On a cold February day, “Derek,” my groundie, stopped working and began complaining of stomach pains. The other climber and I were aloft pruning a massive pin oak. I told him he would be able to drive himself home in about 10 minutes, after I hit the ground.

“Following the rope to its termination, I saw it … on the feed table of the running BC 1800 XL chipper,” the author recounts. The rope in this staged photo is the same one almost put through the chipper. Photos courtesy of the author.

During this interval Derek’s health took a turn for the worse. On the opposite side of the tree, away from my partner and me, Derek had collapsed in the snow. Our boss arrived on scene to grab something from one of the trucks. Finding Derek in and out of consciousness, he yelled to us, “I need one of you on the ground now!”

Zipping out of the tree, I ran to Derek’s side only to find him unresponsive and his eyes rolling back in his head. My boss had already checked Derek’s breathing and pulse. Thankfully, both were present, but they were labored and erratic. I began sternum rubs to get some sort of response from Derek. What followed were intermittent moments of lucidity. Derek would come awake without remembering what he had said to us the last time he had come to. He was saying things like, “H-e-l-p-m-e …” and “What … happened?”

What happened, indeed?

A blind eye
Drugs have never been a part of my life. Growing up, I was made to participate in the D.A.R.E. program at school. D.A.R.E. stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education. Part of the program’s curriculum involved showing children images of organs collected from both healthy and drug-addicted cadavers. The side-by-side comparisons of those organs terrified me. The lungs and brains from those addicted to drugs were pockmarked with holes like the moon’s surface. Others had unnatural hues of charred black and shades of sickly grey.

Despite having this education, I was unable to pinpoint the signs of drug abuse in other individuals. I simply didn’t know what drug dependency looked like. When I began working with Derek, I saw how different he was – this was clear from the get-go. He retained instructions like a sieve, i.e., not at all, but was aware of his own inability, always circling back for reminders or clarification on something he didn’t understand. Even though he couldn’t remember things very well, he wasn’t unsafe – at first. I thought his anomalous behavior was who he was. So I accepted this as his version of normal.

Things went well on our crew. On the heels of two former crew members who nearly put the company out of business, the tide was turning. But not for Derek. Derek confided in me that his parents had recently kicked him out of their house. There was other evidence, too. His car appeared to be the victim of a whirling tornado fresh from a shopping spree in a dumpster.

Increasingly, he retreated within himself. He was more sluggish. When I would ask him about it, he would reply that he was “just tired.” Due to the recent trials with his parents, I believed him. As a young adult, his life had entered a stage of upheaval. Around this time, I mentally began clocking the appearance of sores and scabs on his face.

Still, he was showing up to work, rarely on time, but he was invested in his pursuit of being a tree climber.

The Blue Moon climbing line was the replacement rope Derek, my groundie, had bought me after he’d cut through my first climbing rope with a chain saw on a previous job.

Missed opportunity
There had been at least one close call.

An 80-foot bight of Blue Moon climbing rope stretched out at an unnatural angle from the tree I was removing. Following the rope to its termination, I saw it as though seeing a thread of my very own mortal coil caught in a clutch of brush – on the feed table of the running BC 1800 XL chipper. While tagged into a silver maple spar, I began flailing my arms and yelling at Derek, who was at the chipper. He couldn’t hear or see me. Of course he couldn’t. There was no possible way he was going to hear me over the noise.

I thought to myself, “I am in real danger.” Triaging the shortlist of options left me wanting. I didn’t have time to bomb out of the tree. Maybe the force of the chipper would only snap my rope; maybe Derek would see the error and correct it; maybe the rope wouldn’t snap, and the force would rip this fork of the spar clean off. If I was to be severely injured or killed, I could not possibly know. All I could do was unclip from my climbing system and wait …

Just before feeding the brush into the chipper, Derek saw my climbing line in the brush and hastened to clear it. He stepped back, hands on his head – chipper still running at full RPMs – processing how close of a call we had just had. As soon as he looked up at me, emotion poured out from me in the form of an almighty tongue lashing directed at him. I’m not saying I was right, or that Derek was the only one to blame, but I was angry – and probably adrenalin-crazed after the scare. During our working relationship, I took pains to pick up his slack by covering his blind spots when I could. But climbers can’t do everything – it took me a long time to learn this lesson.

While my attention was focused on descending to the next work position on the spar, I couldn’t let go of the fact that, for mere moments, he nearly put my rope through the chipper. Pausing to collect myself, I stared at the gray flaky bark above my cinched friction saver. The work order was no longer on the horizon of my concerns. I looked at the sky. I thought about my daughter and then about my wife, unable to contemplate my absence from their lives. Reconciling the quiet backdrop of suburbia with what had nearly been my violent expiration, I realized this close call was inevitable.

Looking the other way
We didn’t really enforce a tardiness policy, because we couldn’t terminate Derek. He couldn’t be terminated because we couldn’t find anyone to replace him. As a company, we were in a tough spot. Out of 40 to 50 interviews, two candidates were good enough to receive an offer letter. Both flaked on us. To complete work, we needed a minimum headcount to fill the crew. The climate of our failed recruitment efforts encouraged me to tolerate Derek and his baggage, even to the point where I began ignoring certain aspects of his behavior.

Reckoning day
The paramedics arrived. Stripping off his coat and shirts, they hooked Derek up to a monitor and began to read his vitals. It must’ve been the cold air or the sensor touching his torso that caused him to react, because all of a sudden he came bolt awake. Then Derek became combative. It took four of us to keep him from running down the street. The look in his eyes was distant and wild. It was not Derek.

My thoughts went back to a conversation I had had with Derek when I asked him if he was doing drugs. At that time, he denied it. I believed him. There was no hard evidence to think otherwise. Aside from my suspicions, I didn’t have concrete proof that he was doing drugs. Even though I held the authority to terminate someone or order a random drug test, I never felt compelled to do either. Maybe I was naive. Maybe I couldn’t accept that Derek would make such a stupid decision. Or perhaps the signs were always there, and I had simply become too tolerant of risk.

The Blue Moon climbing line Derek nearly put through the chipper that day was the replacement rope he had bought me after he’d cut through my first climbing rope with a chain saw on a previous job (necessitating a complete switch to a separate system and climbing rope). This, and so many other incidents, made me realize I had ignored several red flags about Derek. He was unsafe.

And he was on methamphetamines. Toxicology tests confirmed this. After Derek’s release from the ER, he confessed his use of drugs to my boss, at which point he was terminated forthwith.

Conclusion
When safe boundaries are kept, I believe we should be socially invested in the people on our crews. Despite Derek’s departure from tree care, our time together taught me a lot about production tree work. Like, tree work doesn’t have to happen if the circumstances, personnel or any other factors are not right. Sometimes it involves saying “No.”

Among other things, I learned what drug dependency looks like and how it endangers a tree crew – something I hope never to deal with again. Most important, I learned that I should act on the evidence in front of me instead of ignoring the red flags. A random drug screen should have been ordered. Had I done so, my close call could have been avoided.

To paraphrase a stanza from Lord Alfred Tennyson’s famous poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “Ours is to make reply; ours is to reason why; ours is to do but not die.”

Ryfe Greenwood lives and works in Missouri and is, or has been, an ISA Certified Arborist, ISA certified tree climber and ISA TRAQ credentialed, and has served as climbing arborist, crew leader, lead production climber and self-employed arborist.