A Samoan in my cherry tree
29th May 2010

This sudden onset of winter has been like running headlong into a brick wall. I feel dazed and disoriented, I struggle to recall life before the skies blackened. But I must reach back to Sunday to fetch this story, to the antediluvian Sunday, the Sunday before the storm.

It was the Sunday of the Samoan in my cherry tree - not that it was intended to be. When I awoke, late, on Sunday morning I had no premonition of the Samoan, no expectation that at day’s end I would have lost not just the cherry tree but the plum tree too and come within a hair’s breadth of losing the great Leylandii.

The Samoans were gathering while I slept and the first hint I had of their presence was when I stepped out for my run. A middle-aged woman was walking along the footpath wearing a high-visibility vest, holding a bundle of leaflets or cards in her hand and taking an interest in the Redmond’s trees across the street. I thought nothing of it until I met another woman around the corner, and then a third. I imagined they were part of a religious campaign – God’s workers in high-viz vestments.

When I returned from my run a business card was stuck in my door. Southern Tree Services it read, with a list of felling, lopping, trimming, pruning and associated arboreal verbs and, at the bottom, a cell phone number and a name – Danny.

There are moments when things fall into place. I stood outside my door with the card in my hand and my eye fell on the ancient and once-beautiful cherry blossom tree that has been dying on the front lawn for years and which we have talked about removing for years: then a swift realisation that I had passed a gang of men with a truck and chainsaws a couple of hundred metres up the street. Of course – Danny!

I sprinted (well, okay, hastened) onto the street. Gone.

I sprang to the phone and dialled the number and there was Danny’s voice at the other end, measured, Samoan.

Five minutes later Danny was at my doorstep. He seemed slightly older than me and not much taller, but there is something about Pacific Island men, a certain gravity, that makes them enormous, and so Danny seemed to me.

I showed him the cherry tree and an old plum tree by the letter box. I asked for a quote to fell the trees and remove the waste. Did I want the firewood? Yes, that would be nice.

Danny thought for a moment. “$1250.00 for felling right to the ground. But today I give it to you for $1150.00.”

I said thank you and I will be interested to get another quote.

“$950.00,” Danny’s lips barely moved. And what about that enormous Leylandii threatening the house? “For that, another $850.00.”

I said I would check with my wife. Sylvia said I was mad. I accepted on the spot, minus the Leylandii, and asked when could he do it?

“Now,” replied Danny.

I don’t believe he put his fingers to his mouth and whistled but I know within three minutes the truck pulled up and nine large Samoan men tumbled onto my front lawn.

With acrobatic skills to rival Cirque de Soleil they dismantled the plum tree and the cherry. They climbed, swung, looped and dropped. They plied their chainsaws with a dentist’s precision. They heaved and carried. They sawed and stacked.

And all the time Danny watched. He watched from beneath the doomed trees. He watched from across the street. He watched on his knees while remediating an unruly chainsaw.

While he watched he bargained the fate of the Leylandii. “$750.00. No? Okay, $650.00.” I pleaded lack of funds. The Leylandii stayed.

Two hours later the two trees were gone, the paths swept, the brushwood removed and the firewood stacked behind the house.

During this the three women in high-viz vests turned up. We gave them cups of tea and Anzac biscuits.

And my instincts were right after all – they were doing God’s work, a fundraiser for their church youth group in Christchurch. Danny is both arborist and pastor, a man of the Word and, as I looked out across my suddenly two-trees-less garden, truly a man of his word.