His body hit the ground with a rustled thump, and he continued to brace against the fall for a few moments more. A dull, complete pain set in; and his breathing stalled. As the bulk of his large frame came to rest on its back, his grimace relaxed and his throat yielded an inaudible sigh – not from a freedom from the pain, but from knowing that the seemingly endless fall was over. He thought how he must have hit a dozen branches on the way down.

His eyes were still closed but he knew his head was turned awkwardly to the left. Air crept back into his lungs as the gasping reflex subsided; his senses slowly drifting back like a tide at night. The mid-morning sun poked through the leaves at his face. The dizziness rang in his head but he could still hear the coughing of the chainsaw near his ear; the sweet oil-gas mixture blended with the scent of the crushed grass under his head filling his nostrils. He felt sawdust and leaf-debris landing on his right cheek – it reminded him of those boyhood December days at his Aunt Aggie’s house when he would lie in the soft, drifted snow letting snowflakes kiss his face and lips. Now, as he tried to taste the late spring air, only fear and stale alcohol bit his tongue.

The basket of his cherry-picker hovered above him buried deep in the heart of the great tree. An employee of the city Parks Department, he freely used the title of ‘tree surgeon’ though without the responsibility of formal training or the credentials – to the public he was just ‘an ignorant tree monkey’. This particular project required removing a center section of the ageless tree for a new power line to be run to the nearby boathouse. The department didn’t want the expense of running the line underground, or around the longer side of the small, man-made lake as the old worn-out lines had been. Despite the pleadings and threats of nearby residents, many trees had been destined to suffer such desecration of the bureaucratically inevitable. He had maneuvered his way around the lower branches to get at the limbs needing his attention.

Still pressing his eyes shut, he tried to remember exactly what had happened: After settling the cherry-picker among the branches near the heart of the tree, he cleared away some small limbs with his loppers. “Now I gots me some fightin’ room,” he always declared as he reached for his chainsaw. He liked quoting from old movies. Indeed a toy that gave men power – and he was no different – he had begun wielding the chainsaw like a two-handed scimitar. Wrist-sized branches were dropping like notes from a conductor’s baton. But today, for every one that fell his victim, another one seemed to get in his way. He remembered his frustration: Where these damn things comin’ from? He yanked the joystick on the basket’s console to re-position himself closer to the real prize: an angled trunk as thick as than his own beer-bloated waist. Adrenaline was surging through his body as he thrust the screaming chainsaw into the brown-gray trunk in front of him. His had begun his assault several feet above the shaft’s intersection with the main trunk. His first insult to the tree was in neglecting to make the required offset undercut. He was warned many times that the proper way to remove any large branch was to start with a wedge-shaped cut on the underside. The next step was to start cutting on the upper side of the branch a little further out than the previous undercut. Once these two steps were completed and the branch was removed, then he was to carefully trim the remaining stump. This time-honored procedure would prevent the tearing of the outer layers when the limb began to drop of its own weight. Ignoring the branches lashing at his face and arms like sail riggings in a gale, he gritted his teeth and leaned the straining machine into the top of the sturdy branch. A cloud of sawdust and gray smoke wrapped him in a shroud, and he squinted his unprotected eyes even tighter. Over the volume of the chainsaw’s motor, he heard a popping sound and he felt the branch quiver through the chainsaw’s handles. He pulled himself and the chainsaw back from the wound as the deafening sound of splintering wood pierced his ears.

He remembered nothing of the fall; only the terror.

A few drops of moisture crawled across his left cheek: sweat? Snot? Blood maybe? He wondered why he couldn’t wipe it away. Afraid to open his eyes, he thought about his arms; he knew his right arm was bent in the wrong places; his left hand was tucked under his back. His legs felt like they had landed far away from him. My God! he panicked. My legs was tore off!… Nah… it’d take a lot more than a fall like that to take off my legs! Like raising a window shade, he opened his eyes slowly. The dark trunk dominated his field of vision. Far above him the basket of the cherry-picker he had controlled only moments ago, still swayed at the end of the yellow arm anchored to the truck. He was thankful he didn’t land on the steel hydraulic outrigger that stabilized the truck whenever the cherry-picker was in use. The orange ‘foot’ of the outrigger was only a few inches front his right ear.

Lying on the soft ground, his eyes glazed in a comfortable sleepiness, his head began growing thick and foggy, not unlike his frequent hangovers. His mind drifted to images of an early retirement – the proceeds from a lawsuit for this accident. Maybe he’d buy a big house in some ocean-side, Mexican village. He heard that ex-patriots from the United States could do well in such places. They can wait on me hand and foot – for just peanuts! he thought. An ice-pick feeling in the back of his neck reminded him where he was; he began to sweat from a vague fear. Through the settling sawdust and winking sunlight he focused on the limb he almost removed, dangling from thick wooden splinters. It still swayed gently in the still, hot morning – a pendulum drifting in contra-point to the “putt-putt” of his chainsaw. Voices in the distance were getting louder and he hoped someone would have a stiff drink with them – his throat was dry.

Despite the severe damage to his spinal cord, he felt a sensation in his lower torso; the first since the fall. I’m gonna be ok, he thought excitedly, until he realized that he was uncontrollably wetting his pants. He began to weep. He looked up again into the great cathedral of a tree above him and a puzzling question was trying to form in his mind. His eyes began to close, and in the subdued light behind his eyelids he felt himself shrinking into a darkness. An unasked question tugged at him as the approaching voices, the fragrances, the pain in his neck, the dusty tears, the dampness in his pants – all began to fade. A brief moment of clarity shook him.

But there was no wind! he puzzled to himself… there was no wind.