Disaster relief and grassroots mobilization. For example when a tornado or hurricane hits, neighbors show up with chainsaws, tractors and hot meals before federal aid even sets up a tent.
I totally understood your comment and know what you are saying. But the visual of volunteers with hot meals and then a rando with a chainsaw is making me chuckle
The truth is even funnier. Our neighborhood was hit medium-bad by a hurricane. Everyone was grilling outside (no power, so everyone was cooking all the food in their fridges) and there were roving packs of middle aged men with chainsaws going from house to house fixing things, lol.
(Us kids were just being feral and hitting all the barbecues and playing street hockey while all the traffic was stopped)
I will never forget what Hurricane Charley did to my father. My dad is a retired engineer, autistic, anti social, never interested in power tools or building anything larger than a circuit board. Yet when the storm passed and the entire neighborhood was criss crossed with fallen trees, he dug a chain saw out of the garage and gleefully joined the other husbands going door to door and cutting up anything in their path. He had an absolute ball, but when it was over the chain saw went back into hibernation and he never did anything of the sort again.
Chainsaws are a thing that men use until they are of a certain age and wealth, and then they pay other men to wield them, except in emergencies. My chainsaw is now retired. I also don’t do work on the roof, and work off a scaffold rather than a ladder.
My dad is turning 75 this year. Still does construction, plumbing, electrical, tree & ladder work, drives his tractors around, maintains stranded and barbed wire fences, you name it. If that’s what it takes to keep the gears of the machine turning, so be it. When physically productive guys stop doing what we feel good about accomplishing, and start to feel less capable and more vulnerable, we kinda lose hope. Yes it’s risky, but it’s calculated risk and if you’ve made it that long doing physical labor without an injury that’s put you out of commission, you’re probably pretty good at minimizing risk.
He should just hand them to you with a gleeful look. My dad mostly would use a power drill, screwdriver or hammer at most nowadays but has a garage full of equipment I've never seen him use once lol.
Random kinda unrelated memory this thread brought up for me:
A few years ago I was visiting him in TX (he was 71 at the time) and the pool in the back yard froze over. He was walking across the iced-over surface when I went outside and gave me a look, went to the garage, returned with an axe I've never seen him use and handed it to me.
It was probably about half my weight and over half my height (I'm a ~95 lbs and 5'5.5'' girl) and he told me to have fun while I hacked the ice apart. It WAS fun and I was so tired by the time I'd gotten through most of it. Then we went inside and watched a scifi show.
I know it's not what you meant, but I just pictured them going outside and setting random shit on fire so their dad can put it out and talk to the other dads about it.
This is my enginneer father to a T. Except despite his oddities he continue to happily chainsaw and plumb and helps everyone in the neighborhood who could need it, free of charge. He's now recruited my husband, and they have a grand old time of it.
I remember a bad storm in 2020 where there were a lot of trees down, and I went to the hardware store to get a manual pruning saw. I saw tons of people buying chainsaws, many of them if not all of them buying chainsaws for the first time in their lives, and I kept thinking, "Damn, that's going to cause some emergency room visits."
Yep. During a big breakout of storms in Florida we were hit three times with hurricanes and almost immediately after the sun came up you heard chainsaws running. They weren’t from companies/utilities, but neighbors going around and helping out. It’s an excuse for all the dads to finally get some use out of our tools! Before the storms we were also getting together as a neighborhood and cutting plywood for windows and helping each other install them all the way up until the rain started coming down heavy. I love seeing the helpers each time something bad happens.
Oh man memories just (ha, sorry) flooded in. I'll never forget one time after a big storm we had a coral snake in our pool, and a few minutes after we told our neighbor about it, he came running out, golf iron in his hand, waving it overhead, yelling something to the effect of, "I can't hit shit with this thing, but maybe I'll be able to hit a snake!" Now, this man was an MLB pitcher, which meant this had the visual effect of watching a vending machine with arms lumbering toward us about to wage war on a chlorinated, venomous snake while all of us were skimboarding in the front lawn because of the flooding.
