The Treemen Cometh

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.

As they work, passersby
take notice of the stand. There aren’t a lot; it was, after all, the day before
Thanksgiving. McCarren Park is quiet, even for a holiday eve. Except for the
joggers—morning, night, pre-holiday, holiday, post-holiday, weekday or weekend,
they would never stop their incessant pacing.

One man walks by Willie on
the sidewalk. He’s wearing a long pea coat and dark-rimmed, stylish glasses. He
has a balding, round head and moves down the street quickly; he catches
Willie—in the middle of things, getting his head around what more they needed
to do before it gets dark—off guard.

"When
are you guys going to be open?" he asks.

Um…What
day is it? The only relevant thing is Thanksgiving. The trees are coming after
that, probably the day after. Willie knows that, so he says so.

"Friday," the man
reiterates. "Good."

The bald man walks away as
briskly as he came.

Adam’s first try at being a
tree man was a bust.

It was 2008 and a few years
had passed since his encounter with the maté-drinking Quebecoise. During the
fall, he was cruising Craigslist—something he often does—when he came across an
advertisement for seasonal help selling Christmas trees in New York City. Oh
yeah—he had forgotten about that. It had seemed like it would be such an
adventure. He hadn’t lined anything up for employment; why not give it a shot?

He emailed the contact on
the Craigslist ad. The guy got back to him. He said it was his first year
running tree stands and was looking for workers. In retrospect, considering the
amount of work—with permits, tree deliveries and everything else—that goes into
running a stand, that should have been the first sign of trouble. But Adam was
unaware of these things and maybe, despite his world travels, a bit nave about
the world of business.

The guy also told Adam he’d
need his own vehicle. He remembered back to the Canadian woman’s pop-up trailer.
Wouldn’t it be cool to get something like that? He started digging through
Craigslist in search of a cheap van or RV that could work.

What he came across was
better than he could have imagined. The picture was of a bright orange 1976
Winnebago, shot during a snowstorm. It looked amazing. $500. Was it legit? He
called the seller up and went to see it. After a day of consideration, he
decided to buy it.

With its bright orange
paint job and the blue stripes, it was the hulking roided-out cousin of the Dukes
of Hazard’s General Lee. She was a
beast; a big Dodge engine, remodeled on the inside to look more like a lounge
than a camper. And of course there was the horn: To Arm in Dixie. The General
Winnie—he couldn’t have been more pumped.

He had only about four days
to get everything ready to go. Over those days he kept in touch with the man in
New York City, whom he’d never met. He sounded reliable over the phone; he
sounded like a businessman.

The day he headed out for
the city, Adam had to make one stop first. A man by the name of Tony had been
hired as well, and he happened to live in downtown Buffalo. It wasn’t a nice
place, to put it kindly. Adam honked the horn; the battle hymn of the
Confederacy came blaring out.

When he saw Tony come out
of his house, he felt a bit nervous. Tony was an older African American man
with long dreadlocks—an actual Rastafarian. He opened the door to let him in to
the Winnebago. In popped Tony, all smiles.

“Can you honk that horn
again for my daughter,” he asked. “She loves it.” Adam obliged.

On the road, Adam found
himself really liking Tony. Tony had had a tough life, and told tales galore of
mishaps and misery. But through it all there was a streak of the positive,
always a silver lining. This drew him to Tony. Despite a world of difference
between the two of them, they shared a way of looking at and dealing with the
world: stay positive, embrace possibilities.

They drove through the
night and arrived in New York City at daybreak on Thanksgiving Day. The guy had
told Adam to drive to McCarren Park. He’d meet them there. Adam parked the
General Winnie and gave the guy a call. No answer. No worries—it was really
early. He’d take a nap and the guy would probably call him back soon. They’d be
tree men before he knew it.

He woke up a few hours
later. No phone call. He tried again. And again, no answer. There wasn’t a lot
to do, given the holiday. They meandered about the park. Adam stopped by other
tree sellers—even the stand he would eventually takeover—to see if anyone knew
who this tree guy was. No one had heard of him. Adam remained positive. How
could he not? He was about to live out a dream, in a way, and besides, New York
City beat Buffalo any day of the week.

Tony wasn’t so sure. He had
a daughter back home. In some ways, the divide in past fortunes setup a divided
response to the situation, one Adam soon got over. He could see, could
understand why Tony was having serious second thoughts. He kept calling, with
no luck, even as Tony grew more convinced things weren’t going to work out.

