Eating Dirt Read online

  We tumble out of our trucks like clothes from a dryer. Fog clings to the warp and weft of our tatters, the fine hairs on our cheekbones. Cigarettes are lit before feet hit the ground. Our smoke drifts up in a communal cloud. Most of us smoke. Brad has a way of making it look delicious, of holding a cigarette high in the crook of his fingers and putting his whole hand to his face. Those who don’t wish they could, just for the portable comfort.

  We gear up for the daily grind, grope around in our vinyl backpacks for wetsuit shirts and watertight containers. Gear hijacked from other sports—shin pads, knee braces made of hinged aluminum and Neoprene. We slide our feet down into tall leather boots with spiked soles. Loggers’ boots, made for walking on bark and slick logs, made to bite down and stick. We lace ourselves tight. We slip our hands into heavy-duty gloves. We tug it all on in preparation for battle. We’re proud, and yet ashamed.

  There is something bovine about our crew. Brian threads his way around between us. He has a wavy thatch of side-parted hair, freckles, and a devious grin. He is a rapid-fire talker. He barks out a bunch of words so compressed and contracted they sound like a foreign language. We let ourselves be herded this way and that. At the same time we hate to be told what to do. We slide waxed boxes from the backs of the trucks and fling them down at the road. Handle with Care, the boxes read. Forests for the Future. Nothing about this phrase is a lie, but neither is it wholly true.

  We chortle darkly, rubbing our palms together. There is nowhere to hide from the cold. No inside to duck into for warmth. A buzz develops all at once and out of nothing at all, the way bees begin to vibrate when they’re about to flee a hive. Box upon box lined up on the side of the road, each one filled with 240 trees. Ready for us, by the hundreds and thousands, lined up together like bullets. A box of seedlings is ripped open. A paper bag torn. Bundles of plastic-wrapped seedlings tumble out. The stems are as long as a forearm, the roots grown in Styrofoam tubules to fit in the palms of our hands. We like this idea, since it lends a kind of clout—trees grown to our ergonomic specifications. Tree planters: little trees plus human beings, two nouns that don’t seem to want to come apart.

  Boot spikes crunch around in the gravel. A runaway seedling rolls down the road. We jostle around one another, hungry for the day that awaits us. We throw down our tree-planting bags and kneel next to them and cram them with trees. We do it with practiced slapdash, as cashiers drop groceries into white plastic bags. We bump shoulders, quick fingered and competitive, like grannies at a bargain bin. As if there weren’t enough, thousands and thousands, to go around.

  Before long we abandon the scene, an explosion of brown paper and Saran Wrap snaking around on the road. We stomp out in every direction, right and left, up and down the mountain. We lean into the next minute and the next like runners in blocks. We don’t know how to do our work without pitting ourselves against one another, without turning it into an amazing race. Otherwise piecework is grindingly relentless, tiny objects passing negligibly through human hands. An inaudible gun goes off over our heads, and the day begins. Somewhere behind the clouds the sun is our pace clock in the sky.

  We came as one, and now the space between us stretches like the filaments of a web. Adam doles out my work space, a hectare of clear-cut hillside. As he points out the boundaries of my daily turf I watch our breath puff out in clouds. And then he launches into his fervent, head-down walk, leaving me to the twists of the day.

  At the lip of the road I peer out at the land. My tree-planting bags ride heavy on my thighs. Human saddlebags, one pouch in the back and one on each side. Every day, they turn gravity up a few notches. In my dreams they have sentient, subservient lives, like the magic broomsticks in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. They fill themselves up, I whistle them to life, and they trot out to do the job on their own.

  Until someone invents a tree-planting robot, a plane that shoots seedlings from the sky, it’s just me and my speed spade—a gardening trowel with a long plastic neck and a D-handle, a stainless steel blade shaved down with a grinder to resemble a big spoon. It feels in my hand the way spears must to Masai tribesmen, not merely a tool but something like an emblem, an extension of the hand and limb.

