Eating Dirt Read online

  The truck corkscrews. The surface of the quarry whizzes past Helen’s window in a brown, liquid sheet. The truck meets the surface upside down, skidding down with gravity onto the water’s surface. The nose of the truck meets the earth with a muffled bang. Adam tumbles. Helen’s seatbelt snatches her back, and the boys in the back bang up against the roof. The truck tips sideways, pinning Helen at the deepest part of the slant. And then the water rushes in, icy cold and dark as iced tea.

  Helen jabs the release tab of her seatbelt buckle, but she’s hanging upside down, and her weight prevents its release. Cedar tannins, a whiff of fermented scum. It gets into her hair first, a phantom touch, as if she were dipping her curls ends first into a bucket. Water rushes against her scalp, frigid and lung shocking. It swirls up past her eyes and then her nose. In the seconds before it envelopes her mouth and chin, she thinks to take a bite of air. Adam tumbles against her. She feels the dense weight of him crash against her side, and then he is gone, climbed up and out into the light.

  Helen wrestles with the seatbelt. Her lungs pull tight. The buckle refuses to budge, and there is the irony of it—the very device that was meant to keep her safe. Airless panic glimmers to the top. Helen thinks: I guess this must be it.

  Adam braces himself against the steering wheel and the armrest between the two front seats. He digs into the water, reaching in up to his armpits. He finds Helen’s seatbelt. He goes at it until it relents, but not without biting off the nail of his index finger. He gets a grip on Helen’s jacket and pulls her into the air. She surfaces with her hair slimed over her forehead, black grit peppering her lips and cheeks. She coughs up a mouthful of ditch water. The truck’s cab is full with water and upside down and sideways—a familiar space turned surreal, like a funhouse crazy kitchen.

  Adam lifts Helen out of the cab, and together they struggle up the sludgy bank. The boys in the back stand in a bubble of air, up to their chests in water. They try the door but find it jammed. There is ditch grass beyond the window and mud smeared down the glass. And all their belongings will be wet and ruined. The cameras and headphones and all manner of digital cut-block devices.

  Cover your eyes, Adam shouts.

  They crouch away from the window, and then Adam kicks in the glass.

  Soon there is aftermath. Brian’s crew arrives in their truck to find upturned wheels and half a crew in a daze, as people are in the minutes that trail behind accidents. K.T. is among Brian’s people. He clambers over the bank and heads straight for Helen, who’s knee-deep in the ditch, soaked and shivering. K.T. asks if she’s all right. She wipes her hands down her cheeks. Her earrings are tiny silver dragonflies, and they tremble beneath her earlobes.

  In the end no one is seriously hurt, not on the outside anyway. But tomorrow there will be a long tangle of forensic bureaucracy. Forms to fill out and photos to be taken and adjusters to be called and environmental assessments to be done to see if diesel has leaked from the fuel tanks. But for now the air is tinged with adrenaline and relief and just the smallest hint of jubilation. Because of this accident, it’s a pretty good bet tomorrow will be declared a day off.

  IN THE weeks that follow, Helen won’t be the same. Nobody, not even Brian, wants to discuss the incident in the ditch, as she comes to call it. The worst part, she says, is that no one can look her in the eye. It vanishes from conversation and then from our collective consciousness, as if it had never happened at all. As if we had no way to deal with Helen’s near-miss but to disappear it from the record.

  Helen is an artist. She believes in beauty. She’s the only one among us with any faith in seatbelts. She almost drowned in a puddle, armed with nothing but a souped-up gardening trowel and a plastic safety whistle. Once we finish the job in Holberg, Helen will pack up her scarves and her tea bags and her cans of organic coconut milk, making sure not to leave behind a single clothespin. She’ll peel out so fast I’ll spot the skid marks her tires made in the gravel.

  See you in a few days, she’ll sing.

  I think I’ll never see her again. She’ll send me an e-mail long after the fact, omitting a telephone number.

  The truck was a write-off. Adam walks around with a white sausage of gauze taped around his index finger. He says he felt nothing at first, when he lost his fingernail to Helen’s seatbelt buckle, before his finger began to pump out blood. Only afterward, in the way that pain comes to pool on the surface—slowly, once the healing has begun. For days after the crash, he’ll jam his finger in ratchet straps or mash it by accident under tree boxes. Every time he feels that awful crush, I hope he thinks of Helen.

