Dances With Woodchippers
I pull the cord and let the fucker rip. Five horsepower doesn’t seem like much, but it’s enough to make puree out of whatever I put in the chute. It lets out a few chugga chugga chuggas before finally bursting to life in a symphony of gasoline-fried spinning bladeliciousness.
I put in the first branch. It is less than tender in its acceptance of my gift. A high pitched whine accompanies the thunderous staccato roar of the engine. My woodchipper is a magician. It makes branches disappear.
I put in the next branch. I have whet its appetite. This one is pulled in even more eagerly than the first. Watching the poor branch rush into the waiting embrace of the blades, I am reminded of the centurions rushing into the headquarters of the People’s Front of Judea in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian. Except the branch doesn’t emerge with a spoon.
The next branch is actually an entire trunk of what once was a tree. It is grotesque and gnarled. It started a happy green sprig, unfurling its lone leaf from the dirt many years ago. It saw the sun through the leaves of its brethren and stood up tall to reach for it. Somewhere along the way it bumped into another branch and took a wrong turn, trying to find a way to circumnavigate it. Then it hit another branch, turned, then another branch, turned, and before long it had spent all the energy it saved to grow up growing from side to side. It never got to where it wanted to be. It never had a chance. I cut that fucker down, and now I’ve got it in my utility-gloved hand. I’m about to show it what a bitch life really is.
I stick the base in the woodchipper. It tugs hard. As I attempt to move my hand away I realize that my wrist is caught in one of the knotted curls of the pitiful thing. The joke is on me. Nicely played, Mr. Tree.
Another tug and my hand meets the enormous spinning blade and the motor whines. I wince in anticipation of the pain, but for a moment there is none. There is only a lack of sensation. Then another tug. My shoulder is buried in the chute now and the rusted edge is pressing hard into my neck. I feel a sudden hotness on my wrist followed by an intermittent stinging in perfect syncopation with the chugga chuggas. My hand is sprayed in mangled chunks of bone and flesh across my freshly mown grass in front of me. Fresh drops of blood just spritzed on the back of the garage have begun to succumb to gravity, dripping slowly.
Then another tug. The heat and the stinging chuggas creep up my arm to my elbow. The pressure from the chute snaps my neck. My feet are lifted from the ground. Chugga, burn, tug, twist, spray, drip. I can feel my nose pressed against the rusty steel of the inside of the chute, my spine against the back of my head. My dense bone and sinewy tissue is really making the machine work hard now. It shakes violently, almost tipping over at one point in its violent mastication, but it rights itself.
I have heartburn. I feel the acid in my throat. No, wait, that’s something else. First the neck, then the chin, then the nose, then darkness. Now I have a headache. Now I have nothing at all.
Soon it’s over. I am fragmented.
It’s hard to believe that something as silly as a woodchipper could tear us apart.
I don’t feel very well today.