Diary of a Rookie Tree Climber

[MasterBlaster]

"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!"



That's a tad wacky, Pa.

 

[Chucky]

Wacky, MB, but true.

I calls ‘em as I see ‘em,
I leave no room for doubt;
If you ain’t believin’,
You’ve drunk too much stout.

 

[Chucky]

June 17, 1991

This is Bike Week in Laconia, and the bikes are already starting to roll into the New Hampshire Lakes region. Yesterday we were lumbering down the road about 30 mph with a full load of chips when two kids on crotch rockets recklessly whizzed by us just before a blind curve in the road. I looked back in truck’s the side mirror and saw two bikers tooling along behind us on Harley’s with their middle fingers clearly extended toward the two kids. They finally passed us with an appreciative wave and a nod.

Today Gil and I sprayed for “deer ticks” around several summer cottages on Lake Winnepesaukee. This is a watershed – no spraying within 50 feet of the lake, and no higher than 6 feet. How convenient, I thought, that the broad-spectrum pesticide Tempo also controls mosquitoes – mosquito spraying is illegal (at least by us) in New Hampshire.

Replaced the chipper blades (Gil did) and did plumbing work on the spray rig.

 

[Chucky]

June 18, 1991

My roommate Brian, who works at the Wolfeboro office, is struggling a bit. Brian hails from a small town in the northern Adirondacks, and like many towns in the six-million acre Adirondack park, its economy booms during the summer, and busts the other eight months of the year. My impression is Brian entered the Urban Tree Management program not so much because of a genuine interest in trees, but because the college is local to him and the program boasts a very high job placement rate in the industry.

Whatever the reason, Brian is a UTMer, and as there’s only a couple dozen of us UTMers on campus, and because all other students at the college regard us the lowliest of the low, we stick together, like an ugly ol’ mass of bagworms. So when anybody struggles in the classroom – or in the tree – they always have support from the rest of us, no matter how stupid or clutzy they might be.

Brian is neither stupid nor clutzy, but the other morning he must have appeared to be both, as he described to me how he spent the better part of an hour attempting to back the chipper up a driveway. Then later in the day, in the backyard of the same customer, he whipped it out and took a whiz on the customer’s lawn – a spectacle the customer clearly was not happy with as he sat watching the action through his picture window.

And Brian works under the tutelage of this guy named Lenny. Lenny, from the impressions I get from Gil and Leo, is not the brightest bulb in the box. But I guess he’s one bodacious climber and hose dragger, which is why I assume the Wolfeboro office keeps him. Anyway, Gil says Lenny lives for takedowns, and that he once saw Lenny sprint toward a tree with his spurs on, take his first step four feet up the trunk, and literally run up the tree with no lanyard, but with just his hands grabbing the trunk! I find this hard to believe, but Brian attests it’s true – the guy is crazy! And I’m just wondering where the company safety guy is when all this takes place? Well I know where he is – sneaking up on us, pointing at a misplaced traffic cone in the road.

Over four weeks, and not a single safety meeting by the safety guy. But I’m sort of glad. Despite certain ANSI transgressions that Gil and Leo tend to commit, I’m completely confident working with these two men.

Sprayed for Gypsy Moth today. Spray season is beginning to wind down. Larvae are beginning to pupate.

 

[Chucky]

June 19, 1991

Examined a declining Littleleaf Linden for girdling roots today. I dug around the side of the trunk with no flare, but found no girdling roots. The tree reputedly has had borer problems, but the company research lab was unable to determine the identity of the pest. I’ve noticed in the Syracuse area that Littleleaf Lindens sometimes have a tendency to send up much sucker growth from the base of the trunks. I’m sure this is a response to some kind of stress, but I’ve never been able to pinpoint exactly what kind of stress. Littleleaf Lindens tend to be planted mostly as street trees in Syracuse so I’m thinking the stress is probably induced by the usual inauspicious soil-related problems often associated with street trees, but I can’t be sure.

