Downed pine tree. By Glynn Wilson
Tales From the MoJo Road –
By Glynn Wilson –
COULTERVILLE, Calif. – Before you dismiss what I’m about to say due to the headline on Facebook, and before I get off into the full story of what happened to me, let me just show you up front an excerpt from one scientific-health journal article.
What are examples of the health issues associated with wood?
“Irritation, coughing or sneezing … Exposure to excessive amounts of wood dust (including from cuttings, rosin and needles) may irritate the eyes, nose and throat. Workers may also experience shortness of breath, dryness and sore throat, conjunctivitis (inflammation of the mucous membranes of the eye), and rhinitis (runny nose)….”
This is from an article published by the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety. It continues.
“Respiratory system effects include decreased lung capacity, and allergic reactions in the lungs such as hypersensitivity pneumonitis (inflammation of the walls of the air sacs and small airways), and occupational asthma. Hypersensitivity pneumonitis (pneumonia) may develop within hours or days following exposure and is often confused with cold or flu symptoms because it begins with headaches, chills, sweating, nausea, breathlessness, etc. Tightness of the chest and breathlessness can be severe, and the condition can worsen with continued exposure. Some hypersensitivity pneumonitis conditions may be caused by moulds that grow on the wood (and not by the wood itself). Occupational asthma may also develop.”
That should be enough to establish initial science-health credibility. There’s more. But this is the story of how it went down. I publish it here today as a cautionary tale, and warn you not to ignore guidelines on using the proper safety equipment when working with wood.
Groundhog Day
The day after the Grammys show in LA on Sunday, I was reading the New York Times Monday morning and sharing a few headlines, including the one about the Trump administration publishing dozens of nude photos in the Epstein Files, including victims; Trump calling for Republicans to ‘Nationalize’ the midterm elections because it’s looking more and more like they will never win without cheating; the insane criminal tech billionaire Elon Musk merging his A.I. startup company X-AI-Grok with SpaceX, to save it from inevitable financial failure; and an editorial cartoon about Groundhog Day.
That done, I walked up the street to hang out with one my new friends here, Tim Chang, a cool Chinese guy whose family for several generations worked as union pressmen for corrupt newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst in San Francisco. With the coming threats from web publishing and then social media, Hearst’s heirs finally broke the unions and fired all the well paid workers and replaced them with scabs, which resulted in a series of violent strikes. I don’t know his entire story yet, but I’ve heard enough to know there’s a good one there.
Meanwhile, in recent years he’s mostly retired to Coulterville on property I assume he inherited from a family member (I will get around to asking). We smoked pipes and did some drumming on a conga and an African drum out back by the creek, where they once panned and dredged out a bunch of gold back in the day, a tributary of the Merced River that flows through Yosemite.
Then he remembered he had a “tree job” to look at in Don Pedro, a little place west of here by a popular sporting lake with the closest Dollar General store to this town. The closest grocery store is 10 miles northeast in Groveland, and it’s not cheap.
I asked to ride along, for the adventure and learning experience, and I needed a few items at the dollar store. He said he was going there anyway for Epson Salt for his bathtub. A man after my own heart. Who doesn’t love an Epson Salt bath?
We took the ride over, talking along the way about his high school days in San Francisco, how the Chinese kids were discriminated against by the other kids, and how things turned violent during the newspaper strikes. We pulled up to a modest home with a full but not giant pine tree encroaching over a work shed and garage where it was also making a mess on the driveway. The owner was a nice fellow, a semi-retired electrician living alone. He just wanted it gone, and had plans to use some of it for an outdoor bar.
A California pine tree of some variety. By Glynn Wilson
My friend took a look and quoted him a price, and said he would come back the next morning with his equipment to do the job. All agreed, so we went by the dollar store and back to town. He asked if I wanted to ride along the next day. I said “sure, why not.”
So late in the morning we headed over again. He’s an experienced tree cutter as a retirement profession, and has chain saws, ropes, pulleys, gloves and a pickup truck, the equipment needed to do the jobs. Sometimes he still works back in the city with his sons as well.