  {

  6 }

  the TOWN that LOGGING MADE

  BY APRIL FOOL’S DAY it’s time to move on. All those Holberg trees tucked into soil, left to begin their long lives. We flee in a convoy of diesel trucks, vintage Toyota Forerunners, and grungy sedans. We head to our next bonanza, on the opposite coast of the island, the sheltered side where all the people live. Here towns are linked by the Island Highway, which runs a straight shot down to Nanaimo, the nearest big town. If we wanted, we could hit a casino in a dangerous three hours and change.

  Cell phone signals. Wireless Internet. We blaze into Port McNeill like loggers on an off-shift tear. We come upon the irresistible allure of neon and signage and spending, the aroma of deep fryer grease. News, connection with the real world. We take our appearance for granted. Our weather burns, our wind-tanned faces. The corded forearms and the pants tied up around our narrowed hips with climbing rope or boot lace. The clear irises, the furrowed squints of people who spend all their time outdoors without benefit of sunglasses. Town people, we are sorry to say, look like boiled perogies by comparison. Clean, indoor folks with trimmed fingernails and marshmallow complexions. Even so, our men gawk at all the local girls, who sashay up and down the hill in tank tops, some pushing strollers, with words like Juicy printed across the bums of their sweatpants.

  The citizens of McNeill stare at us, too. We have stained teeth and crazy haircuts done drunk with electric clippers. We scuff down the sidewalks in dirty jeans and alpaca toques, our shirts untucked and the laces of our hiking boots trailing behind us like afterthoughts. We look hungrily deranged, like crazy gypsies descended from the mountains to pick through the dumpsters for chicken bones. Oh, we see their mental wheels grinding, it’s them again.

  You can buy all kinds of things in Port McNeill. There are two strip malls featuring knitting and craft stores, an art gallery with paintings of killer whales pirouetting out of the water. These clichés derive from the Robson Bight orca sanctuary, located just south of here, a place where pods of whales come to exfoliate on barnacled rocks in summer. In the geographic center of Port McNeill, we find the provincial liquor outlet. A strangely gigantic supermarket with flags flapping from tall poles. A big empty parking lot spiked with tall klieg lights that illuminate half of town.

  Here you can meet all your rainbow-kite and wind-chime needs. You can order breakfast and lunch all at once in the form of a logger burger: two beef patties crowned with processed cheese, bacon, and a fried egg. If you can think of a drug—leafy or crystallized or liquefied—chances are you can find it here. You can snort and shoot and guzzle to your heart’s content, we’ve been told, at parties that last for days. But if you want to recycle, you’ve got to deliver your cans and bottles yourself to a depot a few miles out of town.

  PORT MCNEILL was born as a tent camp on the beach in the 1930s. Small-time operators worked a radius around town, a chunk of land that would eventually become Block 4, Tree Farm Licence 39, an old hemlock and cedar forest spread over valley flats and rugged mountains, much of it logged off today. In the early years, men dragged timber from the woods along corduroy roads lubed with fish grease, and later, along boardwalks built from planed logs. They drove trucks with solid rubber tires. Before internal combustion, they grunted monster trees out of the bush using steam donkeys—cast-iron cabooses, all boiler and winch, an example of which is now a town m
onument parked in the grass down near the marina. Back then it could take two men all day to fall a tree. Many of them died trying.

  Driving into Port McNeill, we descend a hill sloping down to sea level. The town appears at the crest of the bowl, sheltered from the ocean tumult by a thumb of peninsula upon which nobody seems to live. Three thousand people reside here, and nearly everyone makes a living, directly or indirectly, from the logging business. They live in modest dwellings, mostly—mobile homes and two-toned ranchers. The lawns are no-frills, mowed in tidy stripes. Few gardens, few birdhouses. Flower pots made of old tires turned inside out. The people with the waterfront property aren’t loggers, as many working stiffs will tell you, but the proprietors of spin-off ventures. Doctors and dentists, the owners of the helicopters that swoop around the forests carrying fallers, foresters, us. But even then, at a glance, nobody’s getting filthy rich.

