Eating Dirt Page 3

  Enter Doug, with his wool beret and his temples rutted with wrinkles. His pensive brow and sloe eyes, his voice sweet and cre-osotey as sauce sizzled down the back of a barbecue. There’s K.T., whose nickname derives from the way he scribbles his initials on our daily tally sheets. Enter olive-faced Jon. Tall, with the build of a decathlete and the gentle demeanor of Ferdinand the Bull. He has the kind of eyelashes that make women groan with jealousy. Fin, with his sunbaked blonde hair and his perennial surfer tan. Whose name, he tells us, is spelled like the end of a French movie. When he talks he sounds like Grover from Sesame Street.

  After just two weeks we know exactly who’s disciplined and who’s lazy. And who, left half-alone, would pick our gritty pockets clean. You can tell a lot about people—everything, you might say—by how they look over their shoulder when you come up behind them. How they bend down into their work.

  Enter the French Canadians, Pierre and Sylvain. They make a code of their crazy Quebec argot. Even though many of us speak rudimentary French, they know we won’t understand them. In return we take a name as poetically apt as Sylvain and anglicize it to Sly.

  There are the men with matching names, the Daves, the Steves, the Chrisses. And so we resort to surnames, as it goes in the military. Maguire. Davidson. Then Oakley, whose name, like his shape, reminds us of a tree.

  Some of us have known each other for years, since the days of pimples and cowlicks. Every year we bumble into each other’s company. It’s a loose, coincidental friendship. We Facebook in the winter but seldom call, since we’ve seen too much of one another, overdosed on our common life of planting trees. We’ve known each other through all kinds of vicissitudes. Through long hair and short hair. Through boom and bust. Through girlfriends and boyfriends, through spouses and children and divorce. All these circumstances somehow figuring from a distance, like a moon hugs the oceans of a planet.

  A HORSESHOE of mountains, checkered with clear-cuts. A finger of inlet pushes into the land. In the morning we drive out on the valley main lines, climbing the elevation lines. Young trees dot the valley the way hair grows in after a transplant. The loggers crawl the mountains. We see them across the valley. Their trucks budge around in the distance, like white bars of soap carried by ants. Trucks going up, trucks going down. The tidal motions of bush work, up to the peaks in the morning, down to the main lines in the evenings. Sleep in the valley, toil in the sky.

  Logging roads cross-cut the landscape like old surgical scars. Few residents but plenty of business. Every crag and knoll cruised, engineered, divvied up, high-graded, surveyed from the air. Creamed, as we are fond of saying. The term is always the same. No matter the province, no matter the branch of the clan. Cream. An absence of impediments to the eyes, hands, and feet. Breezy money, soil as open and inviting as beach sand. The more complete the devastation, the more a clear-cut resembles a lunar surface, the bigger our financial slice. We’re conflicted about this, if only on the bottom shelves of our minds.

  Cream can extend to anything in this world—people, food, love—just like the Dutch word lekker refers to all things alluring and delicious. In contrast, we have as many different words for garbage-work as the Inuit use for snow: snarb, schwag, chud, cack. Clipped, Germanic nonsense words, uttered from the back of the throat.

  The area surrounding Holberg features mountains rolling down to the Pacific like the soft folds of a blanket tossed over a bed. Nobody has ever logged or ever planted back here before, and the forest floor is untrammeled. The soil is cushy with wine-dark humus built up by hundreds of years of forest creatures growing and dying and dispersing back down into dirt. This job, despite our complaints, is a cream show. Perhaps we complain because it’s a cream show. If we pause in our bitching about the tree prices, the accommodation, or the weather, maybe someone will whisk our good fortunes away. We believe the good times will never end, like Niagara Falls will never end.

  But there’s a catch. It’s a crapshoot.