He hooked up a rope to the tree, a pulley to another rope to another tree, and one end of that rope to a pickup truck tow ball. He got his long chain saw out, gassed it up and checked the oil, and put an edge on the blade. He started it up to get it warmed up, and got the owner in position in the truck on the driveway to pull when signaled. He got down by the tree and began to make the two cuts, but even though I was really just along for the ride, he got me to relay a signal to the driver when he was ready. So I was safely up in the upper driveway and away from the tree, where I could see the cutter and the driver.
He made the cuts, gave the signal, and the truck finished pulling the tree right down in the desgtinated spot on the lower driveway. The entire operation was done and over in just a few minutes. Or so I thought.
The next thing I noticed was that our truck was on the wrong side of the driveway. We were only supposed to take the tree down. The guy had his own chain saw and said he would do the cleanup, cutting the rest of the tree up and moving it. But of course my friend offered to help. No problem. What was I going to do, stand there and do nothing?
Tim had gloves on, but wore no ear, eye or head protection. It was a fairly small tree and a simple cut and take down that didn’t take long. But the clean up was going to turn into a bigger job.
I didn’t see a spare set of gloves in the truck, or other protective gear, and I should have known better. I’ve handled my share of tree work back in the South, and did a stint working with a Hazard Tree Program for the National Park Service in Maryland, splitting firewood from downed trees for a campground near Camp David. I always wore gloves, ear muffs, safety glasses and head gear, long pants, long sleeves and boots, even padded clothes sometimes when called for.
But I figured I would just help them drag the cut limbs off the driveway. I knew it would be a mess, because, well PINE!
I asked what kind of pine it was, but no one seemed to really know. Maybe a Bull Pine, Tim said, which I had never heard of being from the South. There we had mainly four varieties of yellow pine: loblolly, shortleaf, longleaf and slash. California is known for Sugar Pine, Ponderosa, Western Yellow Pine and Blackjack Pine.
Bull pine is in the Ponderosa family, if that’s what we cut that day. Still not sure.
Ponderosa and yellow pine are known for containing Isocupressic acid, which can be toxic to horses and cattle through exposure or ingestion. Especially dangerous to fetuses, exposure has been known to cause premature birth of calves and miscarriages.
Anyway, I started pulling cut limbs off the driveway, and it did turn into a mess. I was exposed to the needles, the bark, the sawdust, and thick, sticky pine rosin, which covered my hands and jeans and shirt sleeves, and I could feel it in my eyes. After we got the driveway clear, I washed my hands and scraped off most of the needles stuck to my hiking boots by the rosin, and we drove back to Coulterville.
I took a shower of sorts and changed clothes, cranked up the computer and prepared some grub. By the time I went to bed, however, I felt that creeping feeling of a coming sore throat and my eyes began to feel sticky, and I felt a little closeness in the sinuses. But I just took a Benadryl and went to bed. By the morning on Wednesday, the sore throat was real, and the cough began.
I knew Tim had been sick for a few days, maybe weeks, but he seemed to be mostly over it except for spitting up some phlegm. Others in town had been complaining about a cold or flu going around. I didn’t think much of it. I had the latest vaccines for flu and Covid in September before driving across the country from Maryland. I hadn’t had the flu in 10 years, back in Mobile, Alabama in the winter of 2015. Never caught Covid.
I treated the sore throat with Advil Gell caps, which seemed to hold it at bay. Tried to keep the sinus passages dried up with Benadryl, an antihistamine. Got some drops to suck on for the cough. Got through the days on Wednesday and Thursday OK, as long as I was standing up or sitting up.
But almost no sleep at night. The cough was relentless in any position laying down. By Friday afternoon I was concerned enough to call in an ambulance to get checked out. My van is still broke down here and it’s 30 miles to an Emergency Room in Sonora.