Tree disease diagnosis is such an inexact science, and when I reflect on the vastly complex interaction of an intricate biological system such as a tree with another intricate biological system of a pest, and then throw in such confounding physical factors such as climate, weather, pollution, soils, and countless other factors, it’s easy to see why disease diagnosis is trees can be so confounding. Mathematicians, physicists, and engineers have it easy. The systems they study are relatively cut and dried, and are infinitely less complex than biological systems. They simply look up the mathematical formula in a book relevant to the problem, and apply it. Try finding a simple “formula” for what’s causing the decline of a Maple when clear signs of a pest aren’t evident. Diagnostic arboriculture, like medicine, is as much an art as it is a science – it requires much knowledge and experience – and sometimes a little luck.

We also pruned some large Maples and an enormous Red Oak. Thenceforward, it looks like all the tree work we’ll be doing out of the Meredith office will be done with climbing gear. The Brookline office just expropriated the bucket truck for the remainder of the summer, and justly so, as they just won a big line clearance bid. Of course Gil and Leo are crestfallen, but I’m elated, as I’ll now get the opportunity for more climbing!

 

[Chucky]

45 Hrs this week. Week #5


June 22, 1991

What is it with these biker types? It was Friday night at Weirs Beach, where thousands of longhaired, leather-clad, and black sunglass-bespectacled Harley-Davidson motorcyclists were congregated. It’s the height of Bike Week, and dressed in black woolen bicycling shorts, a “save the whales” T-shirt, and an oversized Styrofoam helmet, I proudly pedaled up the main drag on my shiny, new, state-of-the-art Schwinn Cimarron mountain bike.

I can’t overstate the fact that no one at Weirs Beach Friday night was impressed with my new bicycle, or me, for that matter. That both the bewhiskered, tatooed biker types, and I, would easily stand out in a crowd, is about all we had in common. The fact that my bicycle lacked the capacity to breech an 80-decibel noise barrier, generally looked uncool, and needed to actually be pedaled, distanced me significantly from my two-wheeler brethren. However, I eventually found my way to the bar and it seems we had a common denominator after all – beer. Ensued were several rounds of pitchers of beer, numerous episodes of biker women *****-flashing, and a few puffs of.… Forgotten by the bikers was my dorky bicycling attire, and it was a bodacious party the whole weekend long.

An exhausting, 12-hour day. Leo, Gil, and I training pruned several large, medium, and small apple trees. A couple were close to 30-feet high. Much watersprout pruning and pruning to maximize light intake. It’s surprising how much growth one can remove from an apple tree and still leave enough growth to sustain the tree (at least we hope). This is a bad time of the year, by the way, to prune apple trees, or most trees for that matter.

 

[Chucky]

June 23,1991

Today Gil injection fertilized, and Leo and I pruned some large Maples. Leo installed one cable. Leo, Gil’s and my foreman, is very knowledgeable in arboriculture, despite his brutish, unkempt appearance. When I see children cower in fear, and dogs turn tail and run, I know Leo is coming.

Leo attended a high school with a forestry major, and then went on to graduate from the Stockbridge School at UMass, majoring in arboriculture. I’ve really got to watch myself when I start pontificating on tree-related matters because he’s quick call me on my tendency to use pretzel logic to justify conclusions on things I really know little about. Leo’s a no-nonsense kind of guy, and he knows his trees, but I have a feeling he’ll never go beyond production tree work, not that that's a bad thing. He shuns sales positions because he doesn’t like to “bull???? people,” and he dislikes management because he doesn’t like to “kiss ass.” I imagine Leo sometimes looks at me and thinks to himself: “boy, this dude is perfect for sales or management.”

It was a near perfect day today pruning the Maple trees. Hanging out and swinging around in trees all day is a most excellent way to make a living.

 

[Chucky]

June 24, 1991

Rain all day. Four large Yellow Birch takedowns, and I didn’t do much except get drenched. The Birches were hazard trees in rest areas along I-93 just south of the famous “Old Man of the Mountain” rock formation, which is the state emblem of New Hampshire.

