Get To Know Leaf & Limb: Meet Chris

Introduce yourself, however you would like.

My name is Chris. I handle tree surveys for Leaf & Limb. I’m basically a one-man department. I’ve been with Leaf & Limb for 10 years now. In that time, I’ve been a crew leader and done all the things we typically do. For the last 4 years, I’ve been doing the tree surveys.

Well, we’re going to find out what that’s about in a bit, but first, how did you get into tree work?

I had recently spent six years working on tugboats. I was looking for outdoor work closer to home, and a couple of my friends happened to work at Leaf & Limb. I put in an application and got a call a couple of weeks later, and the rest is history. Of course, back then Leaf & Limb was a different beast entirely. That’s back when we did removals. Obviously, we’ve changed quite a bit in the past decade. Definitely for the better, in my opinion.

Tell me about tree surveys — another job that’s not well understood. What are they and why are they done? And I definitely want to learn more about tugboat life. We’ll get back to that.

Tree surveys are a requirement whenever someone wants to develop a property. Each municipality has requirements to retain a certain amount of tree canopy. For Raleigh, it’s 10 to 15%. So a client will reach out to us and they’ll say, “Look, we’re trying to develop this property, and the ordinance requires a tree survey be performed.” Leaf & Limb has been performing this service for many years before I started doing it. It’s something we’re very knowledgeable about, and I think we have really good relationships with the city planners. What happens is essentially just going out with a high precision GPS receiver that uses satellites, cataloging all the trees within a certain area of the site, recording the species, size, and health, if necessary.

There are two sides to the job. One half is actually going out physically surveying the trees, and then there’s the desk side that has to do with client relations, ordinance research, putting the data collected with the GPS receiver into a report for the clients, which has to adhere to certain municipality regulations, depending on where the survey is located.

It’s precision work, and you’re well known at Leaf & Limb as a precision kind of guy.

I like attention to detail. A lot of times, you know, with the tree surveys, it can be very black and white — it’s either a water oak or it’s a shortleaf pine. There is a right way to do it, and that appeals to me. I always know which way is up with tree surveys.

I know from some of your Slack posts that you’ve had some interesting things happen while you were running around under the canopy.

When you do this long enough, you’ll happen upon dilapidated cabins. A lot of times, you’ll come across something that’s been there so long you can only make out the stone chimney and maybe an iron fireplace that used to be there, whereas everything else is collapsed and decayed with time. I’ve always been fascinated with history. So whenever I come upon something that’s older, there’s something beautiful about that, knowing that it’s out there by itself in the middle of the woods, and nobody knows it’s there, nobody’s come across it in years. I found a diary dating back to the 1920s. It was fascinating. There were things from her life… she talked about her time in church. There were grocery lists. She talked about her kids.

What are a couple of things about you that you’d like other people to know?

I try to present myself as humble, thoughtful, and empathetic towards others. I try to make a point of considering someone else’s perspective, whether it’s in a conversation, a friendly argument, or everyday discourse. And I find that usually, it’s easy to find a communal path forward when you look at life that way.

Also, I like to draw. Usually pen and ink, but I’ve done all sorts. Very intricate tattoo-style drawings.

Did you ever think of being a tattoo artist?

I have, yeah. A lot of people told me I should pursue it. Unfortunately, although I would consider myself good at drawing, to make any kind of career out of that, you’ve got to be fantastic at drawing, and I’ve certainly seen my betters in that field, so it’s always been a passion of mine, but it’s never been something I’ve actively pursued as work.

OK, now, about the tugboats?

My mom’s second cousin was doing it. I guess my mom was talking with his mom, and it was mentioned that he was working on tugboats. I was about 21 or 22 years old, working as a restaurant manager and looking for something more outdoorsy. And so, I went off on a six-year adventure.

People often ask what a tugboat does, and it does so many different things. But one of the primary jobs is towing large oil derrick barges offshore. You do something called running anchors, which is when an offshore barge is towed to where it needs to be; they drop down these huge anchor buoys and we pick them up, and then run them out to where they need to be, drop them in the water, and then go back to the barge and pick up more anchors. And usually they’ll run out about six or eight anchors; like underwater guy wires. Most of the work was in the Gulf of Mexico. But when you start out in that industry, you start out inshore, which are those tiny little push boats, and you might push coal barges up and down the Mississippi.

That sounds as exciting as tree work.

It’s an itinerant lifestyle, and after six years, I had just received my Steersman’s license, and that’s the point where I was going to get promoted to the wheelhouse, which would have more or less doubled an already considerable salary. And I knew that if I got in the wheelhouse, that was going to be my job for life. So it kind of put me at a crossroads. I really had to do some hard thinking — is this what I want to do for the remainder of my days? And although I loved the job, it wasn’t what I saw myself doing for the rest of my life. Yeah, I wouldn’t trade that experience for the world. I’ve seen some amazing sights, met some incredible people, and seen some of the most beautiful sunrises you could imagine.