Somebody Has to Do the Job : Men: Life’s tough tasks are often done by those with ‘manly’ traits we disdain, but these people deserve appreciation for doing what we are unwilling or unable to do ourselves.

Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Jim Jones, Charles Manson . . . . Draw up your own list of 20th-Century architects of terror and horror and it will probably be an exclusively male club. If, as my mother used to tell me, we are known by the company we keep, we men have a bit of an image problem.

Given the gender track record, it is hardly surprising that many New Age non-women have joined feminists in condemning such traditionally masculine traits as toughness, aggressiveness, emotional flatness, preference for control rather than intimacy and connection. For many of us, the very word man has come to embody a dark, heavy and distinctly unsavory past we would prefer to leave behind us.

But a few months ago, watching some men dismantle a huge willow tree in my back yard, I was reminded of a different side of the story. These three guys, a group dressed in denim distressed in the old-fashioned way, assembled on a nippy winter day to take on a giant--60 feet tall, more than 4 feet in diameter at the base.

I watched as the “climber,” the youngest, most agile and no doubt most foolhardy of the three, climbed about, high in the tree, with the chain saw at the ready, tying ropes to branches as big around as his waist. The idea was to swing the branch, when cut, away from the climber, so precariously perched, and away from my neighbor’s garage (she’s a lawyer). Meanwhile, the guys on the ground were to lean on the other end of the rope and ease the monster to the ground.

Most of the time it worked, although one time there was a miscalculation and the branch swung the wrong way, the rope pinning the climber’s arm--a bare arm because he had stripped down to a T-shirt despite the cold--against another branch while he struggled to free it. When I asked him about the incident later he laughed and told me stories about real accidents he and others of his profession had suffered resulting in deep gashes, smashed or missing parts. He laughed about those, too. Goes with the territory, was the message.

My two-year-old son looked on with fascination at the big, noisy chipper truck that ate up tree parts, the big men noisily cutting down the big tree, the whole adventure. He was most impressed, to the point of hero worship, with the climber. As was I. I was also feeling a bit inadequate, Clark Kentish, as mild-mannered observer of the arboreal heroics. But I was glad I had decided not to try to cut this one down, as I had others. It looked like damned dangerous, difficult work, well worth the $1,500 I was paying them to do it.

I thought of the qualities it took to bring down that substantial old beast of a tree. There were the sheer physical strength and stamina, the experience and skill in the ways of trees and ropes and saws. And there was undeniably courage. But mixed in with the courage were there not some of the very “manly” traits that have gotten such a bad reputation among us enlightened: a hardness, an ability to distance emotionally from danger, to feel at ease with instruments of violence, to turn oneself into a tool for money?

I wondered what kind of husband and father someone in this line of work would make. These fellows seemed nice enough out in their work world, my back yard. They were endearingly indulgent of my little boy. But what about their own domestic world? Would someone routinely subjected to this amount of danger and abuse be dangerous and abusive to have around the house?

And yet that is how my willow tree came down. I was neither willing nor able to do it myself and hired these guys. That is how we get rid of unwanted trees.

I’m sure there are a few women in the tree business now and maybe they are having a softening, humanizing effect on it. (Maybe, as in the corporation, it’s having a toughening effect on them.) For the most part, it’s men who do it and this is how it’s done. And while I consider myself opposed, in theory, to the version of masculinity required, as long as I have a use for that version, as do we all who need trees cut down, our garbage lugged out of sight, iron ore dug out of the ground and forged into steel for our automobiles, and large buildings erected to conduct our business in, I will have to include in my perspective some appreciation for what and who it takes to get it done.