Shake and Bale
A position opened at a new nursery in town, so I applied, eager to apply my burgeoning succulent and mulching knowledge, knowing my retail experience was limited to a few months behind a dry cleaner’s counter, counting on this opportunity to rescue me from a life working maintenance at a chemical plant. The interview went well, or well enough to secure me a job, not for the grand opening of the north store, but rather a location down south that needed immediate labor selling Christmas trees. No experience needed.
Fire had destroyed most of the south store nursery, which languished throughout the summer until a demolition crew bulldozed the entire mess into dumpsters. By the time I reported for duty, the asphalt had been scraped clean, a single-wide office trailer hauled in, a circus-style tent pitched and strung with festive lights. The entire property was boxed in with temporary chain link fence. At the front gate, a man waited, the company logo prominent on his padded vest, a shade of burnt orange that matched his unkempt hair and raucous moustache; he was waiting, presumably, for his new crew; waiting, given the empty lot, for a shipment of Scotch pines and Fraser firs; waiting for the end of his cigarette before jumping into action, waiting perhaps, for the end of the world.
A group of six or seven guys in our mid-twenties, all of us hopeful nursery applicants redirected to this repurposed lot, arrived more or less simultaneously. Strangers to one another but bound by a desperation to escape jobs mixing cement, waiting tables, grinding rebar or selling weed to supplement unemployment checks; bound by a common love of gardening and the great outdoors; bound by the realization as the manager handed out leather gloves and box cutters, explained the four pricing structures based on height, demonstrated the correct technique to shake and bale trees, rules about breaks and smoking, that our dreams of shooting the bull with suburbanite men about fertilizer or explaining to middle-aged women the proper time to prune pear trees would be deferred until early spring.
“Most important rule,” the manager said, “no helping people tie trees to cars.”
“Why not?” one of the guys asked.
“Liability. You do some half-ass slip knot, and a ten-foot pine sails across three lanes of traffic, impales somebody’s grandma. Ruins Christmas for everybody.”
“Trees don’t kill people,” another guy muttered under his breath, setting off a low ripple of laughter.
“The bereaved aren’t coming after the driver,” the manager said. “They’re coming after me, and you know what I’ll do?”
We fell silent.
“I’ll give them you.”
His wide nostrils flared wider. He wiped his red nose and spat. By day’s end, his nose would become a topic of our gossip when someone suggested our fearless leader was fond of nose candy, which caused us to dub him with clandestine nicknames such as Cocaine Claus, Jolly Old Saint Crack, or Frosty the Blow Man. Mean, but we also took to calling one another dwarf names—Sleepy, Sneezy, Grumpy—whatever we felt fit someone’s disposition at the time he punched in.
“Everybody good on the rules?” the manager asked.
“Yes,” we responded in unison.
“Good,” he said. “Hop to it. A truck’s rolling in.”
We watched as a semi-truck stacked high with cut trees that had travelled from the Pacific Northwest to Central Texas—like a fulfilled prophecy in a Shakespearian tragedy—maneuvered its way through the narrow street and parked parallel to our vacant lot. As soon as the driver lit from his cab with a clipboard and conferred with the manager, he yelled over the engine’s low rumble that two of us needed to follow him up to cut the tarp free. Scrambling to the top to toss trees didn’t seem that different from scaling hay bales in my uncle’s barn, so I volunteered. Besides, I loved to climb trees. And, as it turned out, unloading trucks became our hands down favorite part of the job. On subsequent deliveries, we’d race to the driver, trying to secure a tree launching position. The goal, of course, was unloading freight, but the game was knocking guys waiting on the ground off balance without damaging coworker or tree. Afterall, the roles would inevitably reverse on the next delivery, and we were well aware of how the wheel of fate turned.
The ground work, catching trees and sorting by size, hauling them to designated rows, and adding tags beat the dickens out of the mundane nature of selling trees. Most of the time, we milled around the lot confirming size, using ourselves as tape measures. Yes ma’am, I’m six foot tall even, we’d say, holding a tree upright at arm’s length for comparison. Regardless of tree height, we became adept grasping trunks and slamming stumps onto pavement to release a shower of dead needles. We weren’t working on commission so didn’t care if people bought or how much they spent; still, to stave off boredom, we’d pull five, six, seven trees from rows for families’ inspections. Some trees were too tall, some too short, some had misshapen limbs or bald spots, a shocking amount of needle-shed. Inevitably, a dad would crane his head over the rows and ask if we had better ones in back even though the Christmas tree lot was hemmed in by a western-wear store and an Arby’s, so it was tempting to ask where the hell do you think we’re hiding better trees?
