An ISFP man’s standard hands back a verdict — this is right, that is a lie — and hands it back whole, with no case underneath it to cross-examine. Which means you can always win the argument. Winning it is the injury, and the flat, wordless man everyone describes afterward is what winning it produces.
In 2006 a man on the Fairgrounds side wanted us to top three silver maples so he could see the water, and he had cash, and Ruben Sandoval was standing in the yard with his gear already loaded.
I told him what the job was.
“No.”
I said the man had been told by two other outfits that it was fine.
“It’s not fine.”
I asked him what I was supposed to tell the customer.
Ruben set the saw down in the bed and looked at it a moment, which is what he does in place of taking a breath.
“Tell him we don’t do that,” he said. “Or send somebody else, and I’ll be at the shop.”
I sent somebody else. The crew topped three silver maples that week and made nine hundred dollars, and I logged it, and two of those trees are gone now and the third one is a hazard that somebody is going to pay five thousand dollars to remove, and the man who wanted the water view sold in 2013.
Ruben came to Trussell Tree in 2004. He was thirty-two and he had worked for four companies in twelve years, which I knew when I hired him and which my father asked me about twice. He is a compact, deliberate man who moves through a canopy the way other people move through their own kitchen. He does not talk on a job. He eats the same thing. He has a way of putting a hand flat on a trunk before he goes up that I watched for fifteen years and never once asked him about, and I have wished since that I had asked him about it. He can look at a limb and tell you within a foot where the rot stops, and he is right, and if you ask him how he will say he doesn’t know, and he is not being coy, he does not know.
Trussell Tree & Landscape was my father’s. Carl started it in 1979 with a chipper he financed against the house, and by the time I took the office in 1996 we were nine trucks in three counties. We do residential pruning and removals, storm work, and a cabling and bracing business that nobody else around here wants. Arborline Group bought us in 2016 along with six other companies. I am a branch manager now. There is a sign at the shop with my father’s name on it that Arborline’s brand people have twice proposed replacing and have twice been talked out of, which is the entirety of what I have won in ten years.
Here is what everybody at this company says about Ruben Sandoval, and I have said it myself on a phone call with Arborline about staffing.
Best hand I ever had. Never told anybody anything. One day the locker’s empty.
The second and third parts of that are things I did to him. I have known that for about six weeks.
Angelo Bustos gave notice on the fifteenth. He gave no reason. He is the best climber in this branch and Ruben trained him, and his last day is in three days, and I know exactly what the shape of this is because I have seen it before and I made it happen before, and I am going to have to decide by the weekend what I am going to say to him.
Chip Dunavant, who ran plant health care for the region, had a line he used in every crew meeting for three years.
“Nobody ever got in trouble for finding work.”
The Collar
Where you make the cut is the whole of pruning and almost nobody outside the trade knows there is a decision in it.
Where a branch meets the trunk there is a swelling — a collar, a ring of trunk tissue that wraps the base of the branch. The tree’s ability to seal a wound lives in that ring. Cut outside it, right at the shoulder, and the tree closes the wound over the next several seasons and the trunk stays sound. Cut flush, taking the collar with it, and the tree cannot close it, and you have opened the trunk itself to whatever is in the air. Leave a stub too long and the stub dies back and rots inward and you have done the same thing slower.
There is one right place. It is not a matter of taste. The tree tells you where it is if you look, and the difference between the right cut and the wrong one, from the ground, on the day, is about an inch.
Five years later you can see it. Ten years later anybody in the trade can see it from the street. The homeowner who paid for it will never see it, will never know, and will have moved twice.
The other thing nobody outside the trade knows is that the tree does the closing, not you. You are not repairing anything. You are making a wound of a particular shape in a particular place and then the tree spends several seasons walling it off from the inside, and either your cut let it do that or your cut did not. Every argument in this business about quality is really an argument about a thing that will be settled by somebody else, later, without you, and that nobody is going to check.
The ice storm came through in 2007 and we ran fourteen-hour days for nineteen days and I fed forty-one people out of the shop on paper plates and a borrowed roaster. Every company in this business has a storm they date things by. Ours is that one. The diner on Route 12 stayed open past midnight the whole time and would not take a dime from anybody in a Trussell shirt, and when Fern Tandy who owned it retired in 2018 my father, who does not go to things, went to that.
I have kept the book for the same men’s softball team since 1994. I have never played. I do not particularly like softball.
Verdicts
Ruben did not have opinions about things. He had a reading, and the reading came back finished, and there was nothing underneath it to argue with.