Gil pieced down the trees, while the State had a crew that came along and chipped the remains. I was ground man all day, but that entailed mostly just tending Gil’s saw and ropes – no dragging, which at least would have kept me warm in the soaking rain.

I might have asked Gil to get in on the takedown action, but I still don’t have any climbing spurs, and I wasn’t about to borrow his again. Gil has telephone pole spurs, and they’re worn down to projections about as wood-piercing as a pair of thumbtacks!

 

[Chucky]

June 25, 1991

Four takedowns, ten prunings, and three cables today. Two of the trees were easy drops for Leo, the other two Gil pieced down. Gil and Leo pruned most the other trees while I drug brush, and two of the cables I did myself (of course with Gil’s help sending up the drill and tool bucket). Leo had his brand new 150’ Samson bright orange and white climbing line today, after finally retiring his old one that he had so long. Apparently his old line was now relegated to tag line status, but Gil, after inspecting it, later told me he wouldn’t trust the ragged old thing to lower a toothpick out of a tree. I wonder myself how Leo managed to use it so long. Leo must weigh about 230. I also deadwooded a very tall White Pine today, and I see now why Leo likes 150’ climbing ropes!

For certain cabling jobs, I kind of favor high-tensile cables with pre-formed cable grips, but the company doesn’t use these at all. At least they use eyebolts, which go all the way through the tree and are secured with a large washer and bolt. At school we did some cabling using lag screws, which only go a few inches into the tree trunk. I think lag screws are much inferior to eyebolts. One day walking in the woods at school I looked up into a tree that I’d cabled with lag screws a few months earlier, and there was the lag screw – dangling at the bottom end of the failed cable.

I’m beginning to find that a wooden extension ladder is very handy to get me within reach of a first limb instead of body thrusting 30 feet. Or if the limb’s not within easy reach, I can use a pole saw and place a monkey’s fist over the limb, and pull it down. Gil makes his own version of a monkey fist in about 5 seconds. He does it so fast I can’t make out how he does it.

I keep putting off buying a pair of climbers. Though takedowns are not very profitable for the company, it seems we’ll still have our share of them since spray season is just about over, the economy is down, and preferred customers often call for them. Spraying, fertilizing, pruning, and cabling is where the money is for our company, and our salespeople seem particularly adept at selling cabling jobs, even in trees that may not really need them. I can more easily condone salespeople pushing fertilization on trees that may not really need it. It’s amazing how rejuvenating and invigorating fertilizer is to declining trees. As we travel from job to job, Gil often points out beautiful, healthy trees that he has fertilized with the company’s own brand of fertilizer – a 29-9-9 synthetic/organic slow-release formulation – that he says looked spare and chlorotic before fertilizing.

OK, Gil didn’t exactly use the word “chlorotic” – I sort of injected the word in after he said “pale.”

 

[Chucky]

June 26, 1991

“When in doubt, Sevin in June.”

I’m not sure exactly where I’d heard that maxim, probably from Grover Katzman, the guy who started the Urban Tree Management program at college back in the early eighties. But it pretty much sums up the “see and spray” mindset that’s so prevalent in the tree care industry, despite scientific advancements in pest management funded by millions of dollars of research that demonstrably prove that pests in ornamental trees can effectively be managed to acceptable levels using integrated pest management.

IPM has for years been proven in the far larger realm of agriculture, and I can’t see any reason it can’t be successfully applied in urban forestry. Except, of course, for the fact the field is crawling with hacks.

So this morning when I looked at our work order, I couldn’t help thinking of “when in doubt, Sevin in June.” And today I filled the spray tank with a Tempo mix and we set off on a crisp, beautiful New England morning to perform repeat sprays for Gypsy Moths in Oaks where caterpillars were still chewing and wriggling after our first spray.

Today it was Leo and I spraying, and as much as I enjoy Leo’s company, he wasn’t no fun to spray with. I quickly learned where Leo tended to slack a little in certain minor areas of safety in the climbing aspects of tree work, he more than enough made up for it in the spray arena.

