“What are you tree people doing?” the woman peering in the window of our colorful trailer asked. She took in the multi colored prayer flags, the bright yellow curtain blowing lightly in the breeze from an open window, and my expensive coffee grinder (I believe everyone gets a luxury).
“We’re being tree people!” I reply, to her confused look.
Of course she’s confused. Every year, a week before Thanksgiving, groups of Carhartt wearing men and remarkably strong women take up residence in tiny trailers in parking lots of grocery stores and hotels across the nation. Our forearms get covered in sap as we hustle Christmas trees for four weeks to make the money needed to travel for months. We tell tales of kayaking in South America all winter: “Winters? What are those? We chase an endless summer.”
As long as I’ve been kayaking, even before I became a “dirt bag”, I heard stories of the fabled “trees”: a side gig most kayakers have had at some point to fund travel.
People like Brad McMillan, who holds the world record for an open boat descent, have been working this gig for nine years. He started out selling trees on a lot, then began doing the behind the scenes work. After a couple years he made his way up to managing the shipping and receiving end. In the past he’s used the funds he makes working trees to compete at events like the Teva Mountain Games. This year he plans to use his money for a Grand Canyon trip with his girlfriend and then return to school in the spring.
This year Rowan Stuart worked on our lot. She flew in from where she had been competing in the United Kingdom on Thanksgiving Day to work for a little over a week. We squeezed her onto a shelf in the back of the trailer, and displayed her First Place trophy in the window.
Trees are hard work, but don’t get me wrong, we make the most of it. We transform stark work trailers into warm, cozy living places, with rugs we roll out at night and pictures on the walls, torn from travel magazines, of the trips we pine after. Once the lots slow down for the night, we gather in the small living space. Empty milk crates turn into game tables, beer flows abundantly, and a couple times a week we all pitch in for a family meal made in our cast iron skillet.
We swap stories from the day, telling each other about the artist who came looking for the “ugliest tree on the lot”, or the couple from Canada who argued in Romanian over stands. As the night winds down, we roll up the carpet, sweep the floors and begin pulling down beds from where they’ve been stashed during the day. Settling into our somewhat lumpy air mattresses and Paco pads in our various perches, we rest our bones and get ready for another day. In a few shorts weeks, we’ll be headed to Ecuador and the Grand Canyon for the winter, where crystal clear waters will reward us as pay off for the weeks we spend living in parking lots.
