It’s chillin’ and grillin’ season and I should be talking about fishing with the long weekend ahead but I have other fish to fry, figuratively speaking. So, you know how good it feels when you help someone? That’s what I am going to talk about today. For the last 20-some years I have helped Big River Rich plant trees in the Big River Valley.  

I can’t tell you the exact year I was recruited to be an ATPT (Assistant Tree Planting Technician) but I can take you to the spot where I planted my first trees under the watchful eye of the HTPT (Head Tree Planting Technician), a/k/a Big River Rich. The pine trees are now shade bearing and I would guesstimate that they are close to 20 feet tall. 

When I received the call this year from Big River Rich, I accepted immediately. I have benefited in numerous ways recreating on his land. I have hunted grouse, turkeys, deer, morel mushrooms, ginseng and shed antlers. I have also caught trout and watched countless woodcocks during their spring mating ritual. Helping plant trees is a very small price to pay.  

This year's tree planting included Fraser firs, plum trees, swamp oak and sugar maple. We wheeled around the property and planted trees here, there and everywhere that looked like it needed a new tree. The further into the planting we got, the better and more efficient our tree planting system became. After some fine tuning, Big River Rich would go ahead of me and either spike the hole with a tree spade or auger out a hole with a tree drill. The Indiana Jones moment of the day came when I was reaching down into the hole as a snake was coming out. “Why did it have to be snakes?” Okay, it was just a garter snake which is not life threatening, but that yellow and black slithering reptile came shooting out of that hole like it was gunning for me. Startled, I rolled backwards away from the strike zone and my actions told Big River Rich that snakes are pretty much my least favorite thing in the whole wide world.  

For the rest of the morning the tree planting was uneventful, but I remained pretty cautious from that point on when it came to pushing the saplings into the holes. When the back of the wheeler was empty of trees, the job was done. I felt good about what I had just done; I always do. It felt like I repaid a debt to Big River Rich, even though he would never look at it that way. I also felt like I repaid another debt for all the years of use, this one being paid to Mother Nature.  

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