I had to actually get out a grease gun and grease all the fittings on the spray rig. Then, after each spray, the manner in which I wound up the hose on the spool, I was soon to learn, was completely unacceptable. With Gil, you just hit the button, and simply let the hose feed around the spool from left to right, and back and forth, and so on, till its all wound up. A little sloppy, but effective. So I wound up the hose as I normally did with Gil, and I looked over to see Leo’s face all twisted up with horror, as if I’d just set the spray rig on fire. He thereupon proceeded to instruct me on the “proper” method of spooling up the hose, and with great seriousness and complete concentration, he carefully guided the spray hose onto the spool with deadly accuracy and precision, until the final result looked just like factory specs.

So for the rest of the day I did my best to properly wind up the spray hose after each job, but as I glanced over at Leo’s critical gaze while winding, I could clearly see that Leo thought me as an abject failure at this task.

No matter. Months ago I’d formulated a hypothesis that tree people aren’t quite right in the head to begin with, so Leo’s over the top fastidiousness in spray hose winding was just another strange behavioral quirk that I’d come to expect from this strange breed of humans that take to trees.

 

[Chucky]

48 Hrs this week. Week #6

I quit my job as a long-haul trucker to go back to school for urban tree management. I started in the freight-moving business delivering next-day airmail in a pickup truck, moved to delivering furniture in a straight truck, and wound up driving big truck over-the-road. There’s a certain romance in being a long-haul trucker – and there’s many a country music tune that will tell you so. But after a couple years driving big rig I’d come to realize the “romance” part of the job was really a myth. In reality, it was hard, tiring work, and for the most part you were treated like dirt by the dock workers at the shippers and receivers, and the four-wheelers we shared the road with generally despised us.

So it was time to move on and train for a job I thought I’d truly enjoy – tree climbing. And to me the notion of swinging from a rope from the tops of big trees with a chainsaw dangling from my saddle was all as much romantic, and even more exciting and swashbuckling than driving big rig. And now that I’ve reached my goal, after a few hard days on the job doing tree work, I’m already beginning to think there’s no such thing as the “perfect” career.

And Gil and Leo aren’t helping me feel any better about it. Every once in a while, especially after a long day, Gil will talk about what he thinks he should have been doing instead of tree work. And Leo hints about how he’d like to go back to doing factory work at Lawrence, Massachusetts, where he’s from (that’ll never happen). Gil’s brother is a truck driver, and Gil thinks I’m crazy to go from driving truck to tree climbing. But Gil doesn’t know what it’s really like to drive big truck.

It’s true that tree work is extremely hard work, and can be quite unpleasant, but when I really think of it, isn’t any job a pain in the ass? I’m well aware of the “grass is always greener” cliché. And it’s a myth, too. The way I see it, try to find a job you’re at least moderately interested in, and pursue it. You’ll never be completely happy with any job; that’s life.

I like to imagine myself in the future, with a kid on my knee, telling him stories. If I were, say, an accountant or a lawyer, I’d have to make up stories to excite him. A tree worker would never have to make up a story.


Today I pruned a large Oak. Transferred to another leader in the tree via an old cable (tightrope walking). Leo pruned a declining Red Maple while I dragged brush.

Fertilized (hydraulic) for the first time. Injection sites are spaced about 3 feet apart 1/3 the distance from the drip line to just beyond the drip line. The big boss wanted all the fertilizer used up, so I removed the fertilizing needle, installed the spray gun, and fertilized the lawn.

Sprayed a Weeping European White Birch for Gypsy Moth, though a little late in the year for that – Gypsy Moth are pupating now. Used Tempo.

Sprayed a Weeping Willow for the imported Willow Leaf Beetle with Tempo, as recommended by the company research lab. The Larvae skeletonize and the adults eat whole portions of the leaves. 3-4 generations per year.

Was a very hot, humid day. Got mild heat stroke.

