The Cheapskate Jamboree: How much is a man’s life worth?

Yesterday a neighbor called and asked if I could give her Gerardo’s phone number, he having recently deployed his underlings to trim the hated palm trees that flank (and contaminate) the swimming pool.

In the course of conversation, she asked how much I’d paid.

“Two hundred and forty bucks,” I said. “For four trees.”

“That’s too much!” she squawked. “I only paid $30 a tree the last time.”

Let’s think about that…

A Mexican fan palm is a nasty plant. Those fronds that wave so decoratively in the breeze are lined with vicious thorns. They’re very heavy, and they do not readily biodegrade, presenting a serious headache for waste disposal companies in cities where a lot of yards have palms.

Over the course of a year, a season’s green fronds die off as new fronds grow in, creating a “skirt” of dead palm fronds around the trunk. This stuff harbors cockroaches, snakes, black widows, and termites. Also, to the eye of the gringo, it’s unaesthetic. In the springtime, the commonplace Mexican fan palm, which grows to about 100 feet, sprouts long, prolific seed wands (“inflorescences”) that drop tiny, hard flowers into the pool and then eventually drop hard seeds into the water. The flowers clog the filter, forcing you to backwash once or twice a week — a job that should need to be done no more than once every two or three months — and soon requiring you to hire a guy to come take the filter apart and clean it professionally. The seeds also get into the filter, and in addition they BREAK your $350 pool cleaner.

So, we of the White Middle Class hire a class of fearless Mexicans who show up armed with lumberjack equipment. In 100-degree heat, these men will climb a hundred feet into the air, saw off the dead fronds (and, unfortunately, many of the live ones), and cut off the damn seed things.

Then they climb down and fish all that crap out of your pool. This latter chore alone can best be described as one bitch of a job.

All of that might be shrugged off as the life of a Mexican immigrant, hm?

No.

Trimming a palm tree is about as dangerous a job as you can take on. Every year or two, a man gets killed when he undertakes to cut back a palm.

In addition to the obvious risk of falling a hundred feet or so, you have the problem that palm fronds are extremely heavy. If one falls on you and you can’t get free of it, the thing will suffocate you in short order.

This is a common fate of those who die in the palm-trimming trade.

If you’re all the way at the top of a 100-foot trunk and you’re tied to the thing with a lumberjack’s belt, you can’t get out from under a frond that drops down onto your head and face. And nobody can get up there to help you before you smother.

If you’re on the ground and one of the things falls on you, it can knock you out and suffocate you as you lay there, if it doesn’t kill you quickly by breaking your neck. The trimmer himself can’t get down the tree in time to save your life. Assuming he notices at all.

Often you’ll see these guys working with just one spotter on the ground.

Gerardo supervises the job himself, and he also shows up with at least two other guys to wrangle the fronds as the trimmer drops them. But even then: only the trimmer has climbing equipment. If anything happens to him while he’s at the top, none of the men on the ground can get up there fast enough to help him. Without gear, only the strongest and most agile of men could get up there at all.

Forty bucks is too much to pay a man who freaking risks his life so you can have a damn palm tree in your yard? Next to your freaking pool?????

Personally, I think Gerardo is giving away his guys’ services. The trimmer is not going to get anything like $40 per tree, because Gerardo has to pay the other two guys, and he undoubtedly skims off something for his own time — or at least, he surely should. I can’t believe he charges anything less than about $200 a tree.

And even at that: is a man’s life worth $200?