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Predisposed To Happiness Shared, Squared A Growing Joy

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By TOM JACKSON

tjackson@tampatrib.com

Published: December 14, 2008

RIDGE MANOR - It is insufficient to say that Tony Harris is the happiest human on the planet. Given the times, comparative superlatives have a way of failing. You might as well describe someone as the least-guilty inmate in Leavenworth, the tallest Munchkin, the most capable Detroit Lion, the Illinois governor most corruption-resistant.

Let's try, instead, the route of absolutism: Tony Harris personifies happiness. This, of course, precisely defines the quality we would most hope to find in someone who grows and sells Christmas trees for a living. But reality suggests the rational vendors of seasonal evergreens, sensitive, at minimum, to twitches in fuel prices, unemployment rates and hard-bargain drivers, are rarely out of touch with their inner Grinch.

Not Harris. Not while the gates are open and the lights are on, anyway. Ambling about his dirt-floor stage, Harris emerges, as if from another era, from shade houses thick with the aroma of a northern pine forests.

A loose-jointed combination of Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper in silver hair and mustache, work gloves stuffed in his jeans' back pocket, pens and zip ties crammed into the pockets of a deep-sea blue shirt, a smudged red ball cap cocked on his head, Harris repudiates Thoreau's claim about men and their lives of quiet desperation.

If ever a man could be said to be in repose while in perpetual motion, it's Harris. But what would you expect from a fellow who keeps stumbling into good fortune? He swallowed hard, back before Halloween when gasoline was still near $4 a gallon and he had to submit his deposit for this year's "imported trees" - Fraser firs, Scotch pines, white firs, blue spruces - from North Carolina and Michigan, but still ordered "thousands," the exact number being what corporate executives call proprietary.

Now, Harris chirps, cheerfully astonished, "The phone is ringing off the hook," bringing tree-seekers from as far away as Venice, Fla. Once again, Harris presides over a literal growth industry. The only bailing (or baling) out around these parts involves shoving trees through contraptions that wrap trees in nylon mesh for the trip home.

Here on these sloping, breezy 35 acres hugging U.S. 301 hard by the Withlacoochee River, Harris, at a spring-stepping 52, provides reassuring proof, as so many sift through dislocation options, that those who find jobs they love will never work a day in their lives. Says Harris, "I love what I do."

Spreading Opportunity And Joy

The son and nephew of farmers, Harris discovered the truth of jobs and work the hard way. He was a traveling telephone systems installer and later ran landscape maintenance crews at Saddlebrook Resort - neither of which scratched his happiness itch - before persuading his wife, the estimable Debbie Ergle Arnold Harris - of the late, sometimes-lamented Ergle Christmas Tree Farm enterprise - to indulge his appetite for specialty agriculture.

The choose-'n'-cut operation opened in 1992. They added the imported trees division a couple of years later. Nowadays, the tally of trees sold tilts radically toward the imports, about 75-25, Harris reports.

Nonetheless, despite plans to put as many as eight acres into blueberries - which are astronomically more profitable, per acre - next spring, Harris says he wouldn't, couldn't, consider ending the tree farm.

His explanation is revealing: "Not everybody can afford a Lexus. That's what our import trees are. Some families come up here, mom and dad bring their kids, times are tough, they want a $35 tree. For those families, we'll always have trees to cut."

After all, there is happiness, too, in making others happy. Or we missed the one idea of yuletide spirit even secular humanists can support.

The Importance Of Storytime

Besides, in the middle of a typically slow Wednesday afternoon in the second week of December - Harris and his small crew ring up only five sales in a 90-minute period - the place exudes welcome tranquility and restorative properties. Not for nothing is the farm's slogan, "Breathe deeply! We're making oxygen!"

His 11-foot Fraser fir baled and loaded onto a trailer he had to run to Lakeland to fetch, Blanton's Kent Ellsworth, a manager of real estate, lingered by the register counter, finishing off the stub of a cigar, swapping stories about farms, farmers, freezes, droughts, the astonishing French appetite for blueberries; and dogs - those that were lost and found, and those, like Boots the German shepherd, the farm's erstwhile mascot and Harris' constant companion, had to be put down over the summer.

The man took Boots to the veterinarian, her back hips having failed, her gums bleeding, her eyes pleading, and pleaded for her life. "Isn't there something ...?" The doctor cut him off. Prove you love her. Let her go.

So the man hugged her around the neck, cradled her big, adorable head under his chin, and nodded. Later, determined to keep the dog close by, the man and his longtime first assistant, Franco Herrera, shoveled out a large, square hole next to the house. As they finished excavating, but as they were arranging the dog's body at the bottom, the sky opened.

What's a funeral without rain? somebody wondered, and the rest agreed.

They buried her in a downpour. Then the man retrieved a six-pack of Budweiser and they stood by the grave, in the rain, washing down their sorrow and toasting this "good, good dog."

With all due respect to mass marketing and low-price leading, that is not the sort of story you hear at the tree lots with representation on Wall Street. This, too, is the free enterprise system at work.

"Free enterprise at its finest," Ellsworth says.

Hard to argue that one. Especially in the presence of Tony Harris, for whom the lesson of Boots I is that perhaps, soon, it will be time for Boots II. What, after all, is good cheer without willful resilience? Harris has both, along with a diminishing number of prime trees aching for lights, garland and ornaments.

Is it possible to sell happiness? Harris is determined to try, and the staggering number of return customers to this remote outpost, on the way to nowhere else, suggests an answer in the affirmative.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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