Hello World, and welcome in to the in my footsteps podcast. I am your host, Christopher Setterlund. Coming to you from the vacation destination known as Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and this is episode 34. This is a special bonus episode that I do usually once a month, we take one topic and expand on it. In this episode, it's going to be a little bit of a love letter towards my days of landscaping, sharing you a little bit of what goes into being a landscaper. And then I'll share some of my fun stories from my time of doing it. Some of the stories you won't believe because I can't. But let's dive in right now, Episode 34. It is the landscaping love letter. I feel like with especially young boys, things like landscaping are kind of a rite of passage because it's something that you can easily do, you don't need a set of skills to do it at the beginning. You know, if you're working for a company, or if you're working for someone who happens to do it as odd jobs like I did at the beginning, they can just hand you a rake and have you do something as simple as that. But when it comes to the actual big landscaping companies, there's so much more that goes into it than just raking and mowing lawns. I feel like landscaping and working in the restaurant industry, they kind of get a bad rap like, oh, you know, that's where you go if you can't do anything else. And I've done both. I've been a landscaper, I've been a dishwasher slash prep, cook slash cook in a restaurant. So I know what it's all about. And it's hard work. And there's a lot of people in there in all these industries that do a lot of hard work. So this is kind of my way of shining a light on it. Putting some respect behind these jobs, while also keeping it light-hearted and sharing some of the things that happened to me that you won't believe landscaping can be as basic as mowing the lawn. And when you're a teenage boy, I think a lot of times it's an easy way to make money sort of like shoveling snow, where if you have a lawn mower that you can borrow, I guess like a push one from your parents, you can go around the neighborhood and offer to mow people's lawns. However, if you go to work for one of the bigger companies, you're looking at doing things besides raking and lawn mowing, there are things like sodding, laying out the actual, they look like Swiss cake rolls, the little swirls and you lay them out and you sod someone's lawn, you've got edge trimming, which you can do it either with a more of a metal kind of like a shovel edge to trim, or you use the string trimmer and go around and make sure that the edges of the lawn look nice. There's loam, which is kind of prepared dirt, but you've got to rake it to get any rocks out of it. Then you lay the grass seed in it. Or there's hydroseed, which is kind of a step up from the regular seeding. It's like fertilizer and grass seed and it's sprayed from a big old hose. The place that I worked at that I actually did, I'll be talking about them. They had a hydroseeding machine and it was wild looking. It was a big tank and the boss would be up there with a hose and he would just spray this green paste all over the lawn. And that was kind of how you got it going how you started a lawn. And then there was the real grunt work like weeding, pulling weeds and God help you if you didn't have gloves for that. Mulching was kind of similar. You just have gloves and you spread it everywhere. Funny thing is that when I smell the fresh mulch now it brings me back to those days. My landscaping season was almost 20 years ago when I did an official summer season in landscaping and it was almost 20 years ago now. But I can remember a lot of it like it was yesterday and the fresh mulch brings me back to that. I don't know if anyone else has that out there if a certain smell or sound. It's like visceral, it brings you back to something you remember from back in the day. fresh mulch, I guess does that for me. So those are some of the things that kind of entail landscaping. It's more than just lawn mowing and raking. But what are the tough aspects of the job when I say I want to put a little bit of respect on what it means to be a landscaper, there are some hard hard aspects of this job. The very first thing is the long hours. And I find that any sort of manual labor or outdoor labor construction. I've got two brothers-in-law that lay fence. You're basically sunup to sundown, you're trying to get the most out of the sunlight hours. And that can be tough, especially in the summer. I remember where I worked. It was usually 7am You had to be there in the summer, maybe a little later. But it was usually 7am. So you're talking for me, it was a 20-minute drive to get to work. So I was getting up at 530, 5 days a week to go. And that may not sound bad. There are people that get up a lot earlier, but getting up at 530 