I know few people stronger than Joventino. If you subscribe to Instagram as I do (I am a passive watcher, not a contributor), you may have seen the short videos of the humble and modest-looking gym janitor who comes up to the beefcakes pumping the big iron. He usually acts like he just needs to clean around the equipment, but then asks if he can try lifting the monster weights they are deadlifting. They kinda chuckle at him and tell him to be careful while saying to one another, “watch this”, expecting him to be unable to budge the massive barbell with its multiple plates. Instead, the guy in the janitor jumpsuit hefts the weights seemingly effortlessly, sometimes even with one hand. He is very nonchalant about it all and then he goes about his cleaning leaving the jacked-up dudes to wonder what just happened. This little snip of video is one of my favorite vignettes because there is nothing more fun than surprising people, especially the vane and superior-feeling macho men at the gym. Joventino is very much like the unassuming pseudo janitor in the gym, he looks like a smallish guy who knows his way around a rake, but who may not be up to big tasks. My experience with him is that one should never underestimate Joventino.
He only comes to help with my garden once every three weeks, but as I always say, one day of Joventino (he is here from 7am to 5pm and perhaps he takes a half hour break for lunch quietly under some tree) is equivalent to whatever I can do cumulatively over the next three weeks. He always fills up all four of my large green waste buckets with cuttings of one sort or another, plus, he has two dump sites off the lower back of my property where some small cliffs make for perfect natural compost piles. On any given day when he is here, I see him lugging vast quantities of plant material down to the dump sites, I can only imagine how overgrown my gardens would be without him doing all of that regularly.
I once asked him if he knew a guy who climbed palm trees to thin out their high fronds and seed stalks. He very humbly said he could do it, and he did. I have four tall palms on my property and they are always tidy because Joventino takes care of them along with everything else and I never hear a peep of complaint from him. I usually start each day when he comes over by giving him five minutes of direction on anything in particular that I want him to handle that day. Whatever time I allocate in my mind to that task, he gets it done in half that time with no issue. He must find my lack of imagination for things to have him do to be very funny since I bet on average I give him 20 minutes of tasks for his ten hour day.
But today I have a big task that I know from speaking over time to a number of other gardeners and workmen, that it is a very challenging one. As I have explained on a number of occasions, I have an abundance of large blue agave plants all over my property. These Century Plants, as they are often called, are quite primeval in scale and look. They can grow to be ten feet high and at least fifteen feet across. They are literally gigantic and unlike in scale almost anything in any garden, save a tree. As we know, these monsters keep growing until nature tells them to do like your old grade school fire drill…stop, prop and drop. That is, they send up their seed stalk as a last nod to the continuity of life, using every ounce of their vitality to do so before shriveling into obscurity. Their seed stalks are no small affair. This year I had two (out of several hundred blue agaves on my property) that went vertical. The larger of them is on the front hill just beyond the garage corner. It rises more than thirty feet and is perhaps 10 inches in diameter at its base. That stringy, woody material is not a hardwood, but it certainly has a great deal of fibrous strength. I have been told that many a chain saw has met its match on an agave stem.
Given that I have a 36” boxed olive tree sitting out on my upper driveway, poised on the extended forks of a borrowed forklift, my first priority for Joventino is that he bring down the dying agave stalk and cart if off to the dump sites below. I then want him to chop off as much of the dying and browning leaves/branches as he can and dispose of them as well. I have anticipated that he is not able to dig out the stump since that is a very BIG job, but I want him to clean up the planting site for the new olive tree as much as he can.
I woke up early this morning and was outside waiting for him when he arrived (always on time). I did my best to impress upon him that I wanted him to spend as much of the day as he needed to cut and remove as much of that monster agave as he could by himself. If I were to try to do this myself, it would take me until yearend to clear the space and might well cost me my life from hauling that beast downhill. But it is now one hour in and I have already seen Joventino walking past the living room window several times carrying what must be a hundred or more pounds of agave stalk. I know what that feel like from when I worked at the Cornell plantations as a laborer during college for two summers. We used to have to drag felled and cut up trees up out of the gorge. Those were perhaps 75 pound pieces and I was 20 years old and could take my time with several other guys to get those damn things removed. I cannot imagine doing what Joventino is doing today. Joventino must be 50+ years old and from what I can tell, he is nothing but solid muscle and sinew. His cardio fitness level must be astounding.
Nevertheless, this is easily the biggest job I have ever assigned Joventino and I feel like I am somewhat testing his mettle on this task and I am anxious to see how he ends up doing. I gave him two other small tasks as well for after his completion of the big project. I expect that after I do a few hours of Zoom call meetings with expert witness clients (which will pay me enough to cover eight or nine months of Joventino’s work), Joventino will be done with the giant agave. I understand that my expert witness work is predicated on 50 years of experience and education and that it is a much “higher level” and more cerebral task than what Joventino is doing this morning. But it is hard not to ponder a world where an experienced physical laborer who must use all his experience and strength to cut up and remove such a monstrous plant is paid a fraction of what I am paid to pontificate on this and that to help some broker avoid a liability brought on by some very wealthy and annoyed beneficiary of a large trust/estate who somehow thinks she should not be responsible for a market move that spanked all investors when COVID crunched the markets.
What Joventino is doing this morning certainly will test the mettle of his gardening capabilities. What I will be doing this morning will test the metal of my feeling good about how I spend my life’s work. I suspect I will apply some salve to this psychic wound by adding $100 to Joventino’s pay today and tell him that he earned a bonus for tackling such a difficult job for me. Buying my way out of guilt is what I can do and I am certain that Joventino doesn’t get that, but is willing to take the money and just thank me with a puzzled look on his face.