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    • Maine Tales. There’s No More Trees. Hunts Point, New York. Circa 1982. As a general rule, in Aroostook Count

    [ad_1] Maine Tales. There’s No More Trees. Hunts Point, New York. Circa 1982. As a general rule, in Aroostook County we take a man at his word even when a tale sounds outlandish. But when the story takes place in New York it becomes easier to swallow. Ever since the last glaciers melted 10,000 years ago, Maine has been chock full of trees. Even counting in potato ground, 90% of our land is covered by trees, and that makes Maine the most forested State in the Union. After the good years of the 1940s and 1950s, the potato business started to sour in the 1960s. Up until its peak in the early 1950s, Maine remained #1 in potatoes nationwide and farmers annually grew close to a quarter million acres. By the mid-1970s, Maine’s potato acreage had dropped down to 147,000 acres, most all of that potato ground up here in Northern Maine. Looking to find a purpose, a certain percentage of that former potato land was planted to Christmas trees. Typically seven years after planting, the pampered and fussed-over trees are ready to harvest. Once cut and hauled out of the field, the trees are strait-jacketed – in the old days with sisal baling twine, and nowadays with sleek green plastic-mesh-girdles. The very first Christmas trees are cut, hauled, compressed and loaded onto trucks around Thanksgiving. It takes six-hundred Christmas trees to fill up a tractor trailer. For the next four weeks a Christmas tree farm becomes a beehive of stooping, sawing and hefting activity. Truckload after truckload of Christmas trees head south to anywhere there happens to be population density. Back in the glory days of the ‘Maine Potato Empire,’ Aroostook potatoes were shipped most every month of the year. Tablestock shipping would begin at harvest, but then loads would pick up significantly after the first of the year. That was because in states like Pennsylvania, where Fall-warmth lasted and potato cellars couldn’t cool down quick enough, farmers’ ability to keep potatoes in good condition too far past Christmas was exhausted. After the New Year, wholesale potato prices would then trend higher and Aroostook tablestock shipments would crank up mightily. Add to that the fact that in January truckloads of Maine Certified Seed Potatoes would begin to be shipped out to farmers down South. In that era on any given mid-Winter weekday, were you to leave Houlton around 4pm and drive through the snow the 42 miles north to Presque Isle along U.S. Route One, you would have crossed paths with 80-100 tractor-trailers hauling Aroostook County spuds southbound. But this story is supposed to be about Christmas trees. Suffice to say a lot of potato truckers were short on work before Christmastime. That potato-work-void was fortuitously filled by hauling Christmas trees down from Northern Maine. Joe was one such Aroostook trucker and he’d had a busy December hauling load after load of Christmas trees into one of the big wholesale buyers with a stall at the Hunt’s Point Produce Market in New York City. So according to plan, in those final days leading up to Santa’s busy night, the supply of trees old enough for harvest by the Christmas tree grower Joe was hauling for, had run out. As the very last Christmas tree was hefted onto Joe’s truck, the tree grower called out to Joe, “Tell Mario this is the last load.” And with that, as night was falling in Aroostook County, Maine, Joe climbed into his truck cab and began the twelve-hour midnight run down to the Bronx. The night passed and it was almost daylight once again when Joe backed his truck up to the familiar loading dock at Hunt’s Point. Immediately, one employee began unloading the Christmas trees by hand and leaned them outside up against a concrete wall. Joe handed his stack of paperwork to the typically animated and caffeinated supervisor, Mario. Then Joe turned around to walk back and lay down in the truck cab to catch some shut eye. Before Joe had taken but a few steps, he remembered the admonition to apprise Mario of the updated Christmas tree supply situation, “Oh, yeah. He said to tell ya, this is the last load.” “Last load? Whaddya mean, ‘the last load’? I can sell four more loads!” exclaimed the short-fused and excitable Mario. “Well, it’s the last load. There’s no more trees,” replied Joe. “What the hell do you mean ‘no more trees!’ I need four more loads,” an increasingly agitated Mario emphatically repeated, just in case Joe hadn’t understood his explanation the first time. “Sorry, that’s all the trees there is. He said to tell ya.” And with that Joe turned around, walked back to the cab, climbed up and in to lay down. In a matter of minutes Joe was peacefully sawing logs. However, that was not to be the only sawing which was to be going on. Before too long, Joe was abruptly roused from his sleep by the noisy whine of a chain saw running at full throttle. It seems Mario was attacking Christmas trees and sawing each one in half. Almost immediately the chain saw cacophony drew out Mario’s boss onto the loading dock. “What the hell's goin’ on?” shouted the incredulous, wide-eyed boss to Mario. “There’s no more trees,” responded Mario. “There’s no more trees?” repeated the dumbfounded boss, mouth dropped wide open. “Nope, this is the last load,” Mario soberly clarified. When full realization of Mario’s words had at last sunk in, the boss brusquely commanded, “Gimme that saw.” Then together, the boss and Mario commenced lickety-split to saw-in-half every one of those once-pristine Maine Christmas trees. In a Christmas miracle they were creating New-York-style loaves-and-fishes magic. Jim

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