than starting work at seven, and putting in, sometimes 12-hour days. It's tough. I remember the company I worked for they were based out of sandwich on Cape Cod. And one of the things that always got me was, you know, you wake up early, and you try to wake yourself up, have coffee, or an energy drink to get you going. And then you get to the property. It was behind this guy's house, he had a big old barn slash warehouse with everything in it, you'd load up your trucks to get ready to go. And then you were basically sitting in the truck driving to the job. So you spent all that time waking up, and then you were starting to fall asleep again. And some of the places we would go as far as Pembroke. So from sandwich where the company was to the places in Pembroke, we're talking upwards of 45 minutes in the truck, and the rhythmic engine of these big diesel trucks would start to put you to sleep. So there was a lot of time on the road, driving in between jobs. And the place where I worked. The people I worked with, were very hard-working. But at the top, the boss was kind of absent-minded, in that he would book us for two jobs in two different places at the same time that actually happened. That was real. And we were like, what do we do? We can't tear ourselves in half and go work in each place. You had long days getting up early, a lot of time on the road. And there were few breaks when you got to the job. You were kind of expected to do your job and keep doing it. Whether that was raking whether that was weeding. I was low man on the totem pole. So yeah, I did a lot of raking and weeding, Edge trimming, and laying some grass seed. I never got to do the gravely, which was the way that you would grind up stumps, or the big Walker riding lawn mowers I never got to do I wasn't trusted with driving the walker lawn mower to trim the grass. This all adds up to the fact that in summertime long hours, you're going to be in the sun, it's going to be hot. The real feel even on Cape Cod, just last week, the airfield was over 100 degrees. So when you're in the sun, and it's like that, and you're basically there's nowhere for you to hide, there's nowhere for you to cool down. It's brutal. You would lose weight no matter what you can eat at McDonald's three times a day. And if you work, a landscaping job or a construction job or one of these outdoor manual labor jobs, you're going to lose weight no matter what. So I guess that's a bonus. I did landscaping first with my stepfather, Paul, this was when I was like 13. And he had a company called lawns and things. And he had this old blue pickup truck. And he had these wood panel siding, basically above where the truck ended and he painted the lawns and things with his phone number on it. And I would go with him. And he had a very basic lawn mower rakes and weeding and things like that. And I definitely wasn't a big fan of doing that at 12 or 13 to be out in the hot sun, raking and weeding. And it was one of those where I said it would motivate me to do something where I could be indoors in the AC after that. So I worked with him landscaping I've mentioned before on episode 30 about my friend Matt Medeiros, I worked in his family store stocking shelves. And then I ended up working in the restaurant as a dishwasher and a prep cook when I was 15. So I hit the trifecta of jobs that you would get as a teenage boy back in the early 90s. The way that I got into my actual real season of landscaping was when I had come back to Cape Cod from Las Vegas, I basically had to go back into the old life I had I thought that Vegas was going to be the big break, and I left behind my Cape Cod life. And then when I came back from Vegas, I had to sandwich myself back into that life was depressing. So I didn't want to go back into the restaurant business. I said at least I can make that different. So my brother-in-law offered me a job working for his boss at his company that was in sandwich. So that's how I got in there. This was 2002 And I thought about the money like who I'll be working 65 hours a week. I'll make money I'll get a lot of sun, I'll get color because I'm Scandinavian blood so I don't tan I burn and I'll drop weight because I had been stress eating from coming back from Vegas. That's what I thought of only when I got started doing the job that I rapidly lose interest in doing any of that. So what are the stories that I want to share the funny ones? Well, let's just dive right into this is this is all within, I'd say a four-month period, all these stories happened and this is 100% true. First, there was the time that we were at a job and I was in charge of the string trimmer. And if you know string trimmer weed whacker, you can picture it in your head, long handle with the plastic string that when you turn it on, it whips pretty fast and it's kind of dangerous. I was in charge of doing that. I