Day turned to night and
still no word from the man who had promised them jobs. Tony had had enough; he
wanted to go home. Finally, Adam agreed and they left the city. On the way back
Tony asked if they could stop in Monticello; he had family there and wanted to
pick up some of his things they were holding for him.

While there, Adam got a
phone call; it was the guy. He apologized—he’d left his phone at his office and
had just gotten the messages. Adam was livid. He laid in to him, cursing and
yelling in a way he’d never done before. He honestly believed the guy had set
them up, like some sort of sick prank. Finally he had to give the phone to
Tony. The guy wanted them to come back. He’d pay for all their expenses and
give them his best stand. But it was too late: both Adam and Tony had soured on
the situation, not believing they could trust the guy. They were back in
Buffalo by the middle of that day, the day after Thanksgiving.

Almost two years later to
the day, Adam and Willie are woken up by a soft knock on the trailer door. The
sun has yet to rise. The night before, they had visited friends in the Bronx
for Thanksgiving. It had been an amazing time and meal, but they returned as
early as possible to prepare for just such a knock. The trees had arrived.

After his first failed
attempt at being a tree man, Adam returned to Buffalo feeling restless. He
understood why Tony needed to get back, but in his heart he still wanted to be
in New York City selling trees.

He called up some friends
in Washington Heights. They let him crash on their couch as he sought out a
stand that might take him on. Finally, he found one: a small spot near New
York-Presbyterian Hospital, run by two French-speaking men—one Quebecois, the
other actually French.

He took the nightshift and
was shown the ropes by the Frenchman—how to keep the stand clean, how to
present a tree—knock it on the sidewalk to show the needles stay on, turn it to
display its shape’s relative symmetry—and how many trees to keep bundled, how
many to open. His shift started at 9pm and ended sometime between 7 and 8 a.m.

It only lasted 12 days, but
Adam was hooked. The following year he did his research and found Greg. They
met; he seemed trustworthy. That Thanksgiving Day he flew down and joined
Bret—whom he had met earlier that year in Colorado—on a stand near Greg’s home
in Queens.

They worked with some of
Greg’s regular workers and Adam learned what he didn’t want to do with a stand.
To them it was just a job—the grind. A place to get to and look forward to
leaving. For both Adam and Bret—but Adam in particular—it was an adventure. On
top of the outdoorsman quality of it, there were deeper reasons to embrace the
experience. As a small child, Adam would sit in front of the Christmas tree in
his parent’s house and just feel joy. Pure, simple, uncomplicated joy. It was a
special experience to participate in that process now, and it showed in how he
approached his work.

Now, a year later, it was
to begin all over again.

Adam opens the door to see
Greg standing there.

“The trees are here,” he
says. Sure enough, a tractor-trailer bed full of conifers is parked nearby. It
arrived sometime in the night. With the generator working—they got it hooked up
late last night, after a frigid first one—they hadn’t heard it pulled in.

Adam and Willie join a
young guy Greg brought with him to help unload the trees—300 North Carolina
Fraser firs. Unlike many tree sellers in New York City, Greg deals directly
with growers. Last year, he even went so far as to try and start a cooperative
with a number of them, allowing them to bring their trees directly to the city
and, thus, buyers. Things fell through when it turned out the growers weren’t
particularly good at the distribution end of the business.

During the summer Greg
works with small local buyers to generate enough pre-orders on trees to justify
a delivery. The hardest part isn’t finding people to buy from; it’s having
enough trees on a truck to make it worthwhile for everyone involved. He visits
the actual tree farms in central North Carolina to find the best growers at the
best prices. The tree lots aren’t usually acres and acres of trees. In reality
the trees—which have to be grown on the sides of hills to avoid root rot—are on
disparate plots: one here, another over there, some 30 miles away. Very few if
any of the growers’ properties are contiguous.

The lots are usually leased
from landowners for seven or eight years. How do you grow a full-sized
Christmas tree in that amount of time? Most growers start with plugs—an inch-
or two-tall baby trees—that are planted in yearly waves. Trees grow about a
foot a year; after seven or eight years, you’ll have a tree about that tall.
Want a smaller tree? Find one planted a few years later.

Fraser firs have become the
preeminent tree in the city. Not as plush as, say, a balsam fir or as aromatic
as a Douglas, but the tree retains its needles and holds up to the demands of
ornaments quite like a blue-hued Fraser. They dominate every stand Greg owns.