  Today we drive our trucks into a new cut block, ripping new ruts in the road. We stop abruptly at a broad crack in the gravel surface where a culvert has been dug out by a backhoe. We get out and prepare to walk the rest of the way. We peer out over jumbles of logs on the roadside’s downward slough. Our noses work the air for the smell of fresh soil, of fragrant mineral rot. Our eyes skim the land for the story of our day’s wages, a hint about our upcoming fortunes. We catch sight of a stretch of beautiful dream-cream. Fresh logging, a sumptuous pancake, plowed clean of debris, we guess, by an overzealous skidder driver looking to chew through some company time. We edge as close as we can without stumbling down the bank. Some of us let out the moans of dogs at the park, trapped behind car windows.

  But it’s real estate only one person can have. Brian scribbles on a shred of cardboard torn from the corner of a tree box. He folds it up and puts it in his pocket.

  Pick a number, he tells us, from one to a thousand.

  Where else is livelihood based on game show rules? We huddle, glancing at each other sidelong. We go around in a circle, announcing our numbers. Some pick low; others too high. I am one of those people who never win anything. Not grocery store pull tabs, not door prizes, not scratch-and-win lottery tickets. But today my number comes up.

  Shit, say my workmates, drawing the word out into syllables.

  I drop my bags and my dry sack, my boots and my drinking water. The rest of the crew members heave their kits over their shoulders, their shovels with the handles worn down by thousands of slides of the palm. They trudge on down the road in hopes of better fortunes. It’s a terrible freak pleasure, getting away with cream, since it almost always comes at someone else’s expense.

  Sean, our most senior vet, has the misfortune of doing the ugly top side, which affords him a view of my bounty. He watches me through the morning, as neighbors do. I watch him, too. I go back and forth, climbing up to the road to refill my bags again while he’s trapped on his weedy knoll. At noon he climbs down from his piece to bag up and find some lunch. He stops above me and leans on his shovel.

  Hey, guess what? he shouts down to me. I’m writing a book, too! It’s called Run, Charlotte, Run!

  It might be difficult to imagine people fighting over a blasted tract of land, but scarcely a day goes by without some kind of blowup—border disputes and competitive riling and schaden-freude. We’re like cavemen with a hunk of trophy meat to be carved up into pieces. We’re superstitious, perhaps to hide the fact that our job is mercilessly, randomly fair—or unfair, as the case may be. We have no unions, no benefits, no holidays. When the work runs out we’re laid off. Our bosses bid for jobs at silent auctions, and so all our perks come bundled inside the tree price. Everyone gets their time in the weeds.

  At the end of a day, cream or crap, we are still the same old blue-collar mortals. I’m a few hundred dollars further away from zero, no more or less happy, with an aching lumbar, throbbing feet, and a pile of empty tree boxes so big I wonder if we plant trees just to compensate for all the cardboard. Brian comes by and snaps a photo of this tower. Then we light it on fire. The cardboard has been waterproofed with wax, which sizzles up like a Roman candle. Sean comes down from the hills to join us. Late in the afternoon, dusk slips over our shoulders. We feel the chill of evaporating sweat. We hold our hands to the flames to get warm. We rotate from front to back, like chickens on a rotisserie, as smoke pours into the sky.

  We’re offsetting our offsets, we say.

  SOME OF us live in the logging barracks down in the village of Holberg. Some of us are marooned on the edge of town in the “motel,” though there is no neon sign to indicate that’s what it is. The motel is a compound of dwellings with a muddy parking lot where dogs roam, pooping with impunity. Inside these units, we find mouse droppings in all the cupboards, and in the drawers, plates of toxic-looking turquoise pellets. Our bathroom has a tub with a dissolving nylon shower curtain and peach-colored slime all along the hem. Our toilet flushes with a disposable razor tied to a stri
ng. But there is TV, always good satellite TV, no matter where in the wilds we find ourselves. We wander around opening and closing doors, turning Survivor on and off. What are we doing besides looking for an escape hatch?

  The couples live here because it’s the only place with double beds. I share a small cluster of rooms with K.T. The walls smell of cigarettes, and the carpet shows the footprints of the previous tenants, but we are delighted by this secret boon, a privacy the residents of E Bunk will never know. We cross the threshold and shut the door, feeling as if we’ve gotten away with something.

  K.T. is built like a basketball player—tall, with long-fingered hands and ropy forearms. He plants trees like Wayne Gretzky plays hockey, with speed and finesse that elude his own explanations.

