The Treemen Cometh, Part One

Adam Mathews wakes up a little before 7 a.m., just as the November sun rises over Queens. Bret is on one side of the room, Willy on the other, wrapped in their sleeping bags. Before last night, they hadn’t seen each other in at least a year. Like kids at a sleep over they had stayed up talking and laughing.

Mathews should be more tired, but a hum of energy runs through him. He is psyched, pumped. He’s actually surprised he slept at all. It’s the day before Thanksgiving. He’s ready to go—today he becomes a tree man again. But unlike year’s past, Adam is going to run his own stand, his own way. This year, they are going make something really special happen.

Adam rouses the others. They sleep in outdoor clothes and have various lengths of hair, facial and otherwise. Bret and Willy are part of Adam’s crew; they’re his like-minded posse of seasonal-working, adventure-seeking travelers. Some are from his hometown of Buffalo. Some are just kindred spirits he’s met on his travels. A group of them—six in all—heed his call for a chance at excitement, hard work and a few thousand dollars in earnings as New York City urban-camping tree men.

Downstairs is Adam’s right-hand man this year, the other Willie—Willie Jay, also from outside of Buffalo. Willie and Adam make an interesting pair. At over six-foot tall, Adam is skinny, with, long hair. He is handsome, with round, full facial features. Willie comes up to about Adam’s shoulder and is stockier— he played middle linebacker in high school—with a full beard over his sharp face and long hair of his own.

Adam sounds sort of like Woody Guthrie. Willie finishes most sentences with a laugh.

They stand in the kitchen, making small talk; how everyone slept, how they were feeling, recounting some of the conversations from the night before. They are joined by a big, middle-aged man named Greg. It is his house in College Point they crashed at that night and it would be his Christmas tree business of nearly 30 years that they would work for.

Everyone is eager to get on the road. They split into teams: Bret and Willy get in Bret’s van and head to the Central Park stand. Adam and Willie enter Willie’s white Oldsmobile sedan and they follow Greg’s truck. Their place of employment and home—their entire lives for the next month—is in Brooklyn.

The first time Adam considered selling Christmas trees, he was on his bike, riding through Astoria on his way to his delivery job in Midtown. It was shortly after Thanksgiving in 2006 and the cold was starting to set in but if you kept moving, you kept warm. Luckily the trip from Astoria provided plenty of time for working up some heat.

It was the pop-up Volkswagen trailer that first caught his eye—so cool—but he soon noticed the woman sitting outside by the trees. He stopped. Surrounded by her Christmas trees, the woman sat bundled up against the cold, sipping a gourd of yerba maté. Most people wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but Adam had a gourd of his own from Argentina—it was a reminder of the time and experiences down there.

“You drink maté,” Adam half-stated, half-asked.

The woman smiled; a quirky, Mona Lisa-kind of smile. She did, she said. From her accent he could tell she was Quebecoise. “I got it in South America,” she said.

“What were you doing down there,” he asked, sensing a connection.

“Travel. Hitchhike. Ride bikes—whatever we wanted to,” she said. They were also exactly the same things Adam liked to do. This woman totally had a gypsy soul; a free-range attitude, an unencumbered way of operating.

He rode away. How great was that? She was totally different than anyone else he’d run across in New York City.

The visit with the woman stuck with him. He went back to visit her again not long after, bringing a bag of fresh maté with him, as a sort of offering. It was, after all, hard to find good maté in New York City at the time. She was pleased and thankful and that was the last time he would see her.

But he was struck by the experience, something about the quality of a person who would sit out in the freezing cold, on a New York City sidewalk, for weeks on end, selling Christmas trees. It seemed like an adventure.

Adam and Willie get out of the car. The stand is on Driggs Avenue, between Lorimer Street and Manhattan Avenue—the most northeastern portion of McCarren Park. There are a couple bars across the street, condos rising over everything else on another side. Everywhere else was park; naked trees, swing sets, and well-worn pathways cut through browning grass—New York City in late autumn.

Greg exits his truck and joins them. A pile of two-by-fours sit under a tarp on the cobblestone sidewalk. He and Adam walk the block as Greg explains his vision of the stand.

“You should have A-frame stands running from here,” he says, pointing to the middle of the block, “to about here—you know, about two-thirds the way down.

“We’ll put the picture stands with the holes in them so the kids can take their picture looking like Santa at one end here, OK? You should put a row of stands against the fence there—use zip ties to secure them. Put them every, oh, maybe six or seven feet apart.

