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Darwin Awards
2008 Slush Pile

This item was recently submitted by a reader.
Should I include it in the archive?
Vote to tell me what *you* think!

A series of Im-Pined Events

2008 Reader Submission
Pending Acceptance

Accepted into the Archive.
ORIGINAL SUBMISSION:

(I was the MD who took care of the following, and can attest that it is true, you cannot make this up, I cannot give the town or state due to the new Federal Privacy Laws, and risk to my career. By the way, I do have lots more as my 30 year career in Emergency Medicine saw a lot of Darwin candidates).

Three hale and hearty young men, just finished their basic training and had a few days leave prior to moving on to their respective training sites. As luck would have it, one of the private's Grandmother lived in the same town as the basic training base.

The three privates descended upon Grandmother, who refilled them with lots of home cooking. Unfortunately, Grandmother had a swing job to make ends meet, which left the three privates alone late into the night.

Grandmother had three children (one was the father of a private, naturally). As each child was born, Grandmother planted a pine tree in her front yard. In the fifty plus years since the last tree was planted, the pine trees grew considerably. The trees were in a line, and the middle tree now blocked the view from Grandmother's living room window.

To repay Grandmother for her kindness, the privates decided they would cut down the middle pine tree, thus letting in the sun and the view into Grandmother's living room.

At least a case of beer went into the planning. To keep the 50 foot tall pine tree from falling and crushing Grandmother's house, the privates reasoned that they would place a rope at the top of the tree and pull it away from the house as the tree was being cut down.

The middle pine tree was planted slightly closer to the house than one of the end trees. The privates reasoned that they would climb up one of the end trees, and run a rope through that trees upper branches, then throw the rope to a private who had climbed the middle pine tree. On the middle pine tree, the rope would be tied to the top of the tree. By pulling on the rope from the ground, the privates were pulling the top of the middle pine tree away from Grandmother's house. The privates were also out of the direction of the path the falling tree would take.

Now climbing a pine tree is a very sappy event. And, lots of scrapes and gouges occur due to the natural roughness of a pine. But, the hale and hearty privates performed the event and had the middle pine tree lassoed and levered by the rope running through the end pine tree.

Two privates then situated themselves on the ground, each pulling and straining to pull the pine tree away from Grandmothers house. The third private started his 20 hp chainsaw, and started to cut.

You guessed it, the tree actually fell away from Grandmother's house. However, the privates pulling on the rope had wrapped the rope around their waists, not thinking that the falling pine tree weighed several tons, with the rope levered through the top of the end pine tree.

As the middle pine tree fell, both privates were ripped off their feet and smashed through the branches of the end pine tree.

At the height of their acceleration, the privates broke through the last top branches of the tree and were airborne, then were jerked toward the earth when the middle tree hit the ground. The privates entered into Darwin history either on the way up, through the branches of the end pine tree, or the way down when they hit the cold, hard ground. It didn't matter. There was nothing anyone could do, or say. The event spoke for itself.

Submitted on 01/21/2008

Submitted by: Anonymous
Reference: n/a

Copyright © 2008 DarwinAwards.com

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Chip said:
Definitely Keep: Personal Account
Thanks for the extremely visual personal account. Unfortunately as moderators we cannot excise the first couple of lines for you. Darwin can do that if she decides to keep this. I wonder what the last thing that went through the private's minds were (before the tree branches did, that is)...


Bruce said:
Definitely Keep: Personal Account
Thanks for a great story. We do get submissions from the medical community from time to time, and usually they can only be nominated for a PA due to the privacy involved. But they're certainly no less amusing than anything else we get, so we always do appreciate them!


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