That is not the same as being stubborn and it took me a long time to see the difference. A stubborn man has a position and defends it and can be moved by a better argument. Ruben would listen to your whole argument, and agree that it was a good argument, and then not do the thing. He was not withholding a counter-argument. There was no counter-argument in him. There was a verdict, and the verdict was about this tree, on this street, for these people, and it had arrived whole before you finished your sentence.
The other thing about it is that it was always about the particular one. He never once made a policy statement. He never said we shouldn’t top trees. He said not that one, and if you had asked him to write a company standard he could not have done it, and I know because I asked him to in 2011 and got back a page with three sentences on it that were all about a specific job on Ordell Street.
He was also completely calibrated. In twenty-two years I never saw him refuse anything for the sake of refusing. He took ugly work, cheap work, cleanup work, and the removals nobody else wanted. He took down a healthy fifty-year oak for a woman whose foundation it was into and did not say a word about it, because it was into her foundation.
Nita Kessig climbed for us from 2012 to 2016 and had the same thing, and I want it on the page that I saw it and did nothing with it. Nita walked off a job in 2014 over a removal she said was a lie, and she was right, and what happened next is the whole difference. When Ruben walked off a job it became a story people told. Ruben wouldn’t top a tree for the mayor. That story got told at bid meetings and it got him hired at the next place at the same rate, because he’s a hell of a hand travels and outlives whatever else is said about a man. Nita got a reputation for being difficult, and that traveled too, and it got there first, and she does municipal work in another state now and is very good and would not come back here. What the identical walk-off buys a woman in this trade, and how much shorter her list of employers gets, is a separate reckoning and it sits over here.
Four companies in twelve years before us. I looked at that résumé in 2004 and thought: has trouble with authority. I hired him anyway because my father said hire the hands and manage the mouth later.
I have the list now, because I went and got it. Two of them went out of business inside three years of him leaving. One is still running and had a state citation in 2003 for the exact thing he left over.
My father is eighty-nine and I asked him about it at the kitchen table this spring.
“Twelve years, four companies,” I said.
He thought about that longer than I wanted him to.
“Four times he was right,” he said, and picked the paper back up.
Plant Health
Arborline’s plant health care program came to this branch in 2017 and I want to describe it accurately, because the version where I was tricked is not available to me.
The pitch was reasonable and mostly true. Homeowners underinvest in the trees they have. A soil injection program, a systemic treatment schedule, a dormant oil application, an annual inspection — most of it real work with real benefit, sold on a subscription instead of a call. Recurring revenue at forty-one per cent margin against fourteen on production.
I did the model. It was beautiful. I want that sentence in here on its own.
The part that made it work was the diagnosis sheet. A crew leader or an arborist walks the property and marks what he sees, and the sheet goes to the customer with a recommendation and a price, and the crew is credited on what converts. Chip’s number was that a good property yields twelve hundred dollars of program work on the first walk.
Chip ran a meeting in the shop that spring with a projector and doughnuts. He was not a cynic. I want that down, because a cynic would have been easier to stop. He believed that most homeowners let good trees decline for want of somebody telling them, which is true, and that the industry had been leaving money and trees on the table for thirty years, which is also true.
Somebody asked what happens if you walk a property and it’s all fine.
“Then it’s all fine,” Chip said. “Write it up as fine.” He clicked to the next slide. “I’ll tell you what I’ve never seen, though, and I’ve walked a lot of properties.”
That is the whole trick and it took me three years to see it stated out loud. He never once told anybody to lie. He built a room in which finding nothing was a thing you had to be brave about.
Ruben walked properties for about five months.
Winifred Loach is eighty-four and has been on Bellwood since 1971 and had a red maple, two pin oaks, and a dogwood her husband put in the year he retired. Between 2017 and 2020 she bought nine thousand four hundred dollars of treatments for problems those trees did not have. Her granddaughter found the invoices last year.
I have the sheets. Ruben signed the first two. On the first one, in the recommendation box, he wrote monitor. On the second one he wrote monitor and then, in the margin, dogwood is fine.
After that his signature stops. There are nine more sheets for that property over three years and they carry Trey Vandermark’s initials, and Trey was a salesman who had never been up a tree in his life. Nobody in this office noticed the handoff, including me, and I approve every one of those invoices.
I asked Trey about it last year, before he left for a lawn company.
“He said he wasn’t going to do the walks anymore,” Trey said. “So I did them.”
I asked whether anybody had told him to.
“Somebody had to do them,” he said.
The Argument I Won
In the fall of 2017 Ruben came into the office at the end of a day, which he did not do, and stood.
