The journey to good

A journeyman is an old-school term for a worker who is skilled in a given trade, someone that had completed an apprenticeship but had not yet mastered their craft. A journeyman was someone who had spent enough time working on their craft to have gained a qualification but needed to spent time working in their craft before they could become a master craftsman.

The term date back to the Middle Ages (back when washing was optional and soap hadn’t been invented). Back then Guilds ran and controlled the trades – the guild members controlled the supply of labour, raw materials, sales and the price, they determined who could be educated, who could educate and when an educated person could be considered educated. To become a master craftsman, a journeyman had to submit a ‘Master Piece’ to the guild for evaluation. Only after evaluation could a journeyman be admitted into the guild as a master.

Based on the seeming complete control the Guild’s and guild members, and the lack of soap, you would have to suspect that some dirty underhanded actions must have gone on, but that’s not today’s topic. From the Guilds, Trade Unions and Professional Associations arose and guild halls and apprenticeship remain, but somewhere in the last 50 to 500 years, the journeyman been lost. So where have they gone?

The truth is, I don’t actually know the answer to this, I asked a friend what I should write about and he said, “write about what makes a good arborist good?”. He said ‘speed alone was no measure and qualifications can only take one so far’. He said that something seemed to be missing in our training, today’s end-point was yesterday’s starting point. He told me to write about how the journeyman has been lost on the way. What a fine idea, I said, I know some good arborists. I thought to myself, I must be able to define what is good – surely Master Arborists exist.

Back when I was on the tools, I worked with several freakishly fast arborists – people that could keep three groundsmen busy all day while working with one hand and rolling a cigarette with the other. These people were considered to be good arborists, but I’m not sure if you would call them Master Arborists. I have met more than a few competition climbing arborists, some of them have won master’s events, but I’m not sure that alone makes them a Master Arborists. I know a bunch of qualified arborists, that have detailed knowledge of many things, some even have master’s degrees but I’m not sure you could call them Master Arborists either. I also know many arborists that are long in the tooth, white of finger and bad of back; arborists that are not fast or efficient, arborists that do not compete in climbing competitions; they do what they do and they are good at it but they are not Master Arborists. So if a good arborist isn’t based on speed, qualifications or experience, and being good isn’t the same as being a master, then what…?

Professional Associations have been grappling with what is good for ages. Like the Guilds before them, many associations manage or maintain courses and/or exams requiring demonstrations of skills and the endorsements of others. Universities offer Masters’ degrees (which as the name suggests is a spin-off from Guild’s assessing master craftsman) and the ISA even has the Board Certified Master Arborist – but none of these, in my mind, confirm all that is ‘good’, they are an achievement, but not an end-point.

So what about the people that I know, there had to be a reoccurring theme with the people that I consider to be good arborists, but this wasn’t immediately apparent. Some of them have qualifications and some do not, some of them climb or at least could climb but not all of them, all have considerable experience but some have more than others and their individual experiences differ greatly – surely they had to have something in common. All of them have passion, they are all intelligent, they know what they know and are comfortable with what they don’t know. They all understand trees, work incredibly hard, they don’t cut corners or blame-shift. Most of them like a good drink – but I feel that’s happen-stance more so than a requirement… I think above all, not one of them would consider themselves to be a Master Arborist. I believe that they believe, that they are still on the journey; they are the journeymen and journeywoman (the journey-ists) of today.

So, maybe there is no such thing as a Master Arborist. How can you create a Master Piece, when the piece [the tree] that was worked on is growing and changing? Is the craft demonstrated at the point that the tools are cleared from the tree or when the tree responds as directed? Why is it hard to not to have a Yoda voice-over going on in your head when you pose questions like these “happens to everyone sometimes this does?”

Like Joe [the said friend], I do not believe that speed alone is a good (or safe) measure of what a good arborist is. I think qualifications are a great starting point and once an arborist comes out of their apprenticeship their journey begins. I take my hat off to anyone that has taken professional exams or thrown themselves into higher learning. As Master Yoda would say to the younglings, “Patience you must have” and to those long of tooth, “Always pass on what you have learned” – maybe there is no such thing as a Master Arborist, but it’s a great journey to get to ‘good’.

• Written for the ARB Magazine (UK)