“A thousand details add up to one impression.”

I first read that quote in John McPhee’s book Draft No. 4. He lifted it from the actor Cary Grant. The truth to it deepens for you each time you say it. It is a good mantra, and it’s application for arboriculture is very economical.

Yesterday I was dealing with two scenarios. In one, I was tasked with felling a dead Ash tree along a property boarder, and in the second situation I had the project of cabling a maturing Red Oak. Each situation had its own unique characteristics and qualities. There were, in fact, a thousand details to take into consideration for each objective.

In the case of the Ash tree, there was the issue of space. In the homeowners yard, next to the desired lay of the tree on the right was a newly installed propane tank and a wood shed a bit further down range. On the left side were some valuable trees that represented the potential of collateral damage. But there was, technically, enough room to flop the dead tree in the lay here in the yard, if the hinge wood and the face cut was executed to a T, something that I have not always been up to snuff on. There was the option of gaffing up the trunk and flopping large sections of the tree onto the neighbors’s property, but I could tell right away that the homeowner did not like this idea, he wasn’t close to the neighbor, and calling next door seemed out of the question. There was a perfect anchor in order to build a 3:1 mechanical advantage off of in the tagline. The homeowner had recently felled a half dozen smaller Ash trees in this same area in the yard. I studied the hinges, and they seemed fully functional, that is to say, without punk. There was some good wood high in the crown of the tree to set a tagline onto. What was left? It was the confidence to realize all of these details and let the impressions soak in that felling the tree into the yard on a tagline and some wedges was the safest, and most efficient approach for putting this tree down.

I flaked my rigging ropes back into their bags and moved across the yard to the co-dominant stemmed Red Oak. It was a maturing tree, in the area of 25 inches DBH. The main union was narrow, with some inclusion but no active separation. As I studied the tree’s architecture looking for a site to install the cabling hardware, I noticed that the top of the crown was uncharacteristically brushy. Mature epicormic growth radiating from specific locations at the apex of the crown gave me the inclination that this tree had been topped. I inquired. “Oh yes,” the homeowner said. “That had to be twenty years ago.” Well then, what does this mean for cable placement? I know that one of the byproducts of large internal cuts is decay and cracking. Cavities and vertical cracks are not good for static cable anchors. But these old cuts were long sealed over by an actively growing tree, and where one vertical crack did come to fruition about three feet below the old cuts, callus had recently swallowed it up along its length. I’m observing active growth, and active growth is a sign of vigor. I would compensate on my end, and set my anchors slightly lower than I was originally planning on before I started analyzing the clues sprouting up in front of me. Drilling in twelve inches of wood revealed no hollows at the cable site. In went the cable, and out I went to the periphery of the leader on the house side of the tree to place some reduction cuts to accompany the supplemental support system.

These details flood in like sunlight if we take the time to look for them, even on a cloudy day. They are perhaps the silver lining. They are the gear and cogs that drive our work, that lead us to the final impression of ‘yes I can’ or ‘no I can’t’. This will work or it won’t. Seldom there is any middle ground with an impression. To see these details requires the eye of a scientist and the gaze of the an artist. They put into motion every notion we’ve had in the past about certain scenarios, and these details allow us to recollect the results we have accumulated making similar decisions from similar impressions. So that even after ten thousand details, or a million, still we are left with one impression.