Eating Dirt Read online

  There is a clear-cut in the Bowron River valley, three hundred miles northeast of Vancouver, that’s the size of a small nation. The largest clear-cut in the world—roughly two hundred square miles. When the cut was fresh, it could be seen from space. In British Columbia we live among clear-cuts like people of the tropics live in the sugarcane. When we fly over our province we see shaved slopes. When we drive, slash and stumps are a highway blur through our windshields. Cut blocks, they are called in the logging trade, like something you could snip at with scissors.

  The block, as we’ve come to call it. The bucked limbs, the reject logs, and the shattered scraps, all of it sun worn and gray. We’ve seen fallen logs as big as buses, slash piled high as a house. A sudden flattening of monstrous biomass, like whalebones spread out on a beach. Up above us, slash teeters from the ledges of rock bluffs. Down below it drops abruptly away. Rolling, tumbling, pulled by gravity, settling glacially down into itself.

  The chainsaws across the valley sound like mad mosquitoes. We find the loggers’ traces, the crumpled cans, the Coke and the Budweiser, the abandoned jerry cans. We hear machinery clanking and grinding, logs scraped down the mountainsides along skylines of wire rope. Loggers cut. We plant. It’s a strange industrial marriage. And yet, when we look at what’s gone, it seems like more wood than the world could possibly use. We drape ourselves across the stumps as if they were king-sized beds. Does it get to the loggers? Is it getting to us?

  Our jokes are associative, communal creations. We fire our verbal rockets into the cosmos, quips that travel out, never to return. We cook up schemes to start a carbon offset business. We’ll sell green credits on the side. We’ll plant our trees with nameplates, the way the International Star Registry sells twinkling points in the night sky. Keep on truckin’, everyone. Crank out more Kleenex, more Starbucks cups, more IKEA coffee tables. By all means, please, mow down the planet. World, we’ve got you covered.

  IF WE were to close our eyes at the start of a shift and open them at the end, nothing would look the same—not the scenery, not the weather, not even the people, since our crew is always in flux. Someone is always joining or quitting or rotating through, like traveling salesmen, touring circuses, or flight attendants at an airport bar. Sometimes people stay for as little as a single day before migrating to another crew. The most we can remember about them is the brand of their boots or what they ate for lunch; we might not even recall their names. Showing up, then evaporating—as if they’d never come along in the first place.

  Must’ve been a pretty bad day, we joke.

  Maguire is the first to quit. He got jumped outside the pub by some local guys, two logger roughnecks with itchy knuckles. He mangled his fist defending himself. Brad and Doug, who witnessed the fight, went to the cops to report what they’d seen. Some officers took Brad’s statement on a scrap of crumpled paper that looked as if it had been plucked from the recycling bin.

  To keep the crew full, the boss does continuous rounds of hiring. Fresh recruits, sent our way like numbered Ping-Pong balls in a lottery, pneumatically blown up the pipe. Travis arrives one day with a gaunt face and scruff inching down his neck, looking like he hasn’t eaten or slept in a month. He wears dreadlocks, the kind that gather unintentionally near the nape of an unkempt neck. His backpack was stolen in town, he tells us, snatched out of the open bed of a truck. He lost an array of valuables, including his wallet and his medication. Tells is not precisely right, since the information arrives by chance, as our gossip always does, like old grocery bags blown by the wind. Travis is a recovering addict. And a recently diagnosed schizophrenic. Or so the rumor goes.

  In the field Travis beguiles us. We come across his belongings, strewn on the road’s chunky shoulder like garage sale inventory. We look around but can’t find him anywhere, as if he’s been absorbed into the land. When we brush up against his handiwork, it’s hidden in the underbrush. We bend to plant and find his trees at our feet, choked in ferns and brush. They are unhappy things, only half-planted, protruding from their holes. We fix them up sometimes, put them straight in the soil. One or two, until there are too many to repair, and then we turn around and flee.