was lagging behind because it was hot. And I was not interested in doing it anymore that day. So I had to hurry up and get the string trimming done. And I'm rushing and rushing and rushing and I must have either bumped into or hit a bees nest in a bush. So I'm string trimming. And suddenly I've got dozens of bees flying around me. And I'm just running with the string trimmer because the bees I got stung a couple of times. Luckily, it wasn't more, but I'm just running around this yard trying to get the edge trimmed and I'm like, Oh God, I'm getting stung. That's the least of all these stories, because that's funny, and it was a couple of bee stings. And you can picture me running around trying to avoid the bees. But let's take it up a notch. On a hot day. In the summer. If you're outside doing landscaping or any sort of manual labor, it's so important to have you'll see these guys with their gallon jugs of water. And I couldn't figure it out until I started doing the job. And then I started bringing my gallon jug of water with me. There was one day we were doing a job this was up in Sagamore or Sagamore beach right over the bridge over the Cape Cod canal. And it was a house that was being built so there were no trees yet. The house was only half done. And we were there to do the actual landscaping on it. There were two trucks there. I had left my water in one truck. And lucky me that truck was the one that left to go get some supplies at a store they had to go. I mean, they were gone for at least an hour. And at one point I didn't realize they had left with my water. And this day, it was brutal heat and humidity and there was no shade and I'm out there raking. At one point it was so hot. I was starting to see purple spots because I was dehydrated and overheated. Somehow I survived the day and ended up making it home. And I'll never forget I was I didn't realize how overheated I was until I wanted to get in the shower. I said I got to take a cold shower to kind of cool me back down after that hot day all day in the hot 100 degrees sun. I stepped into that shower. And as soon as the water hit me it was like being put in a bear hug by the World's Strongest Man. I gasped for air and I was on the ground in the tub. I couldn't even breathe because it was heat exhaustion. And I mean I don't know what heat stroke is. But I mean, I didn't have to go to the hospital. But oh my god, I literally felt like I couldn't like there was someone standing on my chest because when that cold water hit my body. I will say I never forgot my water again after that. But wait, it gets worse. So anyone that's done landscaping, you know that they have the big heavy-duty trucks. There are some that have heavier metal swinging doors, we call them rack body trucks. We would have to load those up when we would do our morning routine throw in wheelbarrows throw in rakes and shovels and all that stuff. So I'm loading up this truck. This was a morning it was a gray kind of day, windy, kind of drizzly those were the suckiest days to work. But I'm loading this truck up. I'm pushing it. I think it was a wheelbarrow I pushed in. And the wind picked up. It was a gust that just was perfect. And it blew the rack body door so hard that it swung. And this heavy metal door hit me right in the back of the head. I mean hard. And I don't know if anyone's ever had a concussion, but this one, so it was essentially like everything went white. And then slowly everything faded back in and it was painful. The stupid thing was I actually kept I went to work that day. And I was working and throughout the day I was dizzy. I was falling into bushes because of this concussion. It was so bad. I worked the whole day though in the rain and the wind with a concussion. I remember I went to the doctor, and he told me and I'll never forget. That's why it sticks out in my head. He said that concussion was so bad that it was basically the same as if someone had hit me in the back of the head with an aluminum baseball bat. So think to the movie The Untouchables when Robert DeNiro hits the dude with the baseball bat at the party. It's like that. That's what happened to me landscaping. So we got heatstroke, we got severe concoction. What could top that? Well, I got one more. It was another morning loading up the trucks to get ready to go do the jobs and I was having to go grab a wheelbarrow, these were heavy-duty plastic, they weren't heavy so you're talking 15 pounds at most. And this one was upside down. So I went to grab one of the wooden handles to pull it up, just grabbed the handle, flip it over and wheel it over to the truck. So I'm thinking in my mind, this thing weighs 15 pounds, you can just kind of grab it, yank it out and flip it. I didn't know that the front end of this wheelbarrow was wedged under a piece of machinery that must have weighed 1000 pounds. So this thing was