  If I could clone your boyfriend, our boss often says, I’d be a rich and happy man.

  K.T.’s appetite for work is matched by an astounding throughput of food. He eats for fuel and not for taste. When he inhales an entire box of whole-wheat spaghetti, I’m reminded of eating’s thermogenic purpose. Tomorrow these carbohydrates will be converted into human effort, calories transformed into muscle flexion.

  K.T. is a goofball Newfoundlander, and I am often the victim of his foolery and leg pulling. It’s a trait his whole family seems to share, expressing their love with gags and ribbing. He’s also a fastidious person, with an aversion to disarray, dust, and filth—it’s a masochistic miracle that he’s chosen the planting life. When he comes down with a cold or gets injured he’s shocked by his own mutineering cells. He’s been planting trees for as long as I have. And like me he’s seldom worn sunscreen. It shows around our eyes and especially at the back of our necks, where the skin is as tired as an old lady’s purse.

  In the evenings we attack a fresh batch of chores. We divide and conquer. The boots need oiling, holes need patching, wet clothes need to be hung up to dry. And then we address our bodies, applying salve to the chafe, ice to the elbows, Band-Aids to the hang nails. We tend to ourselves as farmers feed their livestock.

  Do you want cheese in your sandwich tomorrow?

  I can’t face another sandwich.

  Yes or no. Just answer the question.

  After the chores K.T. and I watch TV. Often enough, it’s just the Weather Network, an analgesic for the brainwaves. At nine o’clock K.T. strips down and folds his clothes into neat, retail squares, as salesclerks do in stores. I step out of mine, leaving my pants on the floor in rumpled, inside-out tubes. Our bodies buzz with fatigue. We collapse on a worn mattress, rolling into the trough, where we’ll bump spines later in the night. During the tree-planting season K.T. falls asleep faster than anyone I’ve ever known, often in midsentence. Then we drift apart, our muscles electric and twitchy with the ghost motions of the day.

  When we go to work we’re like all kinds of modern working couples—pulling for the team but seldom in each other’s company. But here we also work shoulder to shoulder, united in a common purpose. Slash romance: part dirt, part soldier love, annealed in weather and necessity. I wear an engagement ring on days off but remove it when it’s time to get dirty again. I keep it in a Ziploc bag hidden inside a shoe.

  Nobody wears precious things to a cut block. If you lose some small object—a button, a contact lens—you will never see it again. It’s like dropping your car keys down a sewer grate or an earring in the ocean. Once you take your eyes from the spot where you lost it, the view ripples over with repetitive shapes that go on in every direction as far as the eye can see.

  SIX BILLION trees planted in the province of British Columbia. An unfathomable number, but not quite as mind-boggling as the size of the forest they replace. With these trees you could replant an area roughly the size of Sri Lanka. At the height of the trade there were an estimated 18,500 tree planters in this country, which is about the number of soldiers in the Canadian army. The average career lasts five seasons.

  The first tree planters in these woods were unemployed men put to work by the government in Depression-era relief programs. Conscientious objectors planted trees during World War II. They used grub hoes, rendering the work even more ergonomically unfriendly than it is now. They carried seedlings in buckets and burlap shoulder bags, which they put down to rest every time they dug a hole. They planted in crews of a dozen men, working in rows, separated by an arm span or two. Many were Mennonites who’d been shipped far from the Prairies. They were farmers, used to hard physical labor. Work reminded them of home. Their enthusiasm was also a way to transform punishment into a kind of reward. We know this, too. Hard work done reluctantly is more torturous than work done fast and well.

  In the sixties the government again made use of the unemployed, along with prison inmates, for its silvicultural labor force. Men worked for fixed wages, planting quotas of just four hundred trees a day—what an average modern planter can pull off in an hour or two. Reforestation began as community service, as rehab for the planters just as much as for the land. There is something of the misfit rebellion that still endures today.

  Tree planting, in its modern, high-speed incarnation, has only been around for forty years. Some say it began in the Purcell Mountains. Some say the first professional tree planters were American draft dodgers hiding out on the coast. Maybe nobody can identify the first professional tree planter, but at some point nearly everyone in the business mentions Dirk Brinkman.

