Griglione uses job as arborist to honor trees, puts love into work

NEW LONDON - The death of the man who taught him how to climb helped spurred Rodney Griglione to start his own business, Grig's Tree Service.

Griglione was in his mid-20s when he worked under Danny Weir at the Shade Tree Service Company in St. Louis, Mo., where they cut trees that were growing into telephone wires.

'Without him, I wouldn't know how to climb,” said Griglione, though he recalls Weir wasn't easy to work for, often telling him to cut a tree 'as if there was a fence below it,” meaning Griglione would have to take the extra time to avoid an imaginary fence. But in the process, Weir was honing his precision, something Griglione had realized by the time Weir was diagnosed with melanoma a few years later.

'I remember going to his house one day,” Griglione said. 'I remember just giving him a hug and crying to him, ‘Man you've changed my life forever.'” Weir's response was 'Rod, it wasn't me, you're the one who shut up and litened to me.”

After Weir passed, Griglione realized that advancing further at work would take him out of the field, and he wanted to stay busy. He wanted to start a business doing the job he'd come to love.

Now, with Grig's Tree Service, he's able to be a full-time arborist; he doesn't just cut down trees, but cares for them.

'You can build a new garage,” Griglione said. 'You can't build a new 200-year-old oak tree, and if you cut that oak tree the wrong way you're going to kill it.”

Practices like 'tree topping,” removing large sections of vital branches, leave the tree more susceptible to insects and disease. Griglione likened it to losing an arm; the tree bleeds nutrience and, if cut enough, dies. Some of his arboreal knowledge comes from doing research, but a lot of his love and admiration comes from being up in the leaves and branches so much. 'Even just climbing (trees) you learn a lot,” Griglione said.

Yet, even though his main goal is preserving trees, he recognizes when they need to go. Such was the case with Keli Morgan's ash tree, which was riddled with emerald ash borders. Theses green beetles lay eggs on the bark which, once hatched, bore into the tree and suck it of nurtients, killing it.

Morgan knew Griglione did tree removal, but didn't have a real impression of what that looked like until he came to her house in New London and got to work.

'They don't use a bucket-truck or anything,” Morgan said of Griglione's methods. 'Just a very precise system of pulleys and rope.”

Morgan watched as Griglione created a system of ropes through her branches, tying sections together. Cutting branches as much as 2,000 pounds he'd let it fall until the rope went taut, caught by the section of tree the other end was tied to as it still held fast. Griglione would then lower the dangling section to a specified patch of land waiting below.

'He just went all the way to the top and worked his way down,” Morgan said. 'It was interesting to watch how much planning and precision went into it.”

It's all math for Griglione; what he needs to tie, where a cut should be made and how a section is going to fall.

'It's a very very dangerous job,” Griglione said. 'You do not do something unless you know what's going to happen.”

No two jobs he does are the same. Each tree grows in a unique way making attention to detail key. The location of the tree dictates where he needs to pile the cut pieces, and even the time of year can make the limbs more rigid or malleable.

'When you climb a tree you've got to really inspect that tree,” Griglione said. 'When you're in the tree you've got to be one with that tree, ‘cause if your notch isn't perfect, then the tree's going to fall on the house or a power line and there's no coming back from that, it's over.”

Because a small error might damage his employer's property, or even end his life, Griglione has to be attentive at all times.

'There's a lot of times I'm scared,” Griglione said. 'But if you're not scared, then you shouldn't be up that tree.”

But it's climbing and reaching those heights Griglione loves so much. Over the course of his two days working on the tree, Morgan reports that the whole neighborhood was out watching Griglione work until the tree was gone.

'It's different to hear someone talk about it, and then to actually see it,” Morgan said. 'Watching him work is very interesting and he left my yard looking better than it was when he came in.”

According to Griglione, even if she'd hired a more standard tree removal company, she would have needed a climber in her tree.

'With (Morgan's tree) there's no way any crew around her would have cut that down, it was too tall,” Griglione said. 'They'd still need a climber to come in and do the majority (of work).”

As a climber, Griglione isn't limited by ladder length. It also means he can get out to places a truck might not be able to get to, since all he needs to get up the tree are his ropes and harness. This also means he's up in the branches for as long as 10 hours, but at the end of the day he doesn't mind, because he loves the work he's doing.

'That's what I want it to say on my headstone: That I worked,” Griglione said. '‘Cause I did. I worked hard and I want to impact people's lives. If you can just make someone's day good so they can prosper from the knowledge you gave them, that's great, and with tree's it's really easy to do. For me anyway.”