Dedicated to the friendship that has taken hold here.
--Jim
Today, the first day of March, my first in Paris this year, and the first day in which the Euro is now the only legal tender in the “Eurozone”, I went for a walk in Luxembourg Garden. It was a cool and pleasant day to be there.
Looking for buds leafing out on the old trees, I found a crew trimming them. The French do this, much as the English might trim their hedges. The heavy pruning makes the trees more dense, but it also gives the viewer a stronger sense of perspective. As you look down the rows of trees, with sky separating them, the wedge of sky shifts as you move right or left, eventually disappearing as the rows merge together. The wedge is geometric, though it is the geometry of nature not mane, since the line that the trimmer sets the line by eye. No measurements are taking place. I have suspected this, but yesterday it was confirmed.
In the lower part of the Garden, before I found the crew, I saw evidence of their presence. A pile of brush was left behind -- perhaps a final load that wouldn’t fit on the truck yesterday. Seeing the pile, so carefully stacked, I thought “even here, even in their manual labor, the French think “art”. I spent some time with my camera, but the effect of the pile of parallel sticks didn’t look the same in the two dimensions of the camera. The third was missing -- and critical. Even the small stack of bits and pieces, the parts that wouldn’t stack well, lost their life through the lens.
In the upper part of the park, on the path I take to Boulevard Montparnasse, I found the crew. A large white truck was using an arm with a claw to pick up the stacks of branches. It must work well for the first bite or two, when the compression of the branches holds the mass together, but the operator was having trouble getting the last bite to remain in the claw long enough to get it onto the truck. “Mairdre” he said when it slipped out of his iron grasp. It was late enough in the day that the push to finish was on, and he must have begun thinking of joining his friends for a beer and soccer on TV.
The chief trimmer, perhaps a crew chief for “Mouquette et fils”, the company who was trimming the trees, was about 30 feet off the ground in a basket on a powered man-lift. He was slashing along the imaginary line with a rotating eight inch circular saw blade on the end of an eight foot arm. He was experienced enough that he didn’t often look back to find his line. He steadily worked his way forward as far as he could reach both up and down, then started the engine on the platform below to move it forward another eight feet. Only then did he look back to evaluate his line. I suppose that by doing this, he could compensate for any error on the next section, and over the several hundred feet of the row, only a slight wobble in the line would be visible.
Accompanying the two large machines were an array of ladders and three other men working, the whole being enclosed in the red and white warning tape.
Most of the ladders were ordinary, but one step ladder was about 25 feet tall and mounted on a platform with wheels, looking something like the kind of toy that a very large child might pull with a string, or the sort of thing that might be rolled up to a castle to storm the walls. Nearby was a man whose job description probably included climbing this ladder to trim the lower sections of the trees. If so, I would like to see it done, for he was now slashing away from the ground in a very animated fashion. He would look for a few seconds, pole on the ground, and then attack the lower branches with long and forceful over-the-head swings. At the end of the pole was mounted a thin, curved blade about one foot long,
I have trimmed above my head enough to know that it is tough work and something most people couldn’t do for more than ten minutes at a time. This man, whose job it was to do this daily, was still making ferocious strikes at the limbs late in the afternoon. He must have a very powerful upper body, I thought -- no need to go to the gym tonight to work out.
Following along behind both trimmers were two men with rakes, whose job it was to form the piles. They first pushed as much as possible to the new stack, then pitched it on top. No stick of more than 10 inches escaped them.
This job of trimming trees must be a common site in France, for nobody else was watching. As I watched, the crew must have become aware of me. When I pulled a camera out, there was a visible reaction. After a minute of taking pictures, one of the rakers worked his way over toward the plastic tape where I stood and said something like “are you looking for work”. He was joking, of course, but I said, “looks too difficult for me”. Hearing my answer and my accent, he smiled. He looked African, with a large smile full of white teeth and with a broad scar on one cheek, an old knife wound I thought.
“Are you Italian?”, he asked, still raking, with one eye toward the crew chief. “No, I’m American.” When I said something else, which was not “Where are you from?” he said anyway, “Mali.”. A familiar conversation for both of us.
While we talked, the second trimmer who was working on the ground had moved a few feet closer, and was now close enough that I wondered how often one of the rakers got sliced. There seemed to be an ease with which they normally worked, each worker careful to stay in their zone, each aware of the exact place and movement patterns of the others.
The trimmer yelled something to the raker, and pointed to another trimming pole lying nearby. “Back to work, you”, I suppose. The raker ignored him for long enough to say, “Is there much work in America”. “There is a lot of work in America”, I answered. He smiled and said, “Next year I will go to America”.
What a journey his life is, I thought. How beautiful these old trees are.
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Topic: Yet another postcard from Paris (Read 1622 times)