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QuickTake:
After working 15 years for a mentor, Akin has taken over the small business, clearing trees that could be a fire hazard. “All I ever wanted to do was tree work,” he says. “I love this job.”
Aaron Akin is 65 feet up a drought-dead Douglas fir, his spurs biting into the bark, his flip line tethering him to the tree trunk. His body is at a 30-degree angle to the tree, giving him room to maneuver. He is small and wiry, 135 pounds without his gear.
The saws, the ropes, the pulleys and lanyards and hitch cords, the harness and rigging slings, the arborist saddle add another 35 pounds. His steel-toed boots weigh 5 pounds. The Kevlar-lined chainsaw pants that can prevent an accident you do not want to imagine, add another 5.
If he feels the weight, it doesn’t show in his movements. He throws the flip line up the tree trunk a foot or two higher, leans back slightly into his harness saddle, lifts a leg, plants the spur, lifts the other leg, climbs higher. He is both cautious and self-assured. He is at home up there, a 15-year veteran of this most dangerous work. He’s had near-misses but no falls, no accidents.
“I say a prayer every time I climb,” he says. “A strong man is a praying man.” He nods, then adds, “and a praying man is a strong man.”
Suspended in the tree this early summer morning, he listens to two things at once: the country ballad that is stuck in his head and the older, quieter voice of muscle memory moving through his body. He climbs higher, cutting limbs as he goes, the small ones with a hand saw, the larger ones with a top-handled chainsaw which he wields single-handedly. He reads the tree like a guide reading the river.
“Clear,” he yells to the guys below, his four-man crew hacking away at a thicket of blackberries and vine maples to make a path to another dead tree on this five-acre residential property just outside Eugene city limits. (“No one actually yells ‘timber,’” he confides later with a laugh.) The guys — two 20-something brothers and a father-son combo — have been working with Akin for years. They look up and move back. The limb falls.
He climbs. The trunk is narrower now, and his weight and his movement cause it to sway. He knows that feeling. He doesn’t fight it. There is a kind of communication between him and the tree. From below, it looks almost like a dance.
“All I ever wanted to do was tree work,” he says. “I love this job.”
This job — the removal of dead or dying trees — is critical for mitigating fire hazard. These trees, in forests, on rural properties, in homeowners’ backyards, are essentially, as Akin puts it, “dry kindling waiting to ignite.”
Small, young trees and lower branches can act as “ladder fuels,” wicks that carry flames upward. What Akin does and what other tree removal services do, tree by tree, climbing, limbing, falling, clearing, is eliminate highly combustible fuel. The job is fighting fire before it happens.
A warm, dry winter, historically low snowpack, and an early-season heat wave left Oregon’s forests dangerously parched. The governor declared a wildfire emergency in mid-June, a month before the state’s wildfire season usually begins.
From his perch in the dying tree, Akin sees the future: the yellowing needles and thinning crowns of the neighboring Doug firs, the white oaks that look healthy but he suspects are not.
“White oaks go slow,” he says. It’s what foresters call “oak decline,” less a single cause than a drawn-out chain reaction: First drought, then fungi, then insects, the tree failing a piece at a time.
He’s coming down now, easing himself earthward. With a quick adjustment at his saddle, he feeds rope through his hitch and leans back into the harness until the rope goes taut. His boots walk down the trunk in short, sliding steps, bark catching under his spurs. He feeds more rope. It catches. He feeds it again. His descent is quick and controlled, methodical and deliberate yet also graceful.
He’s on the ground now, cranking up the big chainsaw, and carefully cutting a wedge-shaped notch on the side of the tree facing the direction he wants it to fall. While Akin was limbing the tree, the crew cleared a 10-foot-wide, 100-foot-long “hallway” for the tree. He cuts the first notch downward at a 45-degree angle, going about one-third of the way through the trunk.
Now he works on the bottom cut, sawing straight across the trunk to meet the slanted top cut. The wood left untouched between the back of the notch and the back of the tree is called the hinge. It keeps the tree attached to the trunk. He moves quickly to the back of the tree to make the final cut, the felling cut.
“Clear,” he yells to the crew.
It takes him less than 30 seconds to cut through to the hinge. He moves away quickly. For a moment, nothing happens as the tree balances on its tipping point. Gravity has not yet exerted enough force to move the tree past the hinge. It is that moment described in physics as the transition from static equilibrium to kinetic motion.
There is a splintering sound as the remaining wood fibers fracture. Then a crack, a pop. At first the tree moves in slow-mo. But then, as its center of gravity moves further from the stump, it begins a rapid descent. “Increasing angular acceleration” is the term in physics. Akin knows physics, if not the vocabulary.
