My husband was always more of a logger than a gardener, I stopped appreciating his help around the yard the year he pruned everything with a chainsaw. He turned our clump birch into a forked birch with one swipe of his husqvarna. “Go big or go home,” was his motto. He could clearcut a garden faster than you could say “that’s not a weed.”
I was walking the dog this morning and noticed somebody else’s husband working in a yard. He was using an electric chainsaw, the sort you could probably use to carve the Christmas turkey, to buck up a sizable pine tree. I looked at my dog and we both thought ‘Rookie’ at the very same time.
There is something about the roar of a husqvarna, the smell of oily gas, the teeth rattling vibration, that just screams masculinity. This poor guy tackling a tree with little more than a bread knife was missing the manly mark by a mile and I felt a little sorry for him. I’ve never been one to judge a man by the size of his saw, probably because my man had a sizable saw – he wouldn’t have been caught dead plugging it into an extension cord.
The poor man’s saw buzzed, it didn’t roar, but he wielded it like a warrior nonetheless. He may not have been making short work of the tree but he was being precise with his cuts and obviously had a strategy. He was targeting the smaller branches first, perhaps to condition his saw for the challenge of the trunk. The dog and I didn’t hang around for the show or the showdown, it was pretty much a given that the project wasn’t going to go as planned.
A husqvarna isn’t everyone’s bag or go-to gardening tool, but for a project like the tree this city slicker was taking down it might have come in handy. As for my weekend logger, he might not have been the gentlest of gardeners but he and that husqvarna were always an impressive display of manhood.