Editorial of November 20, 2025

The Tree Side of the Line Industry: How the ‘Hicks’ I Grew Up With Became the Quiet Knights Who Keep America Going

I grew up in the City of Philadelphia, nowhere near a farm, a chainsaw, or a pair of steel-toed boots.

When I moved to upstate New York as a teenager—a land of old barns, stubborn winters and families with generations of calloused hands—I stepped into a different America. An America where kids were up before dawn, milked 60 cows, and threw on their Carhartt jackets (still smelling like hay) to go to school before most of us rolled out of bed.

Back then, small family farms were everywhere, with 50, 60, maybe 100 cows. Just enough for a family to work, survive and hand the land down to their children.

Sadly, little by little, those farms faded, whether it was rising costs, expanding technology, or large companies swallowing up small operations.

And it left a big question hanging in the air: What happens to a generation of kids who were raised to work?

Many of them ended up at the occupational center at BOCES. If you grew up in the 90s, you remember how kids talked about BOCES. The jokes. The whispers.

The bus would pull up, and a handful of kids in patched Carhartts and work jeans would climb on while the “preppy” kids just smirked and giggled.

Everyone knew they weren’t the honor students or the star athletes. They were the “woodchucks,” the “hicks,” the ones everybody assumed wouldn’t amount to much because their hands were always a little too stained.

They were kids who smelled like motor oil. Kids with Husqvarna patches sewn onto their jackets. Kids who couldn’t wait to leave school to go fix a tractor or split firewood. Kids who were, in many ways, already men.

But here’s the thing: When I joined the football and wrestling teams—sports built on grit, not glamour—those “hicks” became my closest crew. In little old upstate New York, we didn’t have the best coaching or the flashiest equipment, but we had each other. And even though I never entirely belonged to their world, I lived close enough to it to feel the heartbeat of something honest.

Long after high school, I discovered what had become of many of them.

They became tree guys.