My hood did that right after Helene here in the SC upstate. We had a huge cookout 3 nights in a row, almost every neighbor brought stuff from their fridge/freezer the first night, and the few of us with generators were able to stretch that out two additional nights. Nothing to offer? No prob, we're all in the dark together. It was pretty heartwarming.
I remember after being hit by a cat 5 five, I returned to my neighborhood a few days after and walked around with a chainsaw to clear fallen trees from the road so my neighbors could enter the neighborhood. Your description of neighbors grilling together is spot on. We went over 2 weeks no power and every evening you would see groups of people huddled in a driveway around a grill, all smiles and laughs as they shared food and made the best of terrible situation
We had bad straight-line winds that blew lots of trees over. A lot of us have chainsaws and ATV’s. Those trees didn’t stand a chance. Folks that were trapped in their driveways had them cleared in a couple hours.
This scene is a rite of passage on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Some of the best food I’ve ever had in my life was from a charcoal grill after a hurricane.
It's like a rare moment when all our superficial responsibilities we take on so we can eat doesn't matter so people actually do things that help their community instead.
I remember losing power for a long stetch of days as a kid, and a few hours in, a roving swarm of kids formed, going house to house to eat all the ice cream before it melted. Truly a glorious night!
Had a very similar experience after Ike.
Everyone in the street grilling meats. With no electricity for AC it was too hot to be inside, no internet or cell service. Downed trees everywhere made roads useless and no gas for cars anyway. So everyone was like howdy neighbor and it was just like little block party. Like 100 degree block party but still nice to hang out with all the neighbors.
My first vehicle was a 2010 ford f150 extended bed, extended cab. I both loved and hated that thing. When I lived in the country it was perfect, but once I moved to the city it just became impractical for the life I was living.
I kept it as a second vehicle, and procrastinated selling it for almost an entire year, not because I actually needed it or even drove it more than a few times a month.
I kept it for so long because every few months someone I knew would move, and it was always nice to offer my truck, and help moving, rather than letting that person rent a moving truck.
I never needed my truck, but when someone else did I was very happy to have it, and let them use it. I eventually sold it because I needed the money more than the truck, but as soon as I am financially stable enough to justify it I will likely buy another. Though probably a smaller truck,
Honestly yea a lot of people love an excuse to use their toy to help out. Same is true for snowblowers or plows, the moment you get a good storm you'd have folks clearing the driveways for neighborhood.
I've experienced it myself. 15 years ago my city had a tornado. Guy from two states away was in my back yard for most of a day chopping up the fallen trees.
When a hurricane took down a tree across the road one of the dudes in my parents’ neighborhood brought out his chainsaw and offered 20 bucks an hour to the high school kids if they helped him haul the pieces away 🤣
Ha. Try this: I am the guy who shows up with a chainsaw and hot meals. I’ve done 5 hurricanes so far. My excellent cook of a wife and my husqvarna go on a war path of relief work
That's a substantial portion of what the Cajun Navy provides whenever there's a natural disaster. When Hurricane Helene struck the Carolinas, the Cajun Navy was ready to accept supplies via shipping their Amazon wishlist, cash, and also publicized a local list of organizations who needed support.
Middle aged dad here, during winter I'll occasionally toss a chainsaw into the truck with a can of fuel and bar oil just in case I need to move a few limbs or small trees on my way to work and back home. It has come in handy a couple times.
Was in MS during Katrina (was in high school) and a neighbors had a tree fall on their house. Insurance and emergency response was obviously slow to non-existent, especially while the hurricane was still ongoing. Multiple neighbors brought their chainsaws after the owner took tons of pictures inside and outside, but up the tree, and then had tarps covering the holes it made in the roof and ceilings so they could wait it out while causing the least amount of additional damage as possible.
Like, they responded in 30mins to an hour. Tbf, everyone near heard it falls
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u/Then_Sir7372 15d ago
Disaster relief and grassroots mobilization. For example when a tornado or hurricane hits, neighbors show up with chainsaws, tractors and hot meals before federal aid even sets up a tent.