Diary of a Rookie Tree Climber

[Chucky]

May 28, 1991

Sprayed more Dimilin today in the Concord area. We refused to spray one property because the Red Oak to be sprayed was too close to a brook. That was Gil’s decision, not the salesman’s. Given Gil’s brusque and macho manner, it was nice, and a bit surprising to me to see Gil’s sensitivity toward the environment. Leo is the same way, and this is difficult for me to process, as Leo is best caricatured by the Popeye character, “Bluto.” The Oak will have to be sprayed with BT, which is not toxic to certain aquatic Arthropods – Crayfish, for one.

 

[Chucky]

May 29, 1991

Today is my only Uncle’s birthday. My Uncle loves his gigantic “Crack Willows” and his “California Maples.” He talks about them all the time. No amount of arguing with him, or even pictures of the trees with the correct names in dendrology books will convince him the trees are really Eastern Cottonwoods and Boxelders. His mind is made up, and that’s that. He works for General Motors, so now I’ve taken to calling his Chevy a “Ford.” Uncle Doug has a neighbor who also loves Boxelders. This blows my mind. Just what goes on in the mind of a person who becomes attached to a Boxelder?

Sprayed the remains of a ¼ tank of Dimilin (150 gals). Sprayed two more tanks of BT around several summer cottages near a lake. I add a spreader/sticker formulation to each tank of spray material as an adjuvant for both Dimilim and BT. Another adjuvant (Spray-Aid ®) is sometimes added to adjust the pH of acidic water.

43 ½ Hrs this week. Week #2

 

[Chucky]

June 1, 1991

Rain today – which means no spraying. Yesterday, Leo became slightly intoxicated from the fallout of spraying the insecticide/acaricide, Tempo ®. Tempo (Cyfluthrin) is a pyrethroid pesticide, which is the synthetic analogue of the naturally-occurring chemical, pyrethrin, which is extracted from Chrysanthemum flowers. The formulation we are using is an emulsifiable concentrate and carries a WARNING label. Leo was spraying for Deer Ticks, which carry Lyme Disease. He says he’s going to wear a face shield in the future. The funny thing about Leo is he's fairly safety conscience except he refuses to wear a hardhat, and he comes up with all manner of rationalizations for not needing one. Leo is my boss, so I'm not about to argue with him, but I notice he's always on the lookout for the pestiferous safety guy, who always manages to find fault with something we're doing when he sneaks up on us at a job site.

Gil and I took down five large trees and cabled a split-crotch Maple. I took down one 80-foot Maple, and groundied for Gil the others. I don’t have climbers, so I had to rope up. Gil dropped the top out of an 80-foot White Pine and discovered there was a Raven’s nest in it (after the fact). There was much squawking and squealing when the top hit the ground. One chick lived! Gil took it home with him (he keeps birds). I somehow managed to drop the Stihl 020 AV from quite a ways up the tree, and amazingly, no damages. It even continued to cut straight. Can’t figure out how it got loose!

 

[Chucky]

June 2, 1991

Sprayed again for Gypsy Moth. The outbreak was so bad last year that the tops of many conifers in the area are chewed off, and they don’t re-flush as the broad-leaved trees do. Especially susceptible conifers are Spruce and Hemlock. Thankfully, White Pine seems to be resistant to Gypsy Moth. It seems the most important pest of White Pine around here is White Pine Weevil. I notice a good share of them with multiple leaders. I wonder how the course of American history might have been changed had the Weevil been prevalent in the 1600s when White Pines were coveted by the British and French navies for their use as ship masts.

While White Pine Blister Rust was no doubt the most serious disease affecting White Pine for many years, it seems to have subsided, as I don’t see that many trees with the telltale whitish blistering on the trunks. The Hemlock Wooly Adelgid pest hasn’t reached New Hampshire yet, though I hear it’s now in parts of Massachusetts, having spread from a Connecticut infestation.

We are now using a mix of Dimilin and Tempo. Tempo is so highly concentrated that the label calls for just one ounce of the material per 100 gallons of water. Dimilin (a wettable powder) is far less concentrated and much less toxic, so it’s much safer to handle. We don’t (at least we try not to) spray trees and shrubs in flower because Tempo is extremely toxic to bees.

 

[Chucky]

June 3, 1991

Same-O. Had to cut the day short because of too much wind causing drift. We now start the day at 6:00 am. Met a customer who had worked with insecticides in a greenhouse – he lost his voice, and has no sense of taste.

