Not Men of the Liberated Mindset

I am a small woman, but I do a lot of volunteer work to maintain hiking trails, and a few years ago was also doing landscape restoration work for pay. Here's the true story of one afternoon at a job site.

Trail folk would have had a good laugh today. I met some volunteer helpers from the University of Michigan at one of my clients' sites this afternoon. Their assignment was to help me remove buckthorn, an invasive shrubby tree, from a fencerow. These volunteers were young men from the MBA program who are certainly not used to spending an afternoon with a saw. Matt and Anu were sent to me and I taught them how to identify the buckthorn and set them to work. They clipped and sawed away, and created a great pile of brushy refuse. I was quite content with their work.

Then Anu, a fellow from India, noticed that I had just cut down a four-inch tree. He said, with characteristic lilting accent," Here, it is taking us all this time to clip these branches, and she has cut down a whole tree!" That was the end of that! I guess they hadn't yet learned to be men of the 1990's. From then on I hardly ever had a tool in my hand again. More volunteers were being sent to me as the other jobs were finished, but our tool inventory was pitiful. I had brought with me two bow saws of good quality, and a pair of adequate but small hand clippers. The client provided one pair of abused loppers. So whenever a guy saw me actually using a tool, he would rip it out of my hands, saying, "let me do that." (I know none of you guys these days would do that, right?) It's a good thing those loppers were too dull to even bother to consider trimming their ears.

It's amazing how adamant they were about using the saws since some of them did not know how to saw at all, let alone cut down a tree. One crew of two guys brought me over to look at a saw stuck in the tree. They were industriously trying to make another cut with the second saw to free the first one. I guess I must have succeeded at not snickering as I showed them how they could just push the cut open to free the first saw from binding. They were very grateful, and almost amazed when I showed them how to cut both sides of the tree to control where it would fall. "I guess you've done this before..." Tom ventured.

Then there was the difficulty of the work. Um, actually I have to admit that I had hardly begun to sweat even when I did manage to hang on to a saw. Anu said with awe, "You have great stamina."

"I do this all the time," I replied, trying to be honest, but probably sounding falsely modest. I guess MBA's don't spend a lot of time sawing their desks. On a trail work day we would have just left the trailhead to begin some actual endeavor in the same amount of time it took this group to decide that I had great stamina.

I had to practically throw rocks at them to make them go get their cold drinks when Patrick (the volunteer coordinator) called them. They wanted me to come too. "I'm being paid for this time, " I insisted, "but you should go get your drinks." Again, they demonstrated either that they are genuinely polite fellows, or alternatively that they are not up to speed on how to treat unconventional women. They wouldn't go, and Patrick kept calling them. After much insistence by me Matt finally said, "I'm going to go get some water." The others did follow his lead, but when they returned Anu brought me a glass of water. I graciously drank it. Oh, heck, I probably looked surly rather than gracious. Hopefully, they didn't know me well enough to tell the difference.

Anyway, it was a great afternoon in terms of accomplishment. We cleared huge piles of the buckthorn, and six or seven other students dragged the prickly stuff down the access road to its final composting place.

They each shook my hand when they left, and I told them they were now botany experts... on buckthorn at any rate. I made sure that they could tell the difference between the buckthorn's blue-black berries which cause awful diarrhea, and the blue-black wild grapes which tasted pretty good that year. We sampled the grapes.

Patrick told me later that they asked him, "Who was that lady who worked so hard?" making me feel a bit like the Lone Ranger ("Who was that masked man?") I galloped off into the sunset: Da da dah, Da da dah, da da dah, dah, dah! Well, I did drive home and have some ice cream. I must deserve it, eh?