Summer is the testing-time for trees. High-powered storms soften the ground with torrential rain, then follow up with tornadic winds, delivering a one-two punch that can topple even a healthy specimen.

Downed trees are practically a given in the summer. How you and your neighbors handle them is where it gets interesting.

Here’s how it happens down in Baltimore. Let’s say a big storm whips through. A massive limb from your neighbor’s hundred-year-old fir comes down in your backyard, splitting an ornamental tree and crushing a section of fence. After the storm, your safety goggles fog with sweat as you cut up the limb with your wimpy electric chainsaw. You do your best to bind the split trunk of the dogwood, going gently, as befits a tree you planted with your wife ten years before. You haul branches out to the alley. You tack the broken fence boards back in place. You sweep up the needles and swallow your losses.

Where’s your neighbor in all this? Who knows? He’s an absentee landlord, hardly more to you than a business card and an email address.

It’s not worth it to make a big deal of the storm damage. You know this because when it came time to take down a gigantic old pine tree straddling the property line, the matter quickly escalated. In no time, he was invoking plot plans and making not-so-subtle hints about lawyering up.

In Baltimore, you’re on your own.

But here’s how it happened last week on St. Peters Church Road.

A big storm whipped through. The next morning, sitting at the breakfast table, we noticed a tree down across the private road we share with our neighbors Buddie and Linda. It was a massive red oak, half standing, half fallen, as if Paul Bunyan had given it a mighty chop twenty feet above the ground, but got distracted and didn’t finish the job. Anyone using the road had to drive under the hypotenuse of a giant leafy triangle.

We know the property line pretty well. The tree was definitely one of ours.

It was Sunday. We had out-of-town guests coming in an hour. I fired off an email, figuring Buddie and Linda would read it when they got back from church. I wrote that the tree was our responsibility; we just weren’t sure how to take care of it.

About ten minutes later, we heard the familiar rumble of Buddie’s tractor coming down the lane, followed by the roar of his trusty chainsaw.

I hurriedly got dressed for tree work and fetched my puny gas-powered chainsaw from the pole barn.

As I approached, Buddie was trimming the crown of the fallen tree to disentangle it from some thick brush. He’d already attached it to his tractor with a sturdy chain. I greeted him and offered my two cents about how to proceed. He nodded thoughtfully, then went back to what he was doing.

Two minutes later, the dangerous hanging part of the trunk was safely down on the road, and Buddie was calmly and expertly carving it into manageable sections.

That’s when I started up my tiny saw and joined in.

Buddie looked up from his cutting. He didn’t say anything, but I had the distinct feeling that he was concerned for my safety.

When I killed my saw and asked what I could do to be helpful, he gently suggested that I roll the big logs off to the side of the road as he cut them.

That, I did, working in concert with Linda, who pitched in by moving the awkward branches and smaller debris.

Half an hour later, the road was clear, but the twenty-foot-tall trunk was still standing just a few yards away. I proposed that we have a tree company come out and take it down.

Buddie examined it, taking note of the big black carpenter ants that were scurrying to and fro with eggs in their jaws. He reported that the bottom of the tree was hollow, but since the trunk was tilted away, it wasn’t likely to fall in the road if it came down.

“No,” he drawled, “let’s leave it for the critters.”

I asked if it was time to load the big logs. I was sweating profusely. It was extremely hot. Not as hot as the day before, when the thermometer on the porch read a shocking 105 degrees, but still a scorcher.

“That’s okay,” he said, no doubt noticing how wet and purple my face was. “They’re not in the way. We’ll move them when it cools down.”

The road was clear. Our houseguests were soon to arrive. I walked down the lane to our house, thinking about the hundreds of dollars I would have spent in Baltimore to deal with the same downed tree.

Then I thought about how Buddie would blush if I were to thank him publicly in one of my columns — modesty being the Perry County way.

Sorry, neighbor. This is what you get for living next to a writer.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 19 July 2012

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com