A few years ago, a relative from out of state visited me. While driving down Cundy’s Harbor Road, he came upon a line of cars that had stopped because a tree had fallen. Admiringly, he watched as folks, chainsaws in hand, got out of their vehicles and quickly removed the obstacle. After I heard that grand tale, I figuratively bought a 5-gallon pail and added “freeing up traffic with a chainsaw” to my lifetime bucket list.

I do own a chainsaw. I also own all the safety equipment that lumberjacks on YouTube recommend you wear to keep from getting chopped up. “Safety first” means always wearing the helmet with the screen visor and ear protection, the gloves, the steel-toed boots, and the chaps that wrap around my waist and legs and make me waddle like a duck. I’m a safety first kind of guy and I credit this philosophy for keeping me alive and well. But I also credit it for ruining a wonderful opportunity to unclog traffic with my 2.4-horsepower Husqvarna chainsaw, with an 18-inch blade and a maximum power speed of 9,000 revolutions per minute.

It was one of those powerful winter storms — the kind that when you go outside, the only sound you hear is the snow falling on top of itself. I had just stepped out to see how much had accumulated when I heard a loud THUMP, then saw a truck pass by my house and come to a stop. Had my moment arrived?

I raced to the top of the driveway and saw a man getting out of his truck because an enormous tree had fallen across the road. He wasn’t carrying a chainsaw. Then, from the other direction, another car pulled up and came to a stop. This time it was a woman and she, too, was not reaching for ear protection or her chaps. It was all up to me — if I acted fast, because I knew at any moment someone might come along prepared to save the day.

I slipped and slid my way back down the driveway and raced inside and down to the basement to grab my chainsaw and all my gear — except not all of it was there. Where were my chaps? Like I usually do when I can’t find what I need, I yelled to Allison to give me an approximate GPS location of where it could be. She said, “garage, under all the garden pots, garden soil and garden tools — somewhere there.”

Partially equipped to save the day and to safely operate a chainsaw, I rushed back up the stairs and into the garage, found and put on my chaps, and waddled outside and toward the scene of my future glory.

Given that five minutes had already passed since the tree had toppled, I was not surprised when I heard the aggressive whine of a chainsaw engine as I waddled to the top of my driveway. Through the cloud of snowflakes, I could just barely make out the man, a fellow glory seeker, adeptly chainsawing, adeptly saving the day. However, unlike me, he was not wearing chaps, a helmet with a metal visor, ear protection, or gloves!

Resigned to the fact that I would not be removing this particular 5-gallon pail from my list, I set my chainsaw down in the snow and did the same grunt work of removing dead limbs from the road, at a waddling pace, that all the other grunts were doing.

So, what to do going forward? I still think putting “safety first” is important when I use a chainsaw. But I now understand doing so can end up making me come in dead last.

Gregory Greenleaf lives in Harpswell and teaches high school English. He ascribes, prescribes and subscribes to many old-fashioned ideas, but especially Charles Dickens’ observation that “There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.”