  I’m not too bad at planting trees, if only because of the practice. I have climbed the flanks of a hundred mountains and hoisted my limbs over countless logs and stumps. I’ve stuck a million seedlings in the ground. I’ve met quite a few people who’ve doubled and even tripled this number. Or so they claim. I don’t mind reading bush maps or flying around in helicopters or driving big pickup trucks. I hardly ever get cold in the rain. But I am not a natural tree planter. I have the hands of a typist. Being filthy and clammy makes me hate myself. And most of all I’d rather plant a pretty tree than a fast one. Which is one thing a tree planter should never do if she intends to earn a living.

  My mornings are hours of reluctance and loathing. I size up the clouds and decide if it will rain or not and if I am wearing the right kind of clothes. I swallow one last cookie. I blow warm air into my fists and scope out the job that looms before me. I eye it up the way rock climbers stand at the bottom of cliff faces pondering spatial puzzles of slope and texture and rock. How many people are doing just this right now, somewhere in the world? Planning and plotting and putting off chores of epic proportions. A hundred boxes of file folders. A great wall of dirty dishes. A graduate thesis. A long row of toilets to attack with just a scrub brush and a can of cleanser. The body recoils. It feels wrong in my cells. My neck hair stands on end.

  Planting trees isn’t hard. As any veteran will tell you, it isn’t the act of sowing itself but the ambient complications. It comes with snow pellets. Or clouds of biting insects so thick and furious it is possible to end a day with your eyelids swollen shut and blood trickling from your ears. There are swaying fields of venomous plants like devil’s club and stinging nettle. There are sunburns and hornets. There are swamps rimmed with algal sludge to fall into up to the armpits. There are leeches and ticks, bears and cougars. There are infections and chafe and boils and trench foot. It’s possible to be so cold you feel dreamily warm and so hot you fall into shivers. Over time the work has the bodily effect of a car crash in extreme slow motion. Sometimes our bosses make off to Mexico with all the money. Besides that, the task itself is thankless and boring, which is to say it is plain and silent. It is also one of the dirtiest jobs left in the modern world.

  What could compel a person to make a career of such a thing? I have always wanted to find out.

  AIRLINERS GLIDE through the skies on their way to Asia. We vanish like fleas into the fur of the land. We look for moss and signs of dirt, searing holes in the ground with our eyes. We find spots, and we stab as if to wound them, throwing our weight behind our shovels. If we’re lucky our blades penetrate slickly, as knives slide into melon. If not, we’ve got roots, rock, wood, grass—barriers to chip at with the blades of our shovels in search of elusive earth. We dig around in our left-hand bags and come out with the trees, one by one by one.

  I push into my shovel as if it were a heavy door. A square of earth breaks open at my feet and sighs a moldy breath. I bend at the waist and slide the roots down the back of my spade. My job is to find these trees new one-hundred-year homes, though I seldom think of it that way. Douglas-firs with slick, wet needles, twigs dressed in green whiskers. I tuck them in with a punch of my fist. I haven’t stood up and I’m already walking. Bend. Plant. Stand up. Move on. The work is simply this, multiplied by a thousand, two thousand, or more. Twenty-five cents a tree.

  Goodbye, little bastard. Have a nice life.

  A rainforest, minus the forest. On wet February days our lives are tinged with dread, a low-grade Sisyphean despair. Moisture comes down in every degree of slushiness. In every shape from mist to deluge, so loud we have to shout over its pattering din. It descends sideways, and it slithers in long strings. We’ve even seen rain fall up, propelled by ocean gusts. There is no way at all to stay dry, despite our rain gear, which
comes with intrepid names like Wetskins, Pioneer, and The North Face. The wetness envelops. It begins at the scalp and dribbles down the back of the neck, all the way down the spine until our boots fill up with water.

  Some days we’re like bugs crawling around in Velcro. Grubbers in the soil, incapable of dreams. In this gigantic landscape it’s easy to feel small, as if we could flake away from the land and splash down in the open ocean. Sweat trickles between our shoulder blades. We do a lot of gazing down.

  Do you like work? we ask one another during the moments in between.

  Not really, we agree.

