As 2021 fades away in the rearview mirror of my truck, I’m thinking about my work, and about my small corner of the world.

Have you ever heard the sentiment, “nowadays, anyone with a truck and a chainsaw thinks they can do tree work…”? I have heard it many times, usually spoken condescendingly and from someone who not all that long ago was doing tree work with a pickup truck and chainsaw. Their tone implies that if you are out there in the world doing tree work with a chainsaw and a pickup truck, that you are a menace to society, a bad apple, unskilled and unknowledgeable. Dishonest even, a drunk, a hooligan, a criminal. Why though? What are you supposed to do tree work with? I wonder what is so threatening about someone with a truck and a chainsaw to everyone in the world of arboriculture. The anxiety must grow out of the meme’s on the platforms, you know the ponytailed man one arming a rear-handle and toppling over in disaster once the limb buckles under the unfinished kerf as his pickup rusts away in the background. I realize they’re giving all of us a bad name, so I sign offline sour and sulking.

Really, what else does one need for sound arboriculture besides a trusty truck and a sharp blade? Some of the finest arborists I have ever seen in my life have showed up to job sites with little more than a truck and a chainsaw. Sure, good climbing gear, sure, a sharp handsaw and a light polesaw to extend their influence. The whole package fits into the pickup and at the end of the day they ride off into a setting sun, a hooligan maybe, but a yeoman hero nonetheless. I even know a few that have ponytails.

There are companies, big companies with lots of trucks and lots of chainsaws and lots of chippers and lots of sprayers and lots of employees, with stiff collars on their company wide matching uniforms; they are in the streets committing the most heinous crimes of malpractice behind the mask of a professional. They are criminals only disguised as experts. They are prescribing insecticide applications on evergreens that are gasping from nutrient deficient construction fill and strangled by girdling roots. They are hedge trimming weeping cherries while hydraulic oil seeps into the street. They are buying up all the plywood. Their scale has tipped.

I look back over my daily planner of 2021 and realize, ‘hell, I’ve worked for weeks at a time without even using a chainsaw’. A combination of Felco #2’s and a Silky Gomtaro is enough firepower to keep my small battalion on the march for days. Of course my hands get crampy and sore! I keep them under the front seat of my truck, even when I go out for dinner or pick the kids up from school, my saw and my snips go with me. Does that make me a criminal? The only secret I conceal is this: I can clear a roof edge in a large Plane tree and deadwood a Japanese Maple in the same yard. I can be done by 2 PM (to get the kids). Or I can go prune privet until 4 (my wife will get the kids). The choice is mine, and I don’t have to check with the office (but definitely with the wife). The only fuel I’ll need is some trail mix and maybe a cup of black coffee, you know how privet can be late in the day. My Diesel engine burns about 1 gallon every 8 miles, so I don’t drive far, and I don’t drive fast. Does that make me a menace to society?

I’ve come into the habit of keeping a spade and a good mattock in the truck too. Their profile is almost non-existent laying flat in the toolbox. In the field though, their character is mountainous. If I had a nickel for all the times people have said to me, “I know not what is wrong with my tree. It’s dying back. It’s sad, it’s lonely, do you think you can help,” then I would surely have a mountain of nickels in the glove box of my truck on which I could live for a good many weeks. I’ve kept the company of a good many tree for at least an hour or two, with my spade and my mattock, while a bigger outfits rip out trees with the exact same ailments at a rate of 30 to my 1, for the same price or cheaper in an hour or two. There is no time for discussion or diagnostics or hope if the chip truck is empty. This is what the heavy artillery of capitalism looks like. I am a threadbare truck farmer. But Joel Salatin says that threadbare is profitable. I have planted all sizes of root systems, from balled-and-burlapped behemoths to naked little bare-roots, I have picked and axed my way through thick mats of perennials, hard crowns of clay, I have unearthed many a girdling root and wire planting baskets, and I have set them all free. For the present my mattock and my spade live in my little truck, and they have explored both the shadow of the past and the horizons of the future. Simple tools can set things free.

E.B. White wrote that “Freedom is a household word now, but it’s only once in a while that you see a man who is actively, almost belligerently free.” I drove over 20,000 miles in my truck last year, sometimes to prune limbs or plant trees, sometimes to see about a horse and to pick up a few pullets from the neighbor, and other times to the beach or the fishing hole or the trailhead. My accountant will sift through all that I’m sure. I don’t really know if anyone with a truck and a chainsaw can do tree work, but you could probably do a lot less with a lot more.