Trees come off the truck
wrapped tightly in blue twine. Each tree is color coded according to quality;
gold is the best, purple the worst. A tag reads, “Greg’s Quality Christmas
Trees.” Greg sees it and is floored.

“I’ve never seen such a
thing,” he says, beaming.

It takes a few hours but
soon the stand is officially open for business. Not long after, Willie gets a
shot at the first customer—a woman who lives in one of the nearby condos.

“How much for this one,”
she asks. It’s a monster of a tree; a beautiful 12-foot-tall Fraser. It’s as
much a trophy as a celebratory decoration.

Willie is feeling his
beginners luck. “$240,” he says

She thinks for moment. “OK.
I’ll take it. I don’t really care how much it is, it just has to be big.”

Willie is beside himself. A
$240 sale on the very first tree anyone’s asked about, let alone it’s one of
the biggest trees they have—the hardest type of tree to get rid of. Adam
explains the system: $10 to $15, per foot, depending on the quality of the
tree. But here he bags a whale of a sale and they’d barely begun.

“Do you take credit cards,”
the woman asks. Willie is crestfallen. Greg was supposed to have brought the
credit card slips, but had forgotten them.

“We’ll have them tomorrow.”

“Oh,” she says. “Well, hold
it for me. It’s the one I want. “ She walks away and doesn’t return.

Each day, Adam, Willie and
Corrie do something to improve the stand, even just a little bit. In the
beginning it’s the essentials: getting the lights strung above everything,
putting the tarp up and making it secure against the wind, hanging wreaths from
lattices secured to the side of the trailer. Adam finds a rocking chair on the
street. He and Willie fix it up for a nice place to sit. Corrie brings her dog,
Olive, a small, shorthaired little bullet of a thing.

The weekdays are spent
preparing for the week nights; the weekends are consistently busy. They sell
trees morning, afternoon and evening, though. People would stop by at 1 a.m.
The bars across the street tend to make things interesting.

Shortly after midnight on
their first Sunday, a young woman wanders into the stand. She has two friends
with her. She is a bit drunk—not total word slurring or wobbling yet, but
close. She approaches Willie.

“How much are the trees,”
she asks. It’s the most common question.

“Depends. How big a tree
are you looking to get?”

“The biggest fucking tree
you have,” she says.

Willie laughs. “OK, well,
we have some big 12-footers back there.”

“No, no, no,” she says,
waving the thought away. “How much is this one?”

Willie shows her and her
friends different trees, pulling them forward, knocking the trunk against the
ground. Her friends find the whole thing sort of suspect, but the young woman—a
petite blond in a sharp red button-down jacket and gold slip-ons—was determined
to get her tree that night. Though that appeared to be as far as things would
get.

“I’m too drunk to decorate
it tonight,” she says.

Finally they settle on a
nice five-footer. There’s one problem: the woman insists she has a stand somewhere—at
home or her parent’s place or somewhere—but is concerned she won’t find it. She
tries to negotiate a cheaper price from Willie since, obviously, she probably
won’t actually need the stand.

“How about this,” he says.
“If you find your other stand, just bring this one back. I’ll give you a
refund.” Willie knows there is no way they will bring the stand back once they
have the tree in it.

Deal!

Willie pulls the tree
through the plastic netting shoot. It’s good to go. The woman’s friend, however,
is only helping her bring the thing home if he can get another drink.

“We’ll just bring the tree
with us,” he says.

“Just tell them you got it
from us,” Willie says.

One friend on the stump
end, the other at the top, and the young revelers march across the street and
into to the bar, tree and all.

“I watch people’s first
reaction,” Corrie says. “If they don’t immediately respond, I’ll say, ‘I don’t
think this is the tree for you.’ Some people don’t care, others care about
every little detail.”

Willie helps a young couple
pick a tree. There is a degree of uncertainty about the process. Maybe it’s
their first tree in their first apartment. Willie sells them on a modest
four-foot fir. It’s not the fullest or the most symmetrical but there is a connection.
As he starts cutting off the base—something they do for all the trees—joy comes
over the couples’ faces. They kiss.

Willie hands them their
tree. They smile, thank him and walk away, bodies close to one another.

Adam wants to put a tree on
top of the trailer. He crosses the street to survey the situation.

“Last year, when I was in
College Point, we mounted the biggest tree we had on the roof of the bowling
alley next to our stand,” he says. “We threw lights on it and lit it up. It was
the second biggest tree in New York after Rockefeller Center.