stuck. It was not going to come out. But I didn't know. So you know you don't brace yourself to grab it if you think it's going to weigh 15 pounds. So I reached with my left arm grabbed the handle of this wheelbarrow and pulled and instead of it pulling out, it pulled my shoulder right out of the socket. And it sounded like a walnut shell getting cracked. That's the kind of searing pain that you never want to experience. My whole shoulder got warm all the way down my arm, because I had separated my shoulder, but then it popped back in. So it's called a subluxation. Basically, it pops out pops in my shoulder though it popped in but not quite all the way like it should have. So it was like 90% in. I've never fully recovered from that my left shoulder. It's still damaged. I went to the doctor, probably a month or two later, he probably got sick of seeing me after the concussion. But he said to me, I remember this one too. He said I can fix your shoulder and pop it back in. But the first thing I have to do is tear your rotator cuff to get it back out and then set it. So I was looking at nine or 10 months of not being able to work and I said forget it. I can still use my arm. I'll just deal with it. I know it sounds like a typical guy. Yeah, I'll work through heat exhaustion. I'll work through a concussion. I'll work through a shoulder subluxation whatever. Needless to say, as the injuries piled up, my interest waned in landscaping and I actually longed for the days of going back into the restaurant business. I got laid off from the job in December because they really didn't need there was no need for landscaping then the boss kept a few people on to do snow plowing and shoveling. But that wasn't me. I was low man on the totem pole. So my tenure as a landscaper ended. And I ended up going back into the restaurant industry to cook. But I learned a lot I got a lot of respect for the people I worked with not so much the boss, he was kind of a knucklehead. But the people that I worked on the grounds with, and I have so much respect for people that do that now landscaping because it's not easy. You think that just anyone can do it? Well, if you do it well. Or if you are out there working tons of hours. It's a lot of hard work that manual labor. And I think going through it you have more respect, just like going through it with the restaurant industry. If I go into a restaurant or fast food, like a sub shop, and there's a mistake made I always tell the people look, I worked in the restaurant industry, I understand what you've got to deal with, with jerk customers that think that, you know, my sliced tomatoes are so important and all this crap when in reality, it's not that important. But those are my experiences with landscaping my one season, concussion, separated shoulder heat exhaustion, but hey, at least I got to mow the lawns and rake these millionaires houses. I got to go to New Seabury and work on a house that had a million-dollar marble pool. Just I just wanted to sit there and look at the pool and say, oh my god, there were definitely good times. And fun times I had some fun with my brother in law at the time. And some of the traveling was fun, and just sitting in the truck and eating Dunkin Donuts and driving to the next job. But at some point, you actually have to work. And the work was tough. And I'm very glad that I'm not landscaping anymore because it's hard work. I don't think I could handle it. I have so much respect for my buddy Steve that does side work. He does it as like a side gig. You know, he's excellent at his job and I tell him he could run his own company. I have so much respect for that. So this was my landscape love letter, Episode 34. Thank you all for tuning in and listening to this little bonus podcast. Remember to find me on Twitter, find me on Instagram. Check out the live stream every Friday at 8pm Subscribe on YouTube, check out the videos go to my sister Katie Marks site Wear your wishes.com for her amazing clothing, apparel and accessories line is doing so well. Tune in next week for episode 35. It'll be a normal full-length episode. I'm going to do restaurant storytime because I'm piggybacking on the landscaping restaurant storytime Part Three attack of the swans. It's going to be a funny one road trip, we're going to go to Hershey, Pennsylvania, and there'll be a lot more. So thanks again for tuning in. And if you see any landscapers out there on a hot day, just give a smile and wave or give them water because they probably need it. Take care of yourselves, take care of your mental health. And remember, in this life, don't walk in anyone else's footsteps, create your own path and enjoy every moment you can on this journey. Because you never know better to be happy than go on the other side. So I'll be back next week for episode 35. Take care everyone and I'll talk to you again soon.