  But what do we know? We’re drive-thru citizens.

  British Columbia was built from commodities, and resource towns dot the province from top to bottom. We’ve done our time in quite a few of them. They have names that start with the words Fort, Port, and Prince. They feel, temporarily, like home. Towns with a single economic tap. The primary employer is a big corporation with regional operations and division offices staffed by middle management. The real chiefs work elsewhere, in different cities, and sometimes other countries. These are people who have never been loggers, who are often enough executive transplants, judges, and accountants, men trained as corporate generals.

  The local employees—the millworkers and fallers and heavy-equipment operators—are mostly men, since there are few jobs for women. Many are the sons of loggers. They have as little use for Brooks Brothers and Cole Haan as do the gauchos of Argentina. They live in houses arrayed in grids and culs-de-sac, thrown up in the style of boom eras gone by. Their streets are picturesquely named after trees that get fed through the saws and the chippers—that is, when the mills are actually running, since logging operations are profoundly vulnerable, as they have always been, to the caprices of the market. With every downturn, there are layoffs and slowdowns and shutdowns. Some men work but a few weeks per year.

  OUR NEW home is a flat-roofed hotel complex with a diner, a pub, a beer-and-wine store, a dining room, and one subterranean banquet hall. The Haida-Way, it’s called, though it lies two hundred nautical miles south of Haida Gwaii, the ancestral islands of the Haida. These are the traditional territories of the Kwakiutl, or Kwakwaka’wakw, as they prefer. The Kwakwaka’wakw once wore broad rain hats and robes woven from cedar bark. Despite their modern predicaments they were, and still are, a wealthy, dignified people.

  For mariners these waters are precariously nutty with islands, cluttered underwater with shoals and rocky reefs. Islands look like mainland. Passages lead to dead ends. Sometimes the air hangs so heavy with fog that clouds, sky, and water appear to merge into one gauzy plain.

  The ocean has always been a great provider. Clams, oysters, crabs. Even now the locals have ways to prepare a fish that would stagger an Iron Chef. Some remember how to cook a whale. There is scarcely a celebration or a feast that doesn’t include salmon—pickled, candied, smoked, canned, or barbecued, to name a few modes of preparation. They still catch oolichan, a type of smelt, which they bury and allow to rot for several days before boiling it all down to a fishy grease. It is the New World version of extra-virgin olive oil, and it tastes, I’ve been told, sublime on a baked potato.

  The hotel proprietors aren’t Kwakiutl or Haida but Greek, and they own one of the briskest businesses in town. The hotel’s accommodations are divided into two tiers. An inn for tourists and respectable travelers, and a cinderblock annex shoved up against a hillside like a hobbit bunker. It’s home to itinerant workers who arrive late in the afternoons driving pickup trucks emblazoned with company insignia. Nonunion guys with blackened hands and faces crumpled in greasy exhaustion. They wear Viberg boots, jeans, and Stanfield’s logger henleys stitched from heavy gray wool. Like us, they’re contractors and subcontractors—men far away from home.

  Our crew has lodged here each spring for years. We open the door on sagging beds covered with floral polyester bedspreads. Lamps that look like huge avocados cast the low-watt lumens of a candle, not ever quite bright enough to read by. In the kitchenettes there are bottles of dish detergent whose level never exceeds one finger’s width. K.T. and I arrive early to avoid getting stuck with one of the rooms at the end of the building, which have tin boxes for showers instead of bathtubs. That feature “compact kitchens” with fridge, stove, and sink merged into one curiously unhelpful appliance. We haul in our plastic bins and our SealLine sacks, and we breathe in the stale air of our new abode. Housekeeping, warned of our arrival, has whisked the towels away. They’ve exchanged the standard creamy plush for thin terry rags in a shade of brown so dark you could oil your boots with them and no one would know the difference.

