man stuff

The other day our landlord Ülo surprised me at the front of the house. I was afraid that something was wrong -- landlords have that effect -- but instead he said that the time was ripe for trimming the apple trees in our backyard of unnecessary branches.

Since last year's bounty was a bit too much for my taste, I agreed with the premise. He would come over on Sunday at noon and we would cut down a few of the dead branches on the apple trees to keep them healthy and productive.

When Ülo came over, I was glad to see him, chainsaw in hand, shaving off the unwanted limbs of our small apple orchard. But then, I noticed, he started getting too into it. He dragged the ladder around the yard, sizing up perfectly healthy, thick tree boughs, angling the ladder just so, and then -- rrrrrrr- sawing them off.

This went on for awhile, and I began to get anxious. What if Ülo couldn't stop himself from paring the trees down to stumps? They weren't our trees, so we had no say in how many limbs he cut. After awhile though, he must have had some other business to attend to, and so he left the trees, each one cut at least once, to adjust to their new shapes.

I would like to think that this was just Ülo, but, unfortunately, it reminded me of my own Dad, who, when it came time to cut down one or two old tree branches, often found himself entranced by the power of his saw, hacking away at nature, until he had to be pulled from the ladder, babbling incoherently about "one more branch" that he needed to cut.

No, I am exaggerating, but I've seen the condition and it has puzzled me. My brother and I don't have a lot of similar hobbies, but we both are sort of minimalist/pragmatists. That is to say that, if we had the saw, we would do only the necessary work and then put the saw away. But some men become infatuated with their saws and chainsaws and can't help but overuse them. They derive some inner pleasure from amputating tree limbs.

This is one facet of manhood that I have never understood -- the desire to use hardware for the sake of using hardware. Give one of these guys some time, a saw, and some beer, and they are capable of reducing a healthy redwood forest to desert. When you ask them why, they'll say something like. "I just had to do it. The forest needed a little bit more sun."