“We used a five-gallon
bucket, filled it with stones and stuff to secure it. I remember going under a
bridge somewhere gathering stones. I think we put some water in as well.”

He stands in silence for a
minute, staring at the roof of the trailer. It’s getting dark. The generator is
on, humming in the background. The stand lights glow.

“You can just kind of
visualize it, in your head,” he says. “But I don’t know how far to go with the
decorations. It’s almost like you can never do enough. I definitely want to
have people mention it as dinner conversation. Like, ‘Did you see the tree
stand at McCarren Park this year?’ ‘Yeah, it’s really great this year.’

“You know, like, to get an
honorable mention like that would fill my heart with joy. That’s all I ask for,
really. Just maybe for people to mention it at the dinner table. Give them
something positive—a positive image in their minds. Something that kind of
makes their heart feel all warm inside.”

The next day the tree is up
and decorated with colorful lights, tied down at all four points of the
trailer’s roof. It’s visible from blocks away as people approach the stand.

Days pass and turn into
weeks. The three sellers fall into routines. Adam and Willie split the late
night shifts, often staying up until 4 a.m. Most nights, at some point, they
make a sale. Corrie arrives almost every morning and stays into the night. It
quickly becomes clear there is no reason for concern about her ability to sling
trees.

Adam, opining on the
virtues of tree wrangling, says, “A tree man’s gotta be tough as nails—as tough
as the pitch on his hands.” Corrie says she sought the job as a chance to
literally get her hands dirty. And she does: day in and out, hers are as pitch-covered
and filthy as either of the boys.

Greg stops by most
evenings—during the day he works at a public school—sometimes with a tree
refill, sometimes with random things. One day he showed up with a long
cardboard box. Ripping open one side revealed a glittery red jumble of colored
pinecones.

“These things have been
sitting in my freaking attic for two years,” he says. “I thought people’d go
crazy over these things—look at them; they’re beautiful. But now I just want
them gone. I’ll just give them away.” And so he does: every tree buyer gets
offered one, as do children shopping with their parents.

It’s getting colder. Adam
begins wearing his cold weather boots that make his feet sweat when he moves
around too much. Sleeping bags cover his legs during night watches.
Bathing—which Willie and Adam did only once in the first two weeks—isn’t much
of an issue with so many dense layers.

The camp is supplied by a
steady stream of trash-pilfered food—dumpster diving is the colloquial
term—provided by Willie’s nightly visits to local grocery stores and bakeries.
Day (or two) old bagels and muffins, just-expired gourmet instant soups and
hummus, almond butter that wasn’t selling—even an enormous haul of matzo just
after the start of Hanukkah.

Adam runs a tight ship. In
fact, the analogy to seamanship wasn’t a stretch: he once spent a month on a
tuna boat in the Pacific and last year helped sail a boat from Buffalo to
Charleston, South Carolina. The stand, like a boat, requires a constant routine
of upkeep to make it work—endless sweeping, repositioning trees and opening new
ones once others sold, making ornamental wreaths—a job largely handled by the
Fashion Institute of Technology graduate Corrie—and numerous other small,
continual efforts to keep the stand at the level of quality Adam expected.

There is only one thing
drives Adam crazy, though: that white plywood wall they’d set up on the first
day. They’d tried covering it with hanging wreaths, but it was still so stark,
so… un-Christmas.

What Adam really wanted was
a mural—something that would bring together the stand, really make it feel like
a retreat away from the city surrounding them, something that would be the
capstone on the enchanted forest.

It’s late at night and well
below freezing. Adam sits in the rocking chair, legs wrapped in a sleeping
back, hood of his jacket pulled tight around his face. On the butane camping
stove he cooks egg and bacon sandwiches in a cast iron skillet—a favorite late
night treat of his. He was thinking about the stand—how it had developed, this
year as well as an idea, in his mind for a long time now.

“I think I’ve always had a
vision of what it could be, from the first time I met the woman in Astoria,” he
says. “Then, my imagination kind of began to run away. I started envisioning
this holy tree stand. I think my vision is slowly forming.

“What better way to
experience the world than selling something as universal as a Christmas
tree—something you can all relate to? It’s a great common ground.”

He cracks an egg open into
the skillet with his gloved hands.

