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"  Published in the June/July 2014 issue Father&amp;#039;s Day. Three generations of men putzing around outside. Me, my father, my one-year-old son. My father: &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s with all the leaves on the trunk of that elm?&amp;quot; Me: &amp;quot;No idea.&amp;quot; My father: &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s take a look.&amp;quot; I pull the leaves away from the tree. My father: &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a vine choking the tree. It&amp;#039;s goes thirty feet high. It&amp;#039;s six inches in diameter at the base.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Like a parasite?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Parasite.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Get a saw?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Saw.&amp;quot; I hand the boy to his mother, go to the shed, get the saw. I saw the base of the vine, cutting the parasite off from its main source of life. Good. My father: &amp;quot;Yank it.&amp;quot; Two feet of vine trunk is ripped free. Way, way more to go. More yanking. The plant is slowly pulled away from its host. Ten feet free. Fifteen. I&amp;#039;m standing twenty feet away from the elm, holding the base of the vine. Half the vine trunk is free, half is firmly embedded into the upper trunk of the elm. I can&amp;#039;t get any more leverage. I let it go and the vine trunk slaps hard against the elm. My instinct at this point? Call a guy. You call the guy, he&amp;#039;ll come over with a crew, they&amp;#039;ll pull off the rest of the vine. What&amp;#039;ll that cost? Like three hundred bucks? Sometimes you have to call a guy. My father: &amp;quot;We could tie one end of rope to the vine, one end of rope to the car. Then pull off the vine using the car.&amp;quot; Me: &amp;quot;Pardon?&amp;quot; This is unfamiliar territory for the two of us: horsepower, yard work, knottery. My father and mother divorced when I was nine months old. Growing up, I saw him a few weeks each year. The time we spent together never involved him teaching me any skills. He can flare copper tubing and replace a three-way light switch without cutting off power to the house, but there was never an opportunity for me to learn those things from him. A general approach to life? Sure. But how to use basic knots to connect a three-hundred-pound plant to a Honda CR-V with nylon rope? No. So, it would be a rolling hitch knot for the end of the vine and a bowline knot for the tow hook of the truck. The rolling hitch is a simple, elegant thing. Say you want to pull a log through a forest. The rolling hitch is your knot. Say you want to make a secure loop at the end of the rope. Look to the bowline. I make him do each knot twice so I can learn. Then he checks the rope. It&amp;#039;s difficult to overstate the satisfaction that washes over you when you yank a giant, heavy vine off an elm tree with a rope. It&amp;#039;s difficult to overstate the whack you hear when it falls to earth. I&amp;#039;m giddy sitting in the driver&amp;#039;s seat. And not just because we felled the plant. What we&amp;#039;re obligated to impart to children is that every problem has a solution\u2014even if it&amp;#039;s absurd and risky. My father never taught me any solutions growing up. But I never stopped craving that instruction. None of us do. We&amp;#039;re forever boys that way: always ready to learn. So as men, we must always be willing to teach\u2014even when it might seem too late. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a29212/knots-are-amazing-0614/>