The Man With The Machete

One of the most important life lessons I’ve ever learned was given to me by a tree farmer.

At the time, I was a brand-new account executive at a radio station in Miami.

Every profession has its version of hazing.

Lawyers have impossible hours.

Doctors endure residency.

New account executives get assigned the clients nobody else wants.

The theory, as best I could tell, was that if you could survive six months of driving across South Florida trying to convince a strip club, a muffler shop, and a taxidermist to buy radio advertising, you had earned the right to keep your business cards.

So there I was: big hair, even bigger earrings, and heels wholly unsuited for agriculture.

Which was unfortunate.

Because one of my first accounts was a tree farmer.

The tree farm was located so far south of Miami that I was certain I had driven beyond the reach of air conditioning, civilization, and possibly radio itself.

As a new account executive, I had imagined client meetings would involve desks, conference tables, and occasionally coffee.

Instead, I found myself trailing a man with a machete through a field of trees.

Nobody had covered this scenario during training.

Thousands of young trees stretched in every direction.

The Florida sun was relentless.

Sweat ran down my back in little rivers.

My heels sank so deeply into the dirt that it seemed a shame nobody was following me with a seed packet.

A machete flashed in the sun.

A bucket split open.

He lifted a tree free, roots and soil intact, lowered it into the ground, and immediately moved to the next one.

Then another.

And another.

There were thousands of trees in that field.

He wasn’t planting one.

He was racing all of them.

I’d ask a question.

He’d answer it without breaking stride.

For forty-five minutes I followed him through that field trying to discuss advertising rates while periodically rescuing my shoes from the earth and reconsidering the judgment that had brought me there.

What I couldn’t understand was the urgency.

The weather was beautiful.

The trees were healthy.

There wasn’t a storm cloud in sight.

Yet he moved through those rows as though time itself were running out.

Finally, unable to stand it any longer, I asked why he was in such a hurry.

The farmer stopped.

For the first time all afternoon, he looked directly at me.

The expression on his face suggested he was trying to determine whether I was capable of keeping a plant alive.

He wasn’t wrong.

I’d spent the previous six years lugging a ficus up and down the East Coast with every move while wondering why it never seemed particularly happy to see me.

He held up one of the trees.

“If they stay in the pots too long,” he said, “the roots start circling.”

Then he split the bucket away from the tree.

“Eventually they run out of room.”

I looked at the tree.

It looked perfectly healthy.

“What happens then?”

He shrugged.

“Then the roots strangle their own tree.”