  One layer of single glazing separates us in our bedroom sanctum from outdoor, public activity. When we watch TV we lay our heads on pillows just a few feet from the bumpers of cars in the parking lot. Our room affords a view of the beer-and-wine store, where there is always steady traffic. A different car parks every five minutes. Someone unfolds from behind the wheel, pushes in through the doors, then re-emerges with a case of Lucky Lager or Canadian. Trucks driven by slow-ambling men. Sometimes a taxi cab with the front and back seats full of people. Leathery women wearing feathered mullets and stonewashed jeans, long cigarettes in hand. Sometimes in the mornings people sit in their cars with their eyes closed and the seats tilted back, waiting for the doors to open.

  WE LIE in bed on a Friday night. Tomorrow we work, beginning our shift just as everyone else is letting off serious work-week steam. We poke earplugs into our heads. Next door, we can hear the thumpa-thumpa-thumpa from the pub, which on the weekends transforms into a nightclub complete with karaoke and whirling dots of light. After ten, the parking lot gets messy with sound. Heels click along pavement. Howls and mewls and squealing tires. The barking volley of romantic squabbles taken out into the night.

  These rooms hold years of our archaeological traces. We’ve smuggled our dogs in, though none are allowed, and they’ve busied themselves while we’re at work by gnawing at the legs of the furniture. When I roll the drawers open, all the knives are burnt black at the tips. We’ve spilled every kind of solid and every kind of fluid. We’ve emptied ourselves of mad youth in these rooms, of impulses bawdy and tawdry.

  It must be some kind of inevitable payback that tomorrow we will have to be up at dawn. Country music blares from an open car window. When the pub closes, the revelry collects and transports itself into the room above us. We call the front desk to complain but get no answer. We dial some numbers upstairs. No answer there either, though we hear the telephone ringing overhead amid the clinking of glass and the cackles of heavy smokers.

  The next morning we drag ourselves out of bed, and we’re surprised to hear the upstairs partiers hoisting themselves as well. We recognize the purposeful stomping of those making ready for work.

  WE MUSTER for our prework briefing in the underground ballroom. We sit around tables pushed together in the shape of a horseshoe. At the front of the room we note an array of AV machinery: an overhead projector, a screen—the implements of corporate tutelage. The panel lights above us flicker and fluoresce. People eat wedding cake down here and dance for the first time as married couples.

  At the head table Roland prepares to address us. He rubs his hands together as if washing with phantom soap, a thing he does when he’s nervous, when he’s worried we’ll fuck up in front of the client. The client in this case is just one person, a plain-faced woman at the end of the table. Her name is Janice. She is a small person in a collared shirt, a puffy down vest and a pair of cargo pants. She wears her hair in a tight ponytail, drawing attention to a high forehead and severely doctored eyebrows. She’s young. At some fledgling stage, we guess, between forestry g
raduate and certified professional.

  Next to Roland sits a burly, flannel-shirted stranger with ruddy cheeks and flyaway white hair. Roland introduces him as Ron, a forestry consultant. We’re not precisely sure why Ron has been sent in our direction or who pays his invoice, only that he looks expensively knowledgeable. He is a tall man wearing worn jeans and rolled-up sleeves, with a sonorous voice that sets us instantly at ease. Ron moves authoritatively to the wall and flicks at the lights.

  Once upon a time, he begins, we tried to plant trees like dirt farmers.

  But a mountainside is not a tilled field, and a tree is not a cornstalk. A forest floor is something different, a living, breathing carpet of rootlets and microbes, worms and fungi, not to mention a dozen kinds of underground plankton. You can’t really tell where the living things end and the sediments begin. Many of these life-forms have only just been discovered, even though they exist right beneath our feet. Creatures that look, under a microscope, like little monsters. Spiders with lobster pincers. Ants with warty antennae and forked tails. Hermit crabs with bulbous noses and shaggy streamers trailing from their legs.

  Ron relates to us the biography of a tree, flashing cosine growth curves and cross-sections of plant guts at the wall. Each spring, before a tree can grow leaves, it must put down roots, gathering strength for the summer’s photosynthetic burst. Our trees are born in nurseries, sown in Styrofoam boxes, sprayed for a year with watering hoses, daubed with fungicides, and then frozen like Popsicles for the winter. They are thawed in the spring, sometimes by accident and sometimes too late, then transported hundreds of bumpy miles. A dozen droughts and shocks before they arrive in our bullying hands.