“I don’t think Greg sees
that. See, a part of me that Greg is probably totally out of touch with is the
camping and the wilderness experience, which has been a huge influence in my
life. A true wilderness experience has really, like—I’ve felt it. There’s this
presence, this nature. This great force… spirit out there. It’s just like these
giant vast open spaces and knowing that you’re the only one there, it’s an
incredible feeling.”

He flips the egg over. He cuts
a roll in half with his utility knife and puts it in the skillet to toast.

“You can be in the
Adirondack or in Colorado. You can stand at a point and look 360-degrees and
you will not see a sign of civilization, whatsoever. It’s just untouched land,
untouched. And then you go here and you go to the top floor of this building,”
he says, pointing to one of the taller condos next to the park. “You do the
same thing and you see nothing but the opposite. It is completely covered in
man-made buildings. Everything is man made, even the parks.”

He piles the egg and bacon
onto the warm bread and takes a bite. “We’re in a paradox here,” he says,
looking around at the rows of fir trees lining the sidewalk. “That’s what is so
cool about this place, it’s a total paradox. These two worlds clash: you got
the contrast of this nitty-gritty and then, all nature.”

On their trip to the city,
Adam’s bike got dinged up and he had to bring his tire to the bike shop a few
blocks away on Driggs Avenue. He had some good conversations with those guys
and it turned out one of them was friends with an artist who might be
interested in helping Adam with his mural idea.

A few phone calls later and
Adam had a young woman named Thyra agreeing to give it a shot. He wanted
something sort of classic—he and Greg had discussed making sure it was
something Greg could live with for years to come—but also something that would
show the two worlds, the wilderness and the urban landscapes, coming together.

It’s the end of their
second week in the city when Adam gets the word that the mural is finished.
Thyra had used a friend’s art studio close to their stand. He just needed to
drive over to pick it up.

Adam could barely contain
his excitement. All his plans were coming together. It was an adventure, in a
way that differed from how most people might think of adventure.

“This is like rafting the
Colorado River,” he says in the car on his way to pickup the mural. “You’re on
the raft day after day, after day. It’s like that: you’re on the stand day
after day, after day.

“You’re always kind of on
the edge of your seat. But here it’s just incredible, for the human factor.
There are so many human beings that just spice it up. When people are excited
they charge you up. I don’t sleep that much but once I’m out, slinging trees,
I’m just constantly energized, with all the energy the people have. I just feed
off of that.

“But no one is going to
give you that energy if you don’t run a good looking stand,” he notes. “If
you’re stand is sad, the people won’t be happy and you’re not going to be
happy. It’s just sort of going to be a sad sight. So that’s why I want to keep
it like a tight ship.”

That’s what makes it an
adventure—the reciprocal relationship: the effort of making the stand great,
the reactions of the people who visit, and the high energy that Adam feeds off
that keeps him going. It was a way of being in the world. It was what he lived
for.

Thyra meets Adam at the
door of the studio space—an art complex near the waterfront in Williamsburg.
Adam’s mouth drops when he sees the mural: an eight-foot by four-foot winter
wonderland scene. Pines decorated in colored garlands give way to a
snow-covered path with footprints leading back to the water in the distance,
where the skyline pokes through. A bright star hangs over the Empire State
Building.

“Do you like it?” Thyra
asks. Her black pants are smeared in various colors of paint. She hasn’t been
given much instruction, just general ideas. There is uncertainty in her voice.

“Oh, my God, it’s amazing,” Adam says. He means it.

“I almost got the name
wrong,” she says, pointing to a banner at the very top: Greg’s Quality
Christmas Trees. Just like the tags. “I almost wrote, ‘Greg’s Finest Quality
Christmas Trees.’”

She points to a tree filled
with seeming randomness: a bicycle, a mustache, pancakes.

“You got my pancakes in
there,” Adam says. “That’s awesome.” He’d requested them—just pancakes. Who
doesn’t like pancakes?

They carry the painting
outside and strap it to the car. Back at the stand, everyone loves it almost as
much as Adam. Almost: he keeps staring at it, wide smile on his face, like the
boy who got exactly what he wanted for Christmas. He excitedly clears away the
knickknacks on the table—lights, fake Poinsettias, a basket full of colored
pinecones—and mounted it. A perfect fit.

He steps back and marvels.
Willie and Corrie turn to take care of customers interested in a tree. Adam
can’t stop admiring it.

“It’s big,” he says. “It’s
amazing. It’s like…whoa.” He shakes his head softly, smiling. “It’s come true,”
he says.