A Personal Story About Trees from One of Our Staff

If you ever wanted to hear a story about trees from a certified tree surgeon and arborist...

Hello, my name is Frank, but everyone calls me the "new guy". It feels weird being called that because I've been cutting, trimming, and working closely with trees professionally for nearly 30 years, but Winnipeg Tree Service pays well so here I am. I thought the story of how I became fascinated with trees (which is the story of how I became an arborist to begin with) would make a good blog post for the company because everyone I ever tell it to says I should turn it into a book.

I didn't know why everyone I told this story too wanted me to turn it into a book until I saw my own new co-worker cry while telling to him. The story starts when I was 17 years old, living in Manitoba. I lived on a First Nations reserve even though my family was of European descent, and we were extremely poor. While being poor, I saw the power that money played in the world, especially in the cities where everyone loves to spend it. But I barely went to the city as a kid. It was ironic because I watched a lot of American movies and wanted to be a big businessman. I told all my friends, when we were camping, of how I was going to move to Vancouver or Toronto and be rich by next summer. I was only 17, so I don't need to tell you that I had no idea what I was talking about.

We were camping by a lake when my friends departed from the campfire. We were sitting by a lake, the fire roaring, and all my friends wanted to go to their tents and sleep. But I stayed up, by myself at the fire, and thought deeply about why my friends were laughing at me for wanting to be a businessman in the city. To this day I still don't know if this was their intent, but I figured out that night that it was actually really funny because it was ridiculous.

I was a 17 year old white boy living on a First Nations reserve in Manitoba -- no wonder all my childhood friends were laughing at me. I'm not much of a reader, but I've read enough to know that becoming a successful city-dweller was a dream many Canadians shared for centuries. But Canada never was a big city kind of country. Canada isn't the cityscapes or the skyline of the skyscrapers blocking the skies at night. Canada is the lone moose calling in the woods. The deer loping in the bushes. The thinker by himself at the fire, surrounded by trees.

That night, alone by the fire, wind whispered through the trees but I since convinced myself the whispers I heard were only a trick of the mind. Nevertheless, they told me to simply look around. Now, the words "look around" are, in my mind, the sagest advice I could ever give to another human.

Look around.

I don't see skyscrapers. I don't see crumbling asphalt. I see trees.

I see trees, and that night, as I thought about how ridiculous my dream of being a big city businessman was, I understood trees. Like whales, sort of, trees are only along for the ride, a ride designed and structured by humans. Humans are along for the ride too, but not in the same way whales and trees are. That night, I looked around at all the trees, dimly lit by the flickering flames of the campfire, and admired them. While everyone is scrambling around in the rat-race of life, trying to become successful businessmen, trees are minding their own business, doing what they were designed to do, despite what humans have in mind for them. They just sit and grow. If we step out of the day to day, the hour to hour, and step back into a view where time flies for millions of years in a single blink of the eye, we would see that some trees just sit there and chill while humans wage war around them. Trees just sit there and chill while squirrels live inside them, while bears scrape their back on them, and while humans cut their neighbors down. They just sit there and chill.

And so I sat there and chilled. Alone by the campfire. Before my eyes my dream of becoming a successful city-dwelling businessmen dissolved. I thought to myself, why couldn't I become more like the trees?

Now, you can call it sitting there and chilling, but I'm a middle-class family man living in the outskirts of Winnipeg and I don't need to be a successful businessman to be happy. Like the trees, I breathe in the fresh morning air every morning, not that stinky city air. I love trees. In the cities, people talk about space aliens and spaceships and how strange they are. But, not me. Me, I sit in the woods by myself and think about trees, and how amazing they are. Innocent yet majestic, fragile yet strong, trees are way more fascinating than you may realize at first glance. It's so easy to think we're so smart being humans, but trees just sit back and chill, like the whales, and the dolphins. For some reason I can't articulate why I think trees have a lot to teach us, and that we might not actually be smarter than them after all. That's why, after I graduated from high school a year later, I decided to dedicated my life to understanding trees. I'm not a scientist, but I can take you into the woods, point out every species of tree in sight, and recite millions of years of history to tell you how the specific species of each trees here, how long they've been alive, and how incredibly amazing they are.

Now, I'm raising a family in the outskirts of Winnipeg while working with trees every day. I've been working with trees professionally for nearly thirty years, but I still don't understand them.