Thinking of that poor guy with no voice, I’ve often wondered if pesticides were a factor in my father’s untimely death in his early fifties, when I was just nine years old. He had an experimental apple orchard in the St. Lawrence Valley of upstate New York, where he and his partner worked on developing apples trees hardy to Zone 3. My mother says she’d frequently see him walking around enshrouded by a thick chemical fog, pumping away with his hand applicator with no safety protection whatever. He got Hodgkins Disease (cancer of the lymph glands) and died within a year.

Yet I’m not opposed to the use of the more toxic chemical pesticides as long as they’re used only as the last resort as part of an Integrated Pesticide Management program, and that the appropriate safety protection is worn by the applicator when applying them. Tempo, when used in concentrations according to the label, is far less toxic to humans than many of the formulations my father was likely to have been using in the 1950s and 60s. I’m sure he commonly used Organochlorines such as Chlordane and Lindane, various Arsenic-based fungicides, and Carbamates such Cabaryl in the more toxic formulations. Today, most of these pesticides have either been banned by the EPA, or re-classified to Restricted Use status.

 

[Chucky]

June 4, 1991

Sprayed Tempo and Dimilin for Gypsy Moth.

 

[Chucky]

June 5, 1991

Ditto.


47 Hrs this week. Week #3

 

[Chucky]

June 8, 1991

Laconia, New Hampshire is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here. Where are all the bars and beer drinkers around here? The population of my hometown was about 700, and the average number of taverns required to service us hovered around four. Laconia has a population 20 times that of my hometown, and as far as I can tell, and I’ve done a lot of scouting, it has one bar – and it sucks! I realize the economy is down and people are retrenching, but this is crazy. And New Hampshire has this odd law whereby if you intend to leave the bar with your drink and go sit at a table, your drink needs to be escorted to the table by a waitress! It’s true – you are not allowed to carry a beer from the bar to a table – in the Live Free or Die State!

So I’ve continued to scout out Laconia and its environs on my rollerblades and I finally found a halfway decent watering hole three miles down the road toward Weirs Beach – a semi-biker bar. The other night it amused me to no end toward last call when everybody was drunk to see these big biker-types having to have their beers escorted around the bar. Anyway, I caught myself a respectable beer buzz, crawled on my mountain bike and wobbled and weaved home, as you especially don’t want to be from New York driving drunk in New Hampshire.

More spraying today. Spraying is where the money is, so most other tree work is put on the back burner until the narrow spraying window closes later this month. Leo remarked that lately he’d noticed an “official” looking green car that was behaving suspiciously. Yes, the dreaded state pesticide safety control officer had marked us. The SPSCO is to the pesticide sprayer, as a game officer is to the hunter/fisherman. You must be properly credentialed, and you must at all times strictly follow all the rules and regulations to a tee, lest you wind up in jail, or at least with a hefty fine. Spraying when the wind is too high, thus causing drift, is akin to exceeding your bag limit – and then you’re busted!

It was enough for Leo that he had to keep a constant lookout for the niggling company safety guy, now he had to be on constant alert for the pesticide cop!

 

[Chucky]

June 9, 1991

The usual Gypsy Moth spray day today – with one exception. It seems some holes in the bark of a small Littleleaf Linden on an important client’s property had attracted the salesman’s attention, thus demanding immediate treatment. So out of the far recesses of the supply barn I dug out an old mothballed backpack sprayer and proceeded to concoct, as per the salesman’s instructions, the textbook remedy to combat the suspected perpetrators of these holes. The remedy, consisting mostly of Dursban ®, I deduced was indeed the correct control measure for boring insects. However, I wasn’t exactly sure how well this particular remedy would work for – sapsuckers.

I went ahead and sprayed the tree anyway.

 

[Chucky]

June 10, 1991

Sprayed today for Gypsy Moth with Dimilin/Tempo. Every spray job is now a combination of Dimilin and Tempo. It is my opinion that this is not good IPM. Dimilin works, there’s no question, but just not as fast and quite as thoroughly as Tempo works. Dimilin alone takes just a few days to work because the larval instars have to undergo another molt to the next instar stage for it to be effective. Our salesman/manager doesn’t seem to have the patience for this – he wants immediate results. The same goes for BT. Meanwhile, the drift from spraying a broad-spectrum pesticide like Tempo inevitably gets into flowers, which are visited by bees. Tempo is highly toxic to bees and the bees bring the toxins back to the hive with them. It seems such a waste that so much time, money, and energy is invested in IPM research, and the knowledge gained from such research is not practiced in the field.