  In the early seventies, Brinkman was a long-haired tree planter with an entrepreneurial streak who got the idea to bid for his own contracts. At the time most crews still used the old shoulder bags for hauling trees, as well as that medieval implement, the mattock. Brinkman got his hands on specially manufactured seedling carriers—a prototype of the current ergonomic design.

  These newfangled satchels sped things up considerably, but more than that, a new kind of mindset took hold. If you could learn to think of manual labor as a sport instead of purgatory, then you could train to become more efficient. You could learn to keep all your parts moving and to perform several motions all at once. When you decreased the number of movements, you shaved seconds. Seconds collected into minutes, and cents cascaded into dollars. Then, as with one of those demonic Sudoku puzzles, the code had been broken. It wasn’t long before everyone caught on. Production doubled and then tripled. Dirk Brinkman didn’t invent tree planting, but you could say he helped turn it from industrial gardening into a competitive, peak-performance event.

  Dirk Brinkman is now the CEO of one of the biggest reforestation companies in the Americas. Even the Brinkman children plant trees. They look as if they were genetically engineered for it, tall and lean and broad shouldered. Brinkman’s wife, Joyce Murray, also a former tree planter, is a Member of Parliament. At official ceremonies, when she plants a tree, she might be the only politician who really knows what she’s doing.

  IN RICH countries and poor countries, tree planters poke at the dirt with hoes and digging sticks and even earth-moving machinery. People plant trees as carbon credit enterprises. On Arbor Day troops of Boy Scouts break out the shovels. City dwellers plant trees in urban parklands to beautify and oxygenate their neighborhoods. When we do it between the stumps on industrial logging sites it’s called reforestation. When a woodlot is planted in an old, abandoned field, it’s known as afforestation—though in some cases this fallow turf was also once a forest, albeit many generations ago. Then the only difference between these two concepts—between forest renewal and forests anew—is time.

  Wherever men make it their business to cut down trees, chances are you’ll find people who make a job of putting them back. Tree slingers. Johnny Appleseeds for hire. Often we work in commodity backwaters, beyond public view, toiling away at the broken land. Mostly, we’re invisible. Still, we’ve seen photos of tree planters elsewhere: in Australia, New Zealand, and Costa Rica. They look a lot like us, dirty and tired and occasionally smiling. We even wear the same tools.

  In the United States our counterparts are Mexican migrant workers. Pineros, they ar
e called. Like us, they’re temporary, seasonal, and nonunionized. Pineros migrate, too. They begin in the southern states in the fall and then arrive in the Pacific Northwest come spring. They’re a long way from home. And just like us, they’re pieceworkers. No pennies drop into the piggy bank until the trees go into the ground, no matter the commute or the daily detours or the plethora of prelude chores. But unlike us, they have no insurance, no way into the clinic when they injure themselves, no backstop when they’re laid off.

  Many pineros live below the poverty line, earning less than five thousand dollars a year. Sometimes they work on private timberlands, sometimes in national forests. Mainly they work for contractors, some of whom are shady middlemen. And so pineros endure the usual array of occupational abuses. Their paychecks are mysteriously docked or withheld altogether, or their passports are held for ransom. But unlike us they can’t complain. They have temporary H-2B visas, but quite a few have no documents of any kind. As many as twenty thousand Mexicans grunt it out in shorn valleys, out of sight and out of mind.

  CLEAR-CUTS ARE illogical landscapes, lunar in their barrenness yet bristling with big texture. The bucked limbs, the twisted trunks, and the rotten heartwood. The logs worth less than the cost of the haul to market. Traveling through clear-cuts is an unstable, three-dimensional affair. Imagine a field piled thick with car parts, knitting needles, coat hangers. Imagine climbing through hurricane wreckage. Add slope and cliffs and waterfalls and weather. Our technique for walking is like jujitsu, performed with both the hands and feet. Slash is a forest’s postmortem revenge, a sharp-toothed terrestrial sea. It’s not our fault, but it might as well be. Every day the land takes a bite out of us.