Nine Hundred Firs and a Forty Dollar Funnel

How It Works

I want to tell you how this works, because people who buy a tree off a lot have no idea. The tree comes to the landing cut, with the limbs spread wide.

Before it can go on a truck it has to be shaken and wrapped, or you will never get enough of them in a trailer.

The shaker is a machine that grips the trunk and vibrates the whole tree hard for a few seconds.

It knocks out the dead inside needles and the old cones and anything living in the branches. A Florida buyer wants that done, because nobody wants a tree dropping brown needles on their carpet.

The netter wraps the tree in a sleeve of plastic netting so the limbs fold up tight against the trunk.

A powered netter has a chain that grabs the butt and pulls the tree through for you. With a hand funnel, people do the pulling, and people do the pushing.

You bunch a long length of the netting sleeve onto the outside of the funnel’s throat, the way you would gather a stocking before you pull it on.

One man shoves the tree butt first into the wide mouth. Another man on the far side reaches in, grabs the trunk, and pulls.

As the tree comes through, the cone folds the limbs up and the netting peels off the throat and closes around them.

When the top clears, you cut the sleeve with a knife and tie it off in a knot, and you tie off the butt end the same way.

We had netting. I keep three cases of it in the barn every fall, and the sleeve that fits a twenty-two-inch powered netter fits a twenty-two-inch funnel just the same.

The shaking was the hard part. We would have to do that by hand, too.

The Morning

We started at a quarter past eight. Aurelio put two of his men on shaking.

They would lift a tree between them by the trunk, raise it a foot or two off a plank, and drop it butt first, hard, four or five times, until the dead needles quit falling.

Then they carried it to the funnel. I took the mouth.

I pushed every tree that morning, trunk first, leaning my shoulder into it, and Aurelio took the far side and reached in and pulled. Our hands met somewhere in the middle of every tree.

The other two men cut and tied, and then carried the netted trees to the trailer.

Thurston ran netting, keeping the throat loaded so we never had to stop and gather a fresh sleeve. Opie and Delmer worked the trailer, and I will come to that.

My mother came out on her porch around eight thirty in her church coat, with her cane in one hand. She stood there a long while looking up at the landing.

Then she came up the road, one slow step at a time, and nobody could have stopped her if they had tried.

Thurston ran down and carried a lawn chair up for her, and set it at the edge of the landing out of the wind, and she sat down in it and held out her hand.

“Give me something to write on,” she said. “Somebody has got to keep the count.”