But I don’t completely blame the salesman/manager. As a business, the company must never lose sight of its bottom line – profit. The salesman/manager is merely satisfying the wants of its customers, or the customers will do their business elsewhere. When the customer sees legions of icky, squirming caterpillars defoliating their prized Oak trees, they want action – quick action. They want to see, moments after we sent 60-foot spray columns of death spray into the canopy of their trees, a rain of writhing caterpillars falling to their deaths. Quick knockdown effect, as it’s said in the industry.

I see this attitude on the part of the homeowner as a reflection of Modern Society, wherein everything requires a quick and easy fix. Nobody has the patience for anything that doesn’t satisfy his instant needs. The same impatient attitude is seen among homeowners dealing with weeds. Roundup ® (Glysophate), like Dimilim and BT, is very specific in its mode of action, and has a very low mammalian toxicity level, yet it doesn’t seem to work fast enough for the homeowner. No, the homeowner wants that pernicious dandelion weed dead tomorrow. Enter Diquat, which is orders of magnitude more toxic than Glysophate. A few targeted sprays of Diquat on the offending weed, and Presto! – da weed be gone!

Enough criticizing for the night. I’ve grown weary dragging miles of hose and I’ve temporarily lost sight all the positives of this great and noble profession. I’m barely three weeks in the field and I’m already becoming disgruntled! I really need to get into the trees more soon. Meanwhile, I’ve got to get some sleep, as we’ve got some major hose to drag tomorrow.

 

[MasterBlaster]

Cool. Le'see whar this goes.

Hmmmmm....

 

[Chucky]

June 11, 1991

I suspect many good-sized tree companies get the gist of their business from huge, half-page ads in the Yellow Pages first, and word-of-mouth second. Not our company. We could easily afford over-sized Yellow Pages ads, but it’s not the company’s style. Under the category “Tree Services” in most Yellow Pages in the country our company name is barely more than a line, and not even in bold print. Our business comes mostly from repeat customers and from its reputation for providing high-quality tree work. There is a very low tolerance toward sloppiness here, and our customers are almost invariably wealthy homeowners with fat bank accounts.

But when the economy is down as it is now, I give Chris, the salesman/manager for our company a lot of credit for keeping the work coming. An unctuous, fast-talking tree salesman can BS the typical client to a degree, but most of our clients tend to be well-educated and are apt to see through the transparency of a slick sales pitch. Chris has both a solid background in arboriculture, and the ability to schmooze, so he engages the customer, summoning as much tree and landscape knowledge as he’s able to muster as he tours the property with the customer. Most people are very prideful of their properties and love to showcase their grounds to admiring strangers. And Chris is more than happy to accommodate such people, all the while complimenting the customer on such things as how the customer had so artfully juxtaposed the delicacy of his white-flowering perennials with his rhododendron planting. Meanwhile, Chris is pointing out a number of deficiencies in the trees on the property, whose role, if maintained in an aesthetically pleasing condition, is to provide an important structural backdrop to the property owner’s landscaping masterpiece.

The pump broke on the spray rig and we spent three hours trying to fix it, with no results. So we got a reprieve from spraying today and Gil and I took down two large Hemlocks next to a camp. This “camp,” nestled on the beautiful shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, has a boathouse that is bigger than any house I’ll ever live in. The job was bid at 18 man-hours, and the work order showed a $950 billing, but due to Gil’s extraordinary climbing skills, we managed to complete the job in only five hours – and I only had to file his cheap Poulan trimming saw once. Ordinarily, Chris, the salesman is pretty close on his bids, but I think because the customer let us chip the trees into the woods, thus saving us a dump run, we came out pretty far ahead with this customer.

 

[Chucky]

June 12, 1991

Spray day – nothing noteworthy.

 

[Chucky]

June 13, 1991 (Saturday)

Volunteered to work today. At $10/hour, the overtime should gross me around $500 for the week.

Chris, the salesman/manager, and I sprayed today. Chris is actually a pretty good dude, despite all the dumping on him Gil, Leo, and I do behind his back. We got talking and he seemed impressed by my knowledge of insects, disease, and dendrology. We studied these subjects at school, and I’d studied trees and botany on my own since I was just a kid, so it shouldn’t have come as much a surprise that I was educated on tree-related subjects. Chris said that it’s not unusual for tree companies to hire people right off the street, people with no more knowledge of trees than a nun has of diesel mechanics. A few of these people, who are ambitious and have a genuine love for tree work, will remain in arboriculture and become successful, but the vast majority of them won’t. In fact, even the majority of those who train in arboriculture don’t stay with it long.