  One day Brian and I catch sight of Travis at work in the field. We stand on the road observing from a distance, as spectators watch athletes warming up around a track. His planting style is a long, exhausted stumble followed by a furious pounce. Brian explains that Travis has been going to work on an empty stomach. He says he can’t afford groceries.

  If we know what it’s like to plant trees on an empty stomach, it only happens by accident. Sometimes we leave our lunches behind on the countertops. Or our day bags are ransacked by ravens or bears or planters’ pet dogs. Our blood sugar plummets. By noon we stumble around in a hypoglycemic haze. Our hands fumble, and we tangle our feet in the smallest branches. Our limbs feel like they weigh a thousand pounds. We plant trees, just like Travis does now, with hunger scratching at our bellies.

  Travis dips down over the rise. Brian puffs out his cheeks and lets out a long, weary sigh. He pats himself down, as if remembering something crucial he left on the other side of the world. Then he throws himself into his truck and peels away. I catch sight of an escaped seedling that fell out of Travis’s bags. It hangs from a branch, swaying in the breeze, even now drying out and dying.

  Back in the kitchens of home, it is reported, food is going missing. Not the iPods or the MasterCards or the laptops. Just the edibles and the drinkables, but never so much that anyone notices. A bottle of beer, a glug of milk, a few slices of bread. We might confuse ourselves into believing we’d consumed these things ourselves. Adam and Brian find empty beer cans rolling around in the back of the trucks. Just one or two, every other day, amid the wet chaff that slops around with our planting bags and tree boxes, the flagging tape rejects and the rotten apple cores.

  Crew life enforces togetherness. There is no fate suffered by just one person. No way to hide even the simplest emotion. If we are mad or sad or have come unglued, everyone will know it, sometimes before we do. Our cut blocks are graded like final exams. When one person fails in his or her daily work, we all sink a little bit. There is no way to forget your lunch or your water or your extra dry clothes without impinging on someone else’s. We’re a hundred miles from the nearest hospital. The only ambulance is our ETV, a work-thrashed Ford F-350 with a fiberglass canopy. Our emergency room is a backpack stuffed with first aid supplies and a spine board strapped to the roof rack. If we fall down and crack our backs or get stung by a hornet and swell up like blimps or puncture our veins or get poked in the eyes, we can only hope, when we shout for help, that someone decides to hear us.

  Travis develops a bad case of tendinitis in his wrist, which he splints with a tensor bandage and a brace. Because of this vulnerability or perhaps to push it along, we start to call Travis by his last name, which is coincidentally the same as that of a famous Hollywood nutcase. It escapes one set of lips, and then it catches on until we’re all doing it. It must have been this way with fire and cavemen, with plagues in the time before penicillin.

  You’ve got to fire that guy, we tell the big boss. Before he runs out of rope.

  ROLAND IS the company owner. His Chevy Avalanche is a rolling office, like the bookmobile. We get used to seeing just his upper portions leaning out through the driver’s-side window.

  No part of Roland is small. Even his salt-and-pepper hair is big. Some of us say he’s the tallest, most expansive man we’ve ever met. He’s French Swiss, a Euro Paul Bunyan, in glasses with buffed steel frames and enough Patagonia GORE-TEX to make a pup tent. He used to be a hippie, a dyed-in-the-wool Brinkman blowhard. We have seen old photos of him alongside Dirk, surrounded by a whole crew kitted out in Icelandic sweaters, big beards, and long hair parted straight down the middle. They look exactly like us except for their general level of hirsuteness. The grubby knuckles, the ruddy, just-scrubbed facial sheen. The ridiculous, reflexive smiles. The coils of wire rope in the backdrop,
the wood planks, the industrial outdoors that resemble the mud bogs of destitute Appalachia. Back then, Roland told me, they worked in a big co-op. One person stayed home every day to stir the soup and bake bread and sometimes to care for the children. He mentioned a wall chart they kept in a company office diagramming which tree planter had slept with whom. It turned into a spiderweb, too crosshatched to be useful.

  Roland lives in the small island community of Alert Bay. He raised his kids on soy milk and organic granola