Tempting, but we were a polite bunch in the public eye. Foul beneath our sweaty shirts and dirty jokes, nicotine jittery, hung over, hands blackened and sticky with sap, and stomachs soured from bitter coffee, but still we offered holiday greetings, thanked you for your business, twirled as many trees as your heart desired, carried your selection to the front where you paid while we leveled the base with an electric chain saw, gave it one more shake down, ran it through the baling tube, slung it over our shoulder, and asked which car is yours?
People just got angry if we shared corporate’s liability concerns, so we absolutely caught rope ends tossed our way, snaked them beneath bumpers and tied our best boy scout knots. Of course, one infraction leads to another, and despite a prohibition against tipping, we accepted the occasional two-dollar handshake figuring, I suppose, that it was worth the risk. Besides, Cocaine Claus seldom left his office and when he did, he’d embraced our propensity for nicknames, calling us Dopey, Bashful, Dancer, and Prancer or the more generic hey elf. Not knowing our Christian names would have made it difficult to single anyone out for punishment.
The work was backbreaking, mind numbing but tolerable until mid-December when a cold front blew in, dropping the after dark temperatures to near freezing, followed by drizzling rain and sleet. Our gloves got wet, stayed wet, and we couldn’t stuff socks thick enough into our boots to keep our feet warm. The manager offered the trailer’s warmth for breaks, which was nice until you realized fifteen minutes was just enough time to half-thaw before returning to the cold. Warming up just made you angry. The key was constant movement, offering families tree options even after they’d seemingly decided, banging stumps on asphalt even though there were no more loose needles to fall, carrying trees to the parking lot to be helpful even when no one asked for help. First the temperatures dropped, followed by the steady stream of customers until me and the guys were just standing around, shivering, watching a few desperate people pick over the sad trees that remained.
And then, three days before Christmas, the manager crowded everyone into the trailer and fired us.
“Hate this boys,” he said, handing out final checks. “You’ve done good work.”
“What about the north store?” one guy asked.
“And the nursery jobs?” asked another.
“Damn economy,” the manager said. “Bad time of year.”
Truth is, the economy was better than it’d been in decades, better than it would be again for years. The company had filled the openings at the new location with qualified workers the same week they’d hired us to sell Christmas trees without bothering to tell us we were part-time, seasonal help.
I was angry. We all were angry, but we’d come looking for work and they’d had work for us to do.
A little while later though, watching sleet bounce off my windshield as I sat in the Arby’s parking lot, clutching a foil-wrapped roast beef sandwich, trying to siphon off the warmth before eating, my truck’s heater blasting hot air through the floor vents restoring a tingle to my toes, I realized I’d been gifted an unexpected vacation in addition to a little severance pay, and that maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing being fired.
Switching from unskilled jobs to ones requiring advanced degrees became the rhythm of my life, as did moving from apartments to rent houses to mortgages as the ensuing decades rolled along. Despite the near constant movement, however, my current commute takes me past the vacant lot where I once sold trees for a season. The other night, driving late, the weather was cold, something I hardly notice given my working days now keep me indoors, but midway home, a light sleet started to fall, which put me in mind of the last truckload of Christmas trees that rolled in after sunset. Having just cinched a knot to a midsize bumper, I saw the semi’s headlights, and rushed to be one of the first to climb the wheel well and scale the tower of trees. When we cut away the tarp, we were surprised to discover branches packed with snow, and for a moment, marveled that just days before these trees had stood in a white forest in some remote part of Washington or Oregon. The other guy grinned, removing his leather gloves as did I and, with the efficiency of elves, we shaped snowballs until the guys on ground yelled up and we answered their impatience with a barrage of snowballs at first, then snow-laden trees, which gave them opportunity for retaliation. The manager, had he peered through his trailer window or stepped outside to smoke would have caught us red-handed, and perhaps he did witness the melee and knew, soon enough, how the wheel would turn, how some of us would fall in love with the wrong person, get married and divorced, that our sometimes addictions would become necessities to make it through a day, that we would buy cars and houses we’d lose to a series of poor choices, that a diagnosis would cripple somebody’s dream, that we’d survive near-death experiences or worse: some of us would work our way to the hell of middle management and we’d have to hire a crew, knowing full-well we’d fire them three days before Christmas; perhaps he foresaw all this and decided to let us, one last time, just be boys throwing snowballs after dark.
Jeffrey Utzinger is the author of The Risk Involved, a collection of creative nonfiction essays. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University, and a PhD in American Literature from Texas A&M University. He lives in Lockhart, Texas where he keeps chickens and a few thousand bees.