Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Tree surgery

As I passed through the Boston Public Garden this morning, I noticed a guy pruning a big tree. He had a gleaming truck with a very long double-articulated hoist which he controlled from inside his bucket. When he saw me taking pictures, he swung his bucket over to me and came down so I’d get a good picture.

The whole situation caught my attention because it differed so greatly from tree surgery in my other home town of Minsk. In Minsk, the tree-pruning teams arrive in old Soviet trucks that leak oil when parked and billow black smoke when running. According to someone in a position to know, nobody on the job, and possibly nobody in the home office, has any special training in tree surgery. And as far as I can tell from the ground, the guy doing the cutting gets positioned by a confederate sitting on the back of the truck, and he can’t position himself. The two guys drive the truck up to the tree however it’s convenient for them and then hack away until they declare themselves finished.

The Boston guy’s truck was parked on wheel mats which protected the lawn from his truck’s tires, and the clean truck proclaimed the presence of a certified arborist. His confederates were far away, grinding up the branches he’d removed from another tree. The Boston guy could go almost anywhere with his double-articulated lift with telescoping extension. The Minsk guys have to jockey around in their trucks to get in a convenient position for the simpler arm (like a human arm with one elbow) that lifts the woodsman.

The arborist in Boston suggests to me a difference in the relative wealth of the two cities, though it may represent simply a difference in priorities. Perhaps I wouldn’t have stopped to marvel at the gleaming truck in the Public Garden if I didn’t have a point of comparison, but today I’m impressed.

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