  The days go by in intricate visuals and bodily sensation and zooming clouds and hundreds of schlepping movements accompanied by five-second shreds of thought. We look out, at the end of the day, at our fields of seedlings. They shimmy in the wind. There, we say. We did this with our hands. We didn’t make millions, and we didn’t cure AIDS. But at least a thousand new trees are breathing.

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  2 }

  a KIND of TRIBE

  TREE PLANTERS OBSERVE a different calendar, not a year highlighted by summer vacations and Christmas holidays, but one aligned with the seasons. We head out to the fields when winter gives way, when the woods are still dormant but the ground is shovel ready—around Valentine’s Day on Vancouver Island. February is our New Year, a time of preparation and departure and excitement mingled with dread.

  I spend my Januarys gazing through windows at the mountains, waiting for the snow line to edge upwards. Then, just when the flowering plum trees push out their first blossoms, I start drumming my fingers and cleaning out the perishables in the fridge. I listen to the weather forecast. When I drag out my caulk boots from storage, they fill my apartment with that old familiar smell of mold, sweat, and petroleum. I oil up my boot leather and screw the soles with brand-new gleaming spikes. I make my trips to the forestry supply store and Mountain Equipment Co-op in the hopes of finding some glove, some supersock that might save me from the impending miseries of outdoor life. It’s high time to head out to the cut blocks. I wait for the phone to ring.

  The forest has its seasons, too. In winter it sleeps. In spring, when the temperature rises just the right amount above freezing, the soil begins to wake up. The plant world gathers strength. Soon it begins its underground work, knitting and probing and girding itself for the summer’s big push. We plant trees in this window, to give our seedlings time to get used to their new environs before the thirsty months set in.

  A northern forest must take advantage of the short beneficence of fair weather. And so, too, must we. Like fruit pickers we are a migratory work force. When spring turns to summer we’ll travel inland and northward, where the thaw comes later and the snows are more persistent. By Labor Day we’ll find our way back to the coast. By late fall the trees harden off in preparation for another winter. The ground frosts over again. It is possible to work as a tree planter from February until October, which nearly negates the need for a home at all. But now we prepare for the rush of work, a new chapter for the arboreal humans, whose lives are measured out not in days or work weeks but in silvicultural increments: seed lots and hectares. Of sleeps and wake-ups. Measured out not in nine-to-fives but in diurnal phases.

  A season in the lives of rainforest planters. We have a million trees and then some to plant before the end of spring. Sixty days, says the boss, between us and the solstice. How much is a million trees besides just a number? It’s a tower of tree boxes more than one mile high. With the contents, we could forest five hundred Manhattan city blocks. Silviculture is a business of tiny things rolled out in big numbers, like grains of rice, like leaves of tea in China.

  THE NORTHERN tip of Vancouver Island, with its rugged folds and its light dusting of residents, has a history of abandonment. A century ago the Danes arrived, but a decade later they fled. Then other Europeans, Canadians, and Americans came. A hundred years of coming and going, waves of immigrants failing in their various ways to scrape a living from the rain-soaked land and the broody, cold ocean. Here nothing wants to grow but trees. Even the aboriginal peoples have dwindled down, done their own kind of surviving. They are now called the Nahwitti, at least by anthropologists. What would they say if we called this our office, our corner of the world to bash around in?

  Far from glinting steel buildings and cappuccino foam and the breath of a million idling cars. The trip from Vancouver involves a ferry, four hours of driving, and, finally, a long, winding gravel road over a mountain pass, pocked with holes in the summer and clotted with snow in winter. A dune of white to climb with tire chains and snow tires.

  On the other side is Holberg, a tiny village of woodcutters. For our first job of the season we are headquartered here. Houses nudge up to the jutting inlet amid the tall firs. Trees, trees, trees. From the snowy peaks right down to the tide line, where seaweed often dangles from the lower branches. You could feel pushed out to the edge of the storm-hammered shore. You could lose yourself among them.