“Put a tarp over the trailer and the tables we’ll put in the middle, underneath, so everything’ll be covered,” he says. “The generator and trailer should be delivered soon. Any questions?”

“When are the trees getting here,” Adam asks.

“I don’t know. Don’t worry about the trees—no matter what, you’re not going to be ready for them.”

Greg gets back into his truck, leaving Adam and Willie stationary next to the pile of wood.

“OK,” Adam says. “Let’s get to work.”

Greg’s into-the-fire shove of Adam and Willie wasn’t that big a deal. The other guys might be scrambling, but this isn’t Adam’s first time on a tree stand. It wasn’t even his first time on a stand owned by Greg.

The trailer and the generator shows up shortly after Greg’s departure. The night before they’d debated where to put it—sidewalk or street. The permit they had from the Parks Department let them do either, but Greg was worried about street sweeping and tickets. Adam wasn’t concerned; if they kept the stand as orderly and neat has he planned, the sweepers wouldn’t really have a need to hit that part of the street.

The trailer is of the kind you find on construction sites—white vinyl exterior, ’70s grandmother’s basement wood paneling interior. It isn’t huge—about 20-by-8 feet—but it is Adam and Willie’s home, an exaggerated tent for their month-long urban camping experience.

By the late afternoon, the skeleton of the tree stand is almost up. Vertical two-by-fours are lashed to the park’s chest-high iron fence with plastic zip ties. Support feet stretched out from the bottom and lateral supports are screwed between them. Similar stands are set up on the street: an A-frame of two-by-fours at either end, connected by more two-by-fours in the top and the middle, and another (sometimes more than one) sits between the two long pieces for support.

The trailer is parked in the middle of the block. Across from it, a 12-foot wall of plywood is setup—a backdrop for the Christmas accessory table that will come. Adam isn’t too thrilled about it. It’s boring and stark. He has to see how everything will look setup, but they might have to make some changes.

Setting up a tree stand isn’t a haphazard or casual affair for Adam. Everything is done for maximum affect. In the end this isn’t going to be just a place where someone comes to buy something; it will be an experience, an enchanted forest. “We just want to make everything nice, keep everything clean,” he says. “We want to be happy—we are happy. We want to make people happy. When they’re happy, they’ll buy a tree.”

They take a maté break inside the trailer. It is something they connected with early in their friendship. Both Willie and Adam had spent considerable time in South America. Both had come away deeply affected by the experience. Willie had spent a year abroad, in Argentina, during college. Adam had once done a cattle run with Argentinean guachos and even helped a doctor do some animal husbandry. Yerba maté had become the link to their experiences and something that brought many of their friends together.

Maté is drunk out of a wooden gourd through a metal straw. It’s a raw pungent tea, free-floating in hot water. The straw has holes in the submerged end—moving it is strictly forbidden, as a matter of protocol. The tea itself is strong; chalky and almost peppery, without the spiciness.

Someone knocks; the person is told to come in. A round, pretty, elfin face appears in the crack of the partially opened door.

“Hi, I’m Corrie,” the young woman says.

Greg had told Adam and Willie they should expect another member of their team at some point—Corrie Zaccaria. The night before, Greg had brought up Corrie’s Facebook page.

“She’s cute, right?” he asks Adam.

She was cute, sure, but Adam was worried. Like lots of cute, artsy girls on Facebook, she was striking a pose in most of the shots. Was this the sort of person he could count on to sling 8-foot-tall Christmas trees for 10 hours a day?

She steps into the trailer. She is petite and dressed like she lives in one of the surrounding hip neighborhoods (which, turns out, she does—Bushwick, to be exact). She, too, had sought seasonal work after her last gig when the U.S. Open had ended. Unlike Adam and Willie, Corrie is looking for something local—a bridge to get her through December before taking off to visit family in the Philippines in January. She answered an ad on Craigslist and now there she is.

“So where you guys from,” Corrie asks. She’s from New York City, born and raised.

“We’re from Buffalo,” Adam says.

“I’ve heard of it—you got a football team up there, right?”

“Yeah,” Willie responds. “Some waterfalls too.”

Willie laughs. Then they all laugh.

After Corrie receives her schedule and leaves, Adam and Willie get back to finishing the stands. Two A-frames are laid out on the cobblestone sidewalk. It’s already after 5pm and getting dark. They wait for an electrician to hook the generator up. Greg had been around earlier with one guy who balked at Greg’s offer. If another electrician doesn’t show up it will be hard to get someone out there on Thanksgiving Day. They will likely spend the night in the trailer, without heat.

[Read Part Two here].