn’t a huge tree and as long as I could get it to fall diagonally
across the garden, it wouldn’t do any damage. I wouldn’t even need a chainsaw. I had a
couple of bow saws I figured would do the job.
I love wood in all its forms. I love walking in forests, I love working with wood with
my hands, I love the colours and textures, the feel of cutting and shaping it. I like to burn
it too — I prefer a wood fire to a peat fire. There may be less heat and it does burn out
faster — depending on how well the wood is seasoned — but it also burns out almost
completely, leaving hardly any ash, compared with the mounds left over when you burn
peat. I hate the powdery grey clouds that ash makes when you have to clear out the
fireplace.
It’s better for the environment too. The managed forests replace trees as they’re
felled. Young trees absorb carbon as they grow and hold onto it, so using wood as fuel
is, theoretically, carbon neutral. As long as we’re replacing them, they’re not adding
any new carbon to the atmosphere. Ireland’s peat bogs, on the other hand, would take
hundreds, if not thousands of years to form again, if it was even possible. And in the
meantime, we’re releasing all the carbon trapped for thousands of years in that peat. The
oil, coal and gas we’ve based most of our civilization upon have taken even longer to
38 WEATHER STATIONS: WRITING CLIMATE CHANGE