The EMT and Paramedic checked my vital signs, which were in normal range, with Oxygen levels a little low. They administered a breathing treatment, which seemed to help some, and advised getting through the night on Benadryl and Advil and maybe picking up some Sudafed and Mucinex and NyQuil with acetaminophen and alcohol on Saturday.
If I had picked up the flu from Tim, that might have helped. I even tried a couple of night caps with Larceny whiskey, honey and lemon juice. It was little help.
I began to realize this was not going to be something you could be tough and shoulder on with these symptoms until it played itself out. I did try the stuff on Saturday, but that shit just made me feel even worse and did nothing for the symptoms.
I called and arranged a county bus ride to Sonora for Monday morning. But by Sunday morning, my symptoms were dire. I didn’t think I could make it through another night. It even seemed to be effecting my heart.
I posted about it on Facebook, and over 100 people advised me to call the ambulance back and get my ass to the E.R. That was my plan anyway.
After I got there, they got me comfortable on a gurney in the hall and started checking me out. Tests for Influenza (flu) virus were negative, including the new K-strain out here. A Covid test was negative. A chest X-ray didn’t show much, but a CT chest scan revealed it.
PNEUMONIA!
They got me in a room, stuck in an IV, and began administering antibiotics and steroids. At bedtime they gave me cough medicine and sleep medication. I was still in such bad shape at midnight they hit me with morphine to try to knock me out for some sleep. It finally calmed down enough to close my eyes and drift off some.
Early Monday morning I was still coughing when I woke up. Not out of the woods yet.
My vital signs were looking good, however, back to those levels of a pro tennis player I’m used to, with normal blood pressure and heartbeat and the oxygen level was back to normal.
“You might make it,” they said, the friendly, professional staff I expected to find in California, like Maryland.
I grew up in Birmingham hearing everyone brag on UAB. But I’ve seen bad hospitals in my time in the South, like Decatur in 1985. The politicians let 17 of them close in the state over the past few years, all out of partisan political pride and not wanting to take money from the “fedral gov’mt,” or a black president. Stupid is as stupid does, as Forest Gump said.
We helped get them a decent moderate Democrat in the Senate in 2017 instead of a pedophile ten commandments judge. But when they went and elected a dumbass Auburn football coach in 2020 instead, I said “nevermore.”
That same Democrat is running for governor now, but everyone knows he has no chance in hell. The same Republican football coach who beat him by 20 points in the second senate race even though he had been a successful incumbent is running against him again. We all know who Forest Gump’s low IQ buddies are going to vote for. The state has suffered from a “brain drain” for decades, and no one seems to even care enough to try to do something about it.
They seem to like it dumb. It’s easy to control for the Big Mules, and that includes the Dick-tater-in-chief who got his start in politics in a stadium rally in Mobile thanks to little Jeff Sessions. He’s now in permanent hiding after recusing himself in the Russian meddling impeachment investigation as Trump’s first attorney general.
Here in Sonora, even the hospital food was pretty damn good. I could not find much to complain about. A walk outside would have been nice. They ran it a little like a prison. You could not even leave your floor. But I’m sure they had their reasons, based on history. All health care workers have been exposed to heavy loads of stress everywhere, especially during the Covid pandemic. I’m sure hospitals have experienced crime due to drug use and such.
I did not feel like a threat. But everyone was nice so I tried to nap and catch the Winter Olympics on television some. The Americans were winning in the most boring winter sport ever, curling, which for some reason seemed to dominate prime time.
By Monday night they went light on the cough meds and sleeping meds, too light in my opinion, but I did manage to get a few hours of sleep here and there. By lunchtime Tuesday, after meatloaf, mashed potatoes, carrots and peas, lemon pudding and donut shop coffee with brown sugar and half and half, the administration decided to kick me out with a script for two more days of antibiotics.
I still think I’m going to need more expectorate cough syrup or drops too. But I do believe I’m going to live to write another day.
My Best Advice?
Do not work around wood without all the proper safety equipment. My symptoms came on fast, and were not properly diagnosed in a speedy way, not even by professionals. As always, better safe than sorry.
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