 

[Chucky]

June 30, 1991

The bothersome, and generally useless company safety guy showed up on the jobsite this morning. His appearance couldn’t have been more ill-timed. Luckily, hardhatless Leo was still on the ground, and his uncanny bat-sense homed in immediately on the approach of danger, and by the time the safety guy had swung out of his pickup, Leo was standing there looking thoroughly safety-prepared, in his ill-fitting hardhat loosely cocked on his gnarly head.

Unfortunate for me, I had parked the truck, and when I peered down from near the top of a large Oak tree, the safety guy was pointing at the wheel of the chipper. No wheel chock. So I had to rappel down the tree, put a wheel chock behind the chipper wheel, and body thrust all the way back up the tree.

What makes the safety guy such an object of Gil’s and Leo’s contempt and derision is his utter lack of practical experience in tree work. At one time, many years before he was ensconced in his current position as safety officer, I heard he did some logging. So he presumably knows about the generalities of chainsaw safety, tree felling, PPE, etc. But it seems clear to me that’s about where his knowledge of tree work stops – abruptly. When any safety-related issues involve the supraterra – the guy’s a total dud. It’s all what he’s read somewhere in a trade magazine he picked up at on a coffee table at office.

To wit: Last semester, when the safety guy appeared at school at a tree climbing lab to give a demonstration – of all things – the use of a speed line, he nearly killed my classmate, Tim. Tim is the most talented climber in our class and is almost fearless. Tim dropped a chunk of wood attached to a loop runner over 10 feet before the speed line stopped its fall, and slid down the line toward the truck. I really didn’t notice how hard it shook the tree, and shook Tim, because Tim is a staid, low-key, type person, and he managed to save grace and hold to the swinging tree and hide his anger at what had just happened to him, probably not to embarrass the safety guy. But when I saw him later he was still seething with anger when he described the violence with which that falling log had shaken the tree he was in. Little did I know that later that summer I’d be up against the very same safety guy – on the actual job!


Recovered from the heat from yesterday only to face another stifling hot, humid day. The thermometer broke 90 degrees. Drank at least a gallon of water during the day. The Brush Bandit was in the shop, so we had to use an old, dull drum chipper all day that the line clearance guys had put out of commission last year. After I got done with the Oak, Leo and Gil refused to deal with the chipper from hell, so they did all the pruning and I dragged and chipped. As usual, Gil and Leo like to see me do things the “hard way” (like they did) until I learnt the right way, so it didn’t take me long to realize that you don’t “feed” pieces into a drum chipper.

Between the safety guy, the drum chipper, and the heat, I did much reflecting today on the merits of the practice of arboriculture at the production level today.

 

[Chucky]

June 1, 1991

Sprayed five or six White Birch trees for Birch Leaf Miner with Orthene. No signs of Bronze Birch Borer.

Fertilized (liquid) several Maple trees. Annual application rate is 25 gallons of material per 1000 square feet of root zone area. This amounts to 2.8 lbs. of nitrogen per 1000 square feet.

We also did a couple of “biennial” applications. This is done by simply holding the injection probe in the ground twice as long as normal. I’m not sure if this is really a good practice, or not. Somehow, it doesn’t seem right.

I find while injection fertilizing, much of the liquid material spouts up from injection hole and onto the ground, and after a few days the lawn under the trees turns into a pattern of round, dark green patches. Curiously, Gil tells me a surprising number of customers like their new polka-dotted lawn. Apparently it’s indicative to them that the fertilizer is doing its job.

Our last job was fertilizing a large, old American Elm in downtown Concord. The owner of this beautiful tree holds it very dear to him. He’s had its trunk injected with the fungicide Arbotect as a safeguard against Dutch Elm disease every three years. I’m told this is a $900 procedure. The salesman says an Arbotect application on this tree was once delayed to the fourth year, and the tree began to flag. Fortunately, the owner was vigilant and immediately had the flagging branches properly pruned and the tree treated before it was too late to save the tree. [A year later I watched the demise of numerous elms on the UMASS campus that began flagging and were not attended to immediately. The disease had spread so fast, they were beyond saving by the end of the season.] Anyway, the Elm is in robust health, with not even a sign of Wetwood.

