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…