(Reading time: 4 minutes)
When I was in my early 20s, Robin Hughes and I set out with passports, vaccinations and very little cash to explore the world. We got as far as Vancouver on our thumbs, at which point the romance of the road had worn thin. Robin wired her parents for money and flew back to the East Coast. I didn’t have that kind of backing, so I hitched my way south to look for work in Seattle—little realizing that I was walking into a Puget Sound economy The Seattle Times was describing as “the longest and deepest recession since the Great Depression.”
I lucked out, though. Although jobs were scarce, I got hired as a gravedigger and all-around helper at a small Jewish cemetery on top of Queen Anne Hill. I was the only employee working under the head groundskeeper, a grizzled old guy with a permanent dab of tobacco under his upper lip and a habit of regaling me with stories about growing up in rural Oregon, spitting and talking while I was digging six-foot holes. We had no power equipment, so it was all shovel work and only enough room for one man at a time, which meant I shoveled and he talked. One story that stuck with me concerned his dad, who had a habit of soaking corn in alcohol and then throwing it out in front of the house for the crows to eat. Dad would sit in a rocker on the porch, shotgun across his lap, watching the crows have their fill, and once they’d gotten good and drunk he’d get to his feet and fill them with buckshot.
That pretty much summarized my boss’s approach to groundskeeping, too.
The older parts of the cemetery had traditional headstones, but at some point a decision had been made to allow only flat markers that laid level with the ground. Making that change meant greatly enhanced productivity, since chain mowers could now ride straight across the lawns instead of zigging and zagging while someone else worked around the tombstones with a hand mower or weed whacker. Not everyone took to the idea, however. Bereaved relatives would plant flowers on the graves, and in some cases would plant little bushes around the perimeter of the plot or stick in the occasional small tree. What should have been a wide-open expanse was getting broken up into an obstacle course, and a crusty old guy brought up on a practice of shooting inebriated birds certainly wouldn’t sit still for that sort of interference.
So for the six or seven months that I worked at the cemetery, there was a lot more death than could be accounted for by the occasional fresh grave. My supervisor hunted weeds relentlessly from a tractor-mounted sprayer, pouring untold quantities of herbicide on weeds—and to him, everything looked like a weed. Leaves wilted, flowers drooped, a brown tinge infected and overcame anything that wasn’t grass. But that grass! Vibrant green, thick, boosted by Seattle’s near-daily afternoon showers, standing in stunning contrast to the vegetative carnage all around it. And so easy to cut!
Decades later, and the spirit of that scorched-earth approach to managing the environment lives on in Staunton. Faced with the inevitable encroachment of plants of all sizes on its power lines and transformers, Dominion Power has again retained the services of Asplundh Arbor Assassins to beat back the jungle and ensure that no storm-driven branch will sever its connections to our homes. It’s a ruthlessly efficient business, limbs amputated without regard for what gets chopped off, what stumps are left behind, or how disfigured or lopsided the offending tree will be rendered. Indeed, some may not survive at all.
Crawling down our streets with their boom trucks and chain saws and chippers, the Asplundh horde is in some cases laying waste to trees that were here long before Dominion erected its poles and strung its wires overhead. There are alternatives, of course. Just a couple of years ago, for example, Dominion took a chunk of its service area in the Baldwin Acres area and converted its overhead lines to underground ones, boring laterally through the soil so it didn’t have to trench. But the real estate is more expensive over there, and the trees are thicker and bigger. Elsewhere, it’s faster and a helluva lot cheaper just to slice right through the landscape.
It could be worse. It can always be worse. In some rural areas, such as along railroad tracks, the state of the art is to use helicopters from which dangle long chains of rotating circular saws. Flying buzz saws, swinging against anything in their way. That’s not something you see every day. Or drunken crows.
Looking askance 