Curtis said, loud enough for the church parking lot, Frank, you still losing sleep over my tree. So I said, not much longer, and I told him the arborists report was sitting with the city forester, and she had scheduled her own inspection of that oak for Wednesday morning.
Because I had shut up and gotten smart. I paid a certified arborist out of my own pocket, and he put it in writing: the limb is dead, the trunk has rot, and it is a hazard to the adjoining property. And I took a photo of that limb after every storm since April, nineteen of them, and you can watch the crack get wider.
For a long while the only thing I had lacked was proof from someone the city has to listen to, and the moment a certified arborist put the hazard in writing and nineteen dated photos showed the crack spreading, the man trying to get a free view by cutting down a heritage tree became a documented safety case the forester had to inspect.
He had the whole Tuesday coffee crowd ribbing me, how is the lumberjack, ha ha. But a certified arborists report is not a joke, and a city forester does not read the Hardees crowd.
I did not yell and I did not accuse him. I said, the arborist report is with the city forester, she inspects Wednesday, and here are nineteen photos of that dead limb growing its crack over your grandkids-height sandbox — my grandkids sandbox. You can call me the lumberjack, but the city is going to judge that tree now.
The report was the report. There is no not-going-anywhere-ing your way out of a rotted trunk and a dead limb an arborist has already condemned in writing.
The city did what my one offer to split the cost never could. The forester found the oak a hazard to the adjoining property and ordered Curtis to take it down or make it safe, which on a tree that far gone meant taking it down.
The oak came down the following month. And here is the part that surprised me: once it was a city order and not me asking, Curtis was almost relieved; I think he had been dreading that limb over the sandbox as much as I had, he just could not be the one to blink.
My grandkids play in that sandbox now and I do not stand at the window praying through every storm. A year of losing sleep ended not with a fight in the parking lot, but with one arborists report and nineteen dated photos, and it turned out the man after a free view was just a grandfather who did not want a canoe-sized limb landing where the children play.