Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 9, 1991 TAG: 9104090170
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: BLAND LENGTH: Medium
Soren Eriksson is trying to knock down a 70-foot-tall white oak tree onto the stump. Tate is sitting on the stump. It could be a dangerous place to sit, because Eriksson, a Swede now living in South Carolina, is a pretty good logger.
He came to Bland County on Monday at the invitation of Southwest Virginia Community College and the state Department of Forestry, to teach some safety and some efficiency to the lumberjacks who regularly toil in Virginia's forests.
Eriksson, 53, teaches the science and the art, the very physics, of cutting down trees. He wields a chain saw like most people handle a butter knife. He cut himself once. In 1958.
Now Eriksson has driven a stake into the ground and said he is going to pound it by directing the death plunge of the oak. Jimmy Tate doesn't believe him, and that is why he is sitting on a stump right next to the target. Few of the other 40 loggers believe it either, but they're standing back, just in case Eriksson pulls off the impossible.
Indeed, the odds are formidable. For starters, the oak is downhill from the stake. Its curling trunk is leaning, too, heavily downhill, away from Tate. Nature wants to embrace the tree downhill. Eriksson wants it to go uphill.
"Never," says one man, and he unleashes a stream of tobacco juice onto the forest floor. "He'll never do it."
Eriksson, an amicable man who obviously relishes the challenges, flips down the visor on his hard hat. He puts on his ear muffs. He fires up his chain saw.
He cuts a notch from the uphill base of the tree, then starts to cut a circular slit around the entire diameter of the oak.
It does not budge.
He turns off the chain saw and lays it down, grabs a wedge and drives it into the slit, whacking it with the blunt end of an ax.
"I think I can . . . " says Eriksson.
"LOSE! I think you can lose. There's no way!" shouts a doubting logger.
Eriksson pauses. He lifts his hard hat and melodramatically wipes his brow. He is part teacher, part logger, part comic, part actor. All day long he has entertained the men with nothing else but a sermon on safety and a good view of Big Walker Mountain.
Now a stiff wind is whipping up and plump raindrops are driving hard into the mountainside. No one seems to notice.
"You're gonna' need a great big wind," taunts Jimmy Tate from the stump. "A grrrrrreat big wind."
And the men roar with laughter.
Eriksson gets back to work, pounding the wedges with his ax. He is hitting them with mighty blows, trying to convince a century-old tree to defy gravity.
"C'mon," grunts Eriksson. Whack. "C'mon." Whack.
There is no money riding on his effort. Just his word.
As the wood fibers crackle inside the tree and as the slit in the trunk widens, the tree leans ever so much uphill, toward Jimmy Tate's precarious seat. The crowd has new doubts.
Maybe he can do it. Maybe Soren Eriksson can chop down a tree that for decades has been leaning down the hill and make it fall uphill.
"He ain't got enough wedges to do it," says one doubter.
"He's doing it!" shouts another.
"I still feel safer up here than I do down there," says Tate, sitting on the stump at ground zero, calmly chewing tobacco.
More laughter.
Eriksson, a craftsman, scurries around the trunk, examining it, plotting his next move.
"If he had more wedges, he'd do it. Jimmy'd be sorry," whispers one bearded man to another.
Whack.
The tree trunk crackles. The tree starts to move, a sight worthy of vertigo, its branches sweeping against passing clouds, uncertain which way to turn.
Tate doesn't budge.
The giant oak tree finally leans too far and gains momentum, crashing to the ground like thunder with cracking branches.
It has fallen across the hill slope, about 10 yards from the stake.
"Aaaacccchhhh," says Eriksson, disgusted.
Jimmy Tate hasn't budged. He is safe.
The men laugh a hearty laugh and Eriksson is nonplussed.
"I haven't worked so hard in a year," he laughs, huffing and puffing from the ax whacking. "But a bigger hammer and bigger wedges and I could have done it. It would have gone."
No one, not even Jimmy Tate, doubts it is the truth.
by CNB