In a fit of wild abandon, I spent my 23rd birthday rather drunk at a professional wrestling event. It was my first (and only, to date) encounter with that world in a live setting. What I recall most about the experience is that it was a massive mêlée, featuring dozens of colorful, muscle-bound characters trying to throw each other out of the ring — a Royal Rumble.
Like my dog staring at an episode of “Jeopardy!,” I never quite managed to comprehend what was happening in that ring. But the memory of its barely controlled pandemonium, the raw energy that spread like wildfire — it all came back to me years later while watching the Bubs play at the Monkey House in Winooski.
For those who have (sadly) not caught the Burlington punk band, the vibe of a Bubs show falls somewhere on the spectrum between doing an 8-ball at an arcade and that scene in Pulp Fiction where Uma Thurman gets a shot of adrenaline straight to the chest. Clad in white jumpsuits, the 10-piece collective creates a whirling dervish of sound, all centered on talismanic front man Ethan Tapper. Onstage, the muscular, heavily tattooed Saxtons River native is the focal point of the Bubs, howling over the microphone and clutching his trusty black Stratocaster, often with a grin beaming from below a camouflage baseball cap.
It might surprise some to know that when he’s not creating a ruckus onstage, Tapper, 36, spends most of his days barely uttering a sound, hiking and snowshoeing through the forests of Vermont. By day, Tapper is a forester, managing private and public woods across the state. And he’s a good one. In 2021, the Northeast-Midwest State Foresters Alliance named him Forester of the Year.
In September, Tapper published a book about his forestry experiences and philosophies, titled How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World. In it, he touches on some of the paradoxes that his line of work presents: How can cutting a tree be a form of loving it? How do you love deer and hunt them at the same time? The book depicts a natural world both damaged and in flux, where complex, emotional and rarely easy answers are needed to heal it.
Initially, the juxtaposition of being a forester and a punk rocker presented another kind of paradox for Tapper, who began working in the woods professionally in 2012.
“When I started as a forester, I was so worried other people would find out I was in a punk band,” Tapper said by phone from his home near Bolton, in a 175-acre forest he bought in 2017 and named Bear Island. He feared that his colleagues, who devote their careers to the preservation of the natural world and spend much of their time alone in silence like flannel-clad monks, might take a dim view of Tapper’s penchant to rage onstage out of the woods. “I was so concerned with adhering to the notion of what I thought I was supposed to be,” he said.
Tapper’s two worlds don’t so much inform one another as balance each other. In the winter, he spends months out in the snow, working in the woods, usually alone. So when it’s time to gather with his friends, he seizes the chance to make a massive amount of noise.
“Everything I do is pretty much about forests,” Tapper explained. “I write about forests. I work in forests. I speak at functions about forests…
“The Bubs is really the only part of my life that’s totally different,” he continued. “It’s incredibly special to me that I get to do this cathartic thing with the band. It adds so much enrichment to my life.”
One song on the Bubs’ latest record, Make a Mess, ties directly to Tapper’s day job. The title track is inspired by his love for forest ecology and how he exalts in, well, making a mess in the woods.
“In Vermont, our forests are pretty young and super simple,” he said. “We try to manage them to be more complex and be more like old-growth forests, which looks to most people like we’re taking a well-ordered, parklike forest and making it messy.”
Released one month before How to Love a Forest, the Bubs’ sophomore album was helmed by Grammy-winning producer Eric Heigle (Arcade Fire, Josh Ritter), who saw the band play live at the Waking Windows festival in Winooski in 2022 and was blown away by its energy.
“When he reached out to say he wanted to make an album with us, I was pretty sure it was a scam,” Tapper remembered with a laugh. “But next thing I know, we’re headed down to Brooklyn to record Make a Mess.”
The record captures the band’s raucous, feel-good punk power onstage, something Tapper said Heigle was dead set on re-creating.
“Our first album was good, but it sounded like a modern rock album. Well produced, but it didn’t quite catch the magic,” Tapper said. “This time, with Eric, we got it.”
The two projects have dominated Tapper’s 2024. He’s in the middle of a whirlwind book tour that picks back up in the New Year with an appearance at Jenna’s House Community Center on January 19. He’ll also be speaking at a number of events, which often give him a chance to talk to young would-be foresters.
“When I speak to forestry students, I always say that I wish someone told me in school that you can be a forester and have feelings,” he said. “You can be in a punk band, too, and you can talk about how loving trees makes for complicated decisions.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Tree Hugger | The Bubs’ Ethan Tapper on his new book about forestry, his band’s new album and what it means to love trees”
This article appears in The Reading Issue 2024.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!