I’m inspired to see the efforts the owner put forth to preserve this magnificent tree. It’s hard for me to explain the deep respect and kinship I feel toward trees. Grand, stately specimens that defy the ravages of time, and survive to grow tall and broad, and age gracefully as they watch over us as we do the same. Only we do so smaller and faster, like the ants that scurry under our feet.

 

[Chucky]

July 2, 1991

Sprayed White Birch trees for Birchleaf Miner with Orthene today. Liquid injection fertilised two large White Oaks and a small Bartlett Chestnut tree. The Bartlett Chestnut is supposedly a blight-resistant hybrid of Castanea grandidentata and C. mollissima that I’m guessing was developed at the original Bartlett research laboratory in Stamford, Connecticut.

Given that the American Chestnut and the Chinese Chestnut have had millions of years to evolve independently since their last common ancestor, and hence many new genes would be introduced into the genome of the F1 generation progeny of a cross between the two trees, I’m not at all surprised that the hybrid Bartlett Chestnut has yielded good resistance to Chestnut Blight. But all this genetic diversity in the hybrid is a double-edged sword. It also means most other characteristics of the American Chestnut will also be altered. So it’s extremely unlikely the mature specimen of this new hybrid will resemble anything like the great American Chestnut, just as American Elm crosses with resistant Asiatic species will similarly never achieve the classic deliquescent habit of the American Elm.

If this first F1 generation hybrid Chestnut is fertile, then genetic segregation will occur and the progeny of the F2 generation will show great genetic variation among the progeny. But you have to wait several years until all these progeny are mature to see which are desirable, if any. Then if you’re lucky, you might have one that fairly closely resembles an American Chestnut tree while at the same time being blight-resistant, but the problem is it’s progeny won’t breed true. The only way to get it to breed true, is to backcross it perhaps several times to an American Chestnut in order to finally “fix” it so it both looks like an American Chestnut and is resistant to blight.

So we’re talking a few hundred years to breed a resistant American Chestnut tree and this is exactly why almost NOBODY pursues a graduate degree in tree breeding, and thus we will never get a blight-resistant tree like we will get, say, a wilt-resistant tomato.

So breeding a Chestnut Blight-resistant American Chestnut is impractical. BUT, we still have the good old mass-selection route whereby a la Luther Burbank we simply allow trees to breed freely and let nature take its course. We wait until perhaps a cosmic ray randomly strikes the DNA of a Chestnut tree, altering its sequence of genes such that it codes for a protein that confers resistance to the blight. But then we have to wait several years to discover that this tree miraculously made it to maturity. And then there’s still no guarantee that this tree will breed true, but at least it can be cloned like most other landscape trees in order to preserve the genetic integrity of its parent.

I guess what I’m getting at is I’m confidant that only technique to bring back our trees that have been decimated by alien pestilence is the new biotechnological gene-insertion techniques that have recently shown such promise in the agricultural realm. These techniques are controversial, but I’m convinced with time and refinement, biotechnological techniques will eventually be the answer to many of our agricultural and horticultural problems.

Also sprayed a Weeping Crabapple tree with MPede Insecticidal soap with a backpack sprayer.

36 Hrs this week. Week #7

 

[Chucky]

July 6, 1991

Today was absolutely indescribable. Today was one of those glorious days where one of us should have belonged on the front page of one those glossy tree climber magazines. We pruned big, mature White Pines with the beautiful backdrop of Lake Winnipesaukee all day long. Not easy work, but very satisfying.

I was thinking a lot of the word “vississitudes” today. I love this word, not only as the way the ssses beautifully summon forth between the teeth, but as I’ve discovered it’s the perfect word to describe the sometimes excruciatingly difficult, yet at the same time perversely enjoyable business of tree work. I’m thinking that this business of tree work is mostly for those who seek adventure, and not those who are looking for a job which offers fairly good pay, and at the same time, security.