He said he wasn’t going to walk properties anymore.
I asked him why not and he said it wasn’t right. I asked him what specifically wasn’t right and he said the sheets. I asked which part of the sheets and he was quiet a good while before he said, “You know.”
I did know. And I argued with him for twenty minutes and I won.
I want to put down what I actually said, because I have gotten good at not remembering it. I said that the treatments were real treatments. I said that he was welcome to write monitor on every sheet he ever touched, which was true, and which I knew he could not do to a customer’s face for years on end. I said that if he walked out the other crews would still walk properties and the only difference would be that a man who cared was no longer the one looking at the trees. I said the branch had nineteen families on the payroll and the program was the reason we were making our number. I said, and this is the one, that I could not fix a system he had left.
Every one of those was true. None of them touched what he had said, which was that it wasn’t right, because there was nothing in what he said for an argument to grab.
He stood there and he did not have a second thing to say, because there is no second thing. Then: “All right.” He went home. He stayed almost two more years.
The following spring we bid a job on Ordell Street that was a removal I did not like and he did not like, a healthy hackberry a buyer wanted gone before closing. I brought it to the yard on purpose, to see.
“You want this one?”
He looked at the sheet. “Sure.”
I said it was a healthy tree.
“It is,” he said, and put the sheet on the seat, and asked whether Angelo could run the ropes.
He was different afterward and everybody noticed and nobody could name it. He stopped saying no. He also stopped saying anything else. He trained Angelo and he did the work and he was, if you asked the crews, exactly the same man, and if you had known him before you could see that something had been taken out and the space had closed over.
I told myself I had kept him.
He did not give notice. On a morning in 2019 the locker was empty and his gear bag was gone and there was no note, and Jerrold Mattes called me from the yard and said he thought Ruben had quit, and I asked what made him think so, and Jerrold said because the locker’s empty.
I called him twice that week. He picked up the second time.
I asked whether there was anything I could have done.
“No,” he said. He was in a truck; I could hear it. “Elspeth, it’s all right.”
And I started in about the certification, and about the branch, and he let me get all the way to the end of it, and then he said he had to go, and he was not being cold, and I have played that back enough times to know that he was answering the only question I had actually asked, which was about me.
Bellwood
This spring the granddaughter’s complaint went to the state, and Arborline sent counsel, and I did the thing counsel told me not to do, which was go out and look at the trees myself.
I took Angelo because he knows the property.
Winifred Loach came out on the step with a cardigan on and told us to take our time and asked whether we wanted coffee, twice, and I have not stopped thinking about the coffee.
The red maple has a pruning cut on the north side about fourteen feet up, from a crown reduction we did in 2011, and the wound is a closed oval with a clean ring of callus all the way around it, and it looks like a scar on a person who healed.
Angelo saw it before I did.
“That’s his.”
I asked how he knew.
“Look at the shoulder.” He walked around to get the light. “You cut that flush, that’s a hole in the trunk for twenty years. He put it right on the collar.” He stood there a second. “There’s two more on the pin oak. Those aren’t his.”
They were not. They were flush cuts, from 2016, and the trunk under both of them has a dark stain running down it, and they will not close, and that tree has maybe fifteen years now instead of eighty.
Angelo said, “Who did those?”
I said I’d have to look it up. I do not have to look it up.
Angelo put his hand on the trunk below the stain and left it there a second, which is a thing I had watched Ruben do for fifteen years and had never once connected to anything.
“He’d have taken the whole limb back to the union,” Angelo said. “Or left it. He’d have left it.”
I stood in that yard a while with an eighty-four-year-old woman offering me coffee out of a house she has paid nine thousand four hundred dollars of nothing out of, and the only honest thing anywhere on that property was a cut somebody made in 2011 that took a decade and a half to become visible.
On the way to the truck she asked me whether the dogwood was all right.
I said it was fine.
“That’s what the first fella said,” she said.
The Crew Report
Arborline ran an integration culture session at the regional office in 2016 with all the branch managers and the crew leaders from the acquired companies. Two days. There was an assessment. Everybody did it on a tablet in a hotel meeting room with the curtains shut.
It produced a binder called the crew composition report, and the regional director used it, sincerely and with a lot of goodwill, to build trucks. His theory, which he explained to us at the closing session, was that you never put two of the same kind of person on a truck — you pair a detail person with a people person, and you spread the steady ones across shifts so no crew is all one thing.
The binder has a page for everybody: the letters, a paragraph, a bar for something called coachability.
Ruben’s says ISFP.