  The village itself is no more than a primary school, a postal station, a pub, and a convenience store where it is possible to pay three dollars for a small handful of Gummi Bears. The houses here are slapped with remaindered paint in peanut-brown, in the green of Wrigley’s Doublemint. In the center of town sits the biggest stump we have ever seen, hauled from the guts of the bush. It serves as civic sculpture. Like other logging settlements on the island, this town grew up in uneasy permanence, built to be dismantled, as if the entire village could decamp any second.

  There are twenty of us, and since there is no facility big enough to house us all, we’re billeted, like a sports team. Some of us live in rented houses peppered throughout the village. Some of us live in the old logging barracks, known by its somewhat correctional name, E Bunk. The exterior is painted a linty shade of gray. There are no flowers and no birdhouses. E Bunk is a long modular building, the kind common to logging camps, mining operations, and industrial sites everywhere. A long hallway lit by fluorescent tubes, insect carcasses trapped behind pebbled plastic panels. Old lino on the floor, grimed with Rorschachs where our liquids have been spilled and emitted and dripped and tracked in and left to dry.

  The kitchen is a communal arrangement. Empty beer vessels rest on every horizontal surface. Half-crumpled cans of Pacific beer, craft-brewed bottles of nut-brown ale. A microwave, three fridges, and an old stove encrusted with hardened goo. Dirty dishes stacked up in the sink. A tea bag with the tag slung over the counter. And behind one of the fridges, quite a few strands of spaghetti are stuck to the wall. The bathroom houses a bank of showers and a short row of toilets, the porcelain enrobed in a fur of dust and pubic hair. There’s a sign, written on loose-leaf in black Magic Marker, above one of the toilets that reads: Poo Bandit: We Are Watching You!

  What use is there for shaving and hygiene and cleanliness when we’re only going to get dirty again, when fresh rounds of soiling await us? Besides, with the shortage of women, the lack of civilized company, there is no one to impress. Pot smoke, warm beer, musty footwear. The air is thick with male craving. It condenses and runs down the walls.

  Despite all of this, the space is friendly and unabashed. A party all are welcome to join if they can look past the proprietary filth. A long row of private quarters. Ten-foot rooms furnished with single mattresses, in-built desks, and orange chairs made of plastic with ovoid cutouts in the seats. Here we fling ourselves into all kinds of oblivion, tangling our legs in the covers. Housekeeping laxity camouflages workday mania. Call us anything but lazy hippies.

  WE CAME together at the start of the season, an undifferentiated group of faces. As the early days tick by, names come to mean something—complexions and hair color, our laughs, the way we throw back our lunches, in avid bites or all at once. We get to know the talkers and the joke tellers from the silent observers. Nick. Jake. Brad. Neil. Fin. Jon. The grown-up boys with monosyllabic names.

  Soon our men will grow beards, their last decent haircuts pushing out into
long shags. Their faces will become wind burnished. The skin of men who toil outdoors, dawn to dusk, tanned in the blunt light of winter. For now our femaleness is limited. We are just two—Carmen and me—in the early days, when the sun drops from the sky before our workday is even over, plunging us into twilight. Other women are rumored to arrive, and we look forward to that day, because until then we are invisible and outnumbered. Or perhaps we are too visible. We endure the talk of rampaging lust, of toilet habits. We get used to the sweaty tang of them, these dudes who surround us on all sides. Like those crewmen on Circe’s island, metamorphosed into pigs.

  But, as with families and weather and bad tattoos, what we can’t change we learn to love. We work next to these men, planting trees when the wind stirs the forest around like palm trees in a hurricane. When the wind blows our snot sideways from our nostrils. Together we bend and shove trees into the ground when the rain turns to sleet. When the hail comes down like icy BBs. And when our fingers finally give up, freeze into numb things at the end of our wrists, we ask to thaw our hands in their armpits, and they agree. We stand together, in the field, with our hands tucked under their wings, our hoods pulled tight. We gaze into their faces and see that their brute behavior is just a cover. They’ve been tenderized by inconvenience, the weather pulsing through their hair, running over their scalps, and down the backs of their necks. After all this tapping and needling, their defenses whittle down. What remains is pure personality, turned out, as plain as day. And if it’s happening to them, it must be happening to us, too.