Jason:

I think I would probably just use ordinary clothes line. If for whatever reason that wasn't practical, my next suggestion would be stainless steel aircraft cable. That cable is very strong and you could do with a much smaller diameter cable than clothes line. I would be concerned that 100 feet of clothes line would be hard to pull to reel the clothes in and out.

To address the concerns about the swaying of the trees, clothes lines don't need to be taut. If you allow quite a little slack in the line, the trees will still sway. I'm thinking that 100 feet might be quite a heavy clothes line, so you'd have to anchor it to something pretty solid at the house end.



Oren: During the winter, Canadians use electric and gas dryers to dry their clothes. But, in the summer, clothes lines in the country and in small towns and villages are not an uncommon sight, as are "rain barrels" and "burning barrels". When I was a kid, my mother dried our clothes on a clothes line. We had a huge rain barrel behind our house where the rain gutters emptied into, and my mother used that water to irrigate the vegetable garden we had in our back yard. And, there was a garbage collection service paid for by property taxes, but people were expected to burn what could be burned so as to reduce the amount of stuff that needed to be hauled to the landfill site. So, we had a 45 gallon drum in the back lane behind our house and we burned newspapers and paper grocery bags in it. That wouldn't be allowed now because of flying embers landing on someone's roof and starting a fire.