I went and got that binder out of the storage room the week after Bellwood, and I read the appendix, which is the only part of that binder worth anything. What it says is that the letters compress an order: a habit that does most of the work, a second one it operates through, and, at the back, the ones a person can reach only slowly and at a price. How the order runs for this one gets set out where the type has its own page, drawn from the sixteen the binder’s grid was built off.
At the head of his run is a standard. Not rules and not ethics in the seminar sense — a private calibration, his own, which returns a finding about the thing in front of him: this is right, that is not, this is good enough, that is a lie. It returns it immediately and it returns it whole, and there is no chain of reasoning underneath it, because it was never assembled out of steps.
Which means, and this is the part I would pay money not to have understood, that you can always win. There is nothing under a verdict for an argument to get hold of. A man with a case can be beaten by a better case and a man with a verdict can only be beaten by force of talking, and I talked for twenty minutes in 2017 and the thing that gave way in that office was the instrument itself, not a position he was holding.
The second habit is what the standard runs on, and it is the physical particular. This tree. This cut. This woman’s dogwood. He could not turn it isn’t right into a policy because the finding does not live at the level policies live at. When I told him he could write monitor on every sheet, I thought I was giving him an out. I was telling him that his objection was general and could be handled generally. His objection was Winifred Loach’s dogwood, which he had already written down on a sheet, and there is no general version of that.
And at the back of his run sit the two that could have let him win. Building an external case — criteria, evidence, a memo, a policy argument that another person can be walked through and made to concede. And the long forward view, the one that would have let him say in three years this program will produce a complaint from a granddaughter. Those two are the entire operating language of a company. Everything an organization does is one case set against another case. He had a finding and no apparatus, and a finding with no apparatus has exactly two available moves, which are silence and the door, and he used both of them in front of me and I read the first as agreement and the second as a character trait.
The plain thing, and it should not be buried down here: when somebody asks you to put your name on a diagnosis you do not believe, that is not a values-fit conversation and it does not get resolved by somebody explaining the margin to you. Depending on the trade it is a licensing board, a state consumer protection office, or an attorney, and in a lot of places there are protections for the person who reports it. The reason it comes at you feeling like a personality problem is that the company is describing it that way, and a company describing it that way is information.
The binder’s own methodology page says the assessment is a development tool and should not be used for staffing or selection. That page is two pages before the crew composition tables. The regional director wrote the tables himself.
He also told us, at the closing session, that if you retake the thing a month later about a third of people come out with a letter different, and that the scales underneath it hold up much better than the boxes.
Somebody asked him then how much of the crew report he’d built off it.
“All of it,” he said. “It’s the best data we’ve got.”
Three Days
Angelo’s last day is at the end of next week and it is now the weekend before.
Two things reversed on me at Bellwood and neither is the one I expected.
The Fairgrounds job in 2006, first. For twenty years that one has been a company anecdote about the day we found out Ruben had a line, and I told it warmly, and the punchline was always that we made the money anyway. What was actually happening in that yard is that he had already been to four companies, and he already knew what the next twenty minutes would cost him, and he said send somebody else and I’ll be at the shop — which is a man offering to be paid less that day rather than take the money. I logged it as a scheduling problem.
Then 2017, and All right. I have carried that for nine years as him coming around. What all right meant is that he had run out of the only two things he has and had decided that the door was not yet worth it, because Angelo was two years in and because the other crews would still be walking properties. He did not come around. He went quiet, and I got two more years of his hands and none of the rest of him, and I called that keeping him.
The parts the binder had no room for: he keeps every saw he has ever owned in a shed behind his house, twenty-some of them, and has not sold one; his brother has been in and out of trouble since the nineties and Ruben has never once mentioned him to me; and he refused, for fifteen years, to be photographed for anything, including the company holiday card and a newspaper feature that would have been good for both of us, and I never learned why, and there is no line on that binder page it would go under.
He climbs for an outfit two towns over. I know what he makes, because it is a small trade and everybody knows. It is nine dollars an hour less than what I could put in front of him tomorrow, and he has been there almost seven years, which is longer than he has ever stayed anywhere, and the owner over there is seventy-one and does not sell subscriptions to anything.
I called Angelo yesterday and asked if he’d come by the shop before he goes.
He said he would.
I have the argument. I built it on the drive back from Bellwood without deciding to, and it is a good argument — the branch is nineteen families, he is twenty-six months from a certification the company pays for, the program is under review at the regional level, and a man who cares is better in the truck than out of it. Every one of those is true, and I know precisely what it is, and I wrote it down anyway, which is the most honest thing I can tell you about myself.
What I have not worked out is what to ask him instead.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.