He watches, hands on his hips, as the tree crashes to the ground. It lands precisely in the middle of the drop zone. Akin nods his head imperceptibly.
Tree falling is the most dangerous part of this everything-is-dangerous job. Akin once had a tree fall backward. “You can be careful and cautious,” he says, “but every situation is different.” There are the hidden killers: internal decay that weakens the tree fiber; heavy internal wood density that alters the expected center of gravity; decayed or shallow roots. A gust of wind.
“But the biggest mistake you can make,” he says, “is complacency. You cannot take anything for granted.”
Before he climbs, he lays out all his gear and checks and rechecks every piece.
“I trust my life to this,” he says. “I don’t take shortcuts.”
Before each job, the crew gathers for a tailgate briefing. It’s not just about the job, about who will do what. It is about safety. He runs through a list of all the personal protective gear each crew member needs, from hard cats to steel-toed boots; eye protection, hearing protection, high visibility clothing.
Then he reads aloud from a document he created that lists site hazards (power lines, falling limbs, uneven ground) and equipment hazards (wood chippers, chainsaws, rigging) and precautions to take. He points to the first-aid kit in the truck. He tells them where the nearest hospital is. Each crew member signs at the bottom of the document, acknowledging their acceptance. This is the protocol on every job.
Back by the stump of the tree he has just toppled, Akin, covered in saw dust, takes off his safety glasses, removes his shoulder harness and grabs a water bottle. He calls out to the crew to take a water break. Minutes later, they start in on the downed tree, chain-sawing their way down the trunk, dividing it into 18-inch rounds that the homeowners will split and use in their wood stove this winter.
A tree faller’s work is a mix of skill, craft and science. It requires technical knowledge, precision calculations based on geometry and physics, and the physical strength and stamina to make it happen. It is about reading high-risk environments and about the ability to execute work under challenging and sometimes unpredictable conditions. But it also requires something else: a “feel” for the forest.
Akin learned the skill, craft and science of the job from the master, his one-time boss Kyle King.
King is a local legend who bought his south Willamette property when the street above 46th Avenue was gravel. He planted more than 300 trees on his land. He is a licensed arborist who built and operated his namesake Eugene-based tree service company for almost 35 years.
His son, Kyle Jr. — described in his 2015 obituary as “an artist in the trees” — was set to take over the company. After that devastating death, Kyle Sr. kept working — and working — finally retiring at age 84 this year when he sold the company to his lead climber and loyal employee, Aaron Akin.
When Akin talks about King — who shows up today on the job site, unannounced, just to see how the crew is doing — it sounds like a son talking about a father. In this case, with Akin 35 and King 84, it is more akin to a grandson and grandfather.
In 15 years of working for King, Akin learned all of what he puts in practice now. But he learned more than how to read trees and how to climb and topple them. He learned more than the intricacies of gear and the science of safety. He learned even more than how to run a successful small business. He learned integrity and ethics.
“Kyle was and is a huge inspiration to me,” Akin says, as he carefully packs up his gear, stowing it away in an oversized duffle bag. “It’s his dedication to the company, to the land, and most of all to his family.”
Akin had a tough childhood and a rocky start. Now he is married with a young son, living on a half-acre in Oakridge, where he was born and raised.
“I don’t mean to brag,” he says. And then that’s just what he does, laughing. “But I’ve got the best property on the street.” He names all the trees he’s planted, and all the varieties of flowers his wife tends.
Jim, the oldest of the crew members on the job, the 51-year-old father who works side-by-side with his son, walks over to Akin, his arms extended, his hands cupped around something. It is a small birds’ nest — a neat, sturdy cup made of woven grasses, weeds and sticks.
Inside are two tiny nestlings, their eyes closed, their beaks open. They are probably song sparrows, a native species that like the protection of blackberry brambles. This is where Jim noticed the nest seconds before his brushcutter was to slice into the thick and thorny wall of Himalayans. “I saw it just in time,” he says.
Akin takes a look.
Jim and the homeowner discuss where to place the nest.
“It needs to be close enough to where it was so the mother bird can find it,” Jim says. They decide on an apple tree in the orchard that borders the line of blackberries. Jim’s son and the two other guys stop work and walk over.
And so a day that began with five guys in hard hats and steel-toed boots gathered around a Ford F-150 ends with five guys in hard hats and steel-toed boots peering through the branches of a Fuji apple tree at a perfect little bird’s nest.