I was thinking of my cousin, the accountant, who makes more than me, but who is not living ….

 

[Chucky]

July 7, 1991

Pruning again, but instead of large, towering pines, we spent the day today in five large Red and White Oak trees. Twenty man-hours.

Most pruning we do involves deadwooding everything broomstick handle thick and larger. For some reason (likely because most our customers are very rich) almost all the trees we prune are very large, mature trees, many of which are beginning to decline. The Red Oaks are much easier to prune than White Oaks because their crowns have a leader, unlike the wide-spreading White Oaks. In the White Oaks, as we don’t climb pruning jobs with spurs, both ends of our climbing lines are always in a crotch, and often we’re wishing we had a third end. These are extremely difficult trees to prune, and with no central leader to hang from it’s very hard to access the ends of these large, laterally spreading limbs. I had to shimmy up a couple of them on the bottom side lanyarded into to them because either there just wasn’t a suitable crotch to throw my monkey-fisted climbing line tail through, or the crotch was just too far to reach. My tie-in points on these two laterals actually would usually end up below me, which is not good. Because the boss wasn’t there, Gil actually put his telephone spurs on for a couple big laterals, and I really didn’t blame him. I honestly believe it’s folly for a salesman to put a pruning crew on a large White Oak without a bucket.

Yet in a way I’m glad the Brookline line clearance crew had the bucket truck, because though the climbing was very hard, it afforded me some very valuable climbing experience. When I’m expected to do most of the groundwork, I jump at every climbing opportunity I can get.

One thing I’ve noticed in the tree is how handy 15-foot polesaws are. They have a lot of uses besides just pruning. Unless the tree is a takedown, I’ve learned my lesson to never be in a tree canopy without a polesaw – they’re absolutely indispensable.

 

[Chucky]

July 8, 1991

After shooting the breeze with my roommate Brian over a few beers the other night, I got thinking about an interesting statistical concept. I learned something I never knew about Brian, something that to me was startlingly intriguing: he’s the direct blood descendant of two generations of renowned treemen from northern New York. His grandfather had a long and storied career as a logger, and later retired as a logging superintendent in the great Adirondack lumberwoods. And his father was a legendary tree climber and later a beloved and respected forestry supervisor. He died an early and unlikely death in a car accident.

Yet despite this legacy in Brian’s ancestry, he’ll be the first to admit that he just can’t climb trees. When he applied to college he wanted to become a surveyor. But they told him because of his limited mathematical background, he should not pursue such a career, so he wound up in Urban Tree Management, the field his father excelled so well in, but one in which Brian knew he would never excel in.

I know Brian well; I know his work ethic and his sticktoitedness. He would have succeeded and excelled in surveying. The college advisors told him wrong.

It’s called “regression to the mean,” the probabilistic concept I was thinking about. For those who aren’t familiar with statistics, it means whenever a person (or any biological form) has an uncommonly large, small, fast, smart, ugly, beautiful, strong, etc. offspring, the offspring of that superlative person will tend to revert back to normal. Such a statistical anomaly is a standout, an outlier, and the law of averages dictates that their offspring tend to revert back to normal. If you look at sports standouts, celebrities, scientific geniuses, or just about anybody who has stood out for uncommon achievement, with few exceptions, you never see their offspring achieve similar greatness.

And I’m the same as Brian, in that I’m the son of a man who excelled spectacularly in his career and who also died young, and whose career I doubt I could ever match. So I chose a career I was interested in, really enjoyed and could do well at. But because some know-nothing, second-guessing, administrative do-nothing convinced Brian he couldn’t pursue his goal, Brian wound up in a career he never wanted to be in.

Do what you love to do, follow your dreams, and never let anybody stand in your way.

[Brian started a tree company in Tupper Lake, NY in 1993, but it went under after five years. He now owns a successful construction company in the same area.]

Pruned a Sugar, a Red, a Silver, and a Norway Maple today. We pruned them away from the roofs of two daycare centers and deadwooded them. Also installed three cables.