Chris graduated from the same college I’m now attending, but the Urban Tree Management program I’m currently in was not in existence when he graduated in the late ‘70s. He learned arboriculture on the job, and he’s a real company man. He told me I could be a sales rep with the company in three months. I figure I’d be better of sticking with my plan to get a B.S. in Urban Forestry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. My ambition has always been Municipal Arboriculture ever since the City Forester of Burlington, Vermont gave a talk to our class at college last semester.

Burlington is a Tree City USA and it has a very strong forestry department, partly because the department is separate from the DPW, and partly because the community prides itself on its trees. The City Forester seemed really enlightened and enthusiastic about his job, and he gave a great presentation to our class. In most cities when the economy takes a dip, it is the Forestry Department that is first to take a hit. Not in Burlington. Here the City Forester has so much power, any excavation near street trees must be done under the tree roots, not through them. I like that kind of power.


54 Hrs this week. Week #4

 

[Chucky]

June 15, 1991

Gypsy Moth spray Day.

Harry showed up on the job site today, after just visiting John, who works for his father’s tree service in Lebanon, NH. Harry is an instructor in the Urban Tree Management program at the college I’m attending, and each summer he spends time meeting with students on the job during their summer externships to see how they’re doing. He also helps run the school sugar bush and brought with him a fresh gallon of his maple syrup. Though Harry’s extra-extra dark maple syrup has the looks and consistency of a paving material, it sure is good!

I took Harry on a small tour of the Lake’s region of New Hampshire and we checked out New Hampshire’s champion White Oak, which is just a mile up the road from the apartment. The tree sits next to a pond back from the road a bit among other trees, and as White Oaks don’t grow so tall as they do thick and wide spreading, passersby barely notice it. But once you get out of the car and walk up to it, you begin to recognize how truly magnificent a specimen it is, with its 19-foot girth and 140-foot crown spread. Unfortunately, it’s beginning to show signs of decline.

Harry’s a real cool, mellow guy, with a great appreciation and infectious enthusiasm for trees. I wouldn’t say Harry is anti-technology, but in the natural vs. synthetic debate, he clearly sits on the left. For example, he’d prefer to fertilize a tree using the drill hole method with a power auger and compost instead of liquid injecting the tree’s root zone with a synthetic, inorganic fertilizer. I see nothing wrong with that attitude, but if I had access to a spray rig and a needle, there’s no doubt I’d be pogo stickin’, and not drillin’ and fillin’. And I could plainly see that Harry wasn’t too excited about the spraying aspect of tree work. Rather than being on the ground looking up, I’m sure he’d much rather be in the tree looking down. Can’t say as I blame him.

Later we ate some tamales and had too many tecate beers at a Mexican restaurant, chewed the fat awhile, and crashed. Tomorrow, Harry is headed to the Wolfeboro office to see my roommate, Brian, and then he’s off to Portland, Maine to see Travis. I got thinking about my ambition to become a municipal arborist, which seems like a good gig, but thinking of Harry on his tree traveling adventures, educational arboriculture can't be such a bad gig either!

 

[Chucky]

June 16, 1991

Four years in high school on the track team as a pole vaulter and discus thrower, weight training daily, lots of rope work, and 30-50 miles a week roadwork – and not one of those days matched the workout I got today.

But it was worth it, because I got lots of climbing in! Gil and I pruned eleven Red Oaks, two Apple trees, two European Mountainashes, and topped an Aspen (not me). The salesman bid the job for 16 man-hours, but we were lucky to finish it in 22. I did 3 tree-to-tree transfers in the Oaks. I keep forgetting to make myself a 15-foot rope with a clip to help me get around the canopy better. It will come in real handy, especially in more wide-spreading trees such as White Oaks, which are plentiful in New Hampshire. Gil uses one all the time when pruning.

The chipper started to bog down. “Dull blades,” Gil said. I asked Gil if the Oak pieces we put through it might have been too big. Gil scanned the area behind the chipper where I was working. “Where’s the rake?”

“Uhhh….”

Gil was partially eaten by a chipper once. And he showed me the scars to prove it. Luckily a co-worker was right there to hit the reverse bar, but it ate his arm and shoulder right up to his neck before it spit him back out. I can’t believe how tough this guy is. He also was a chronic alcoholic and used to go up into the trees in the morning still drunk from the night before. Every day with his lunch he packs a couple NA’s. This guy's a freaking grandfather, and he still climbs like a monkey!

 

[MasterBlaster]

Uh, I wouldn't go too wacky here-uh, eh?

 

[Chucky]

No wacky-tabacky. Company randomed us.

 

[MasterBlaster]

I din nut say that, laddie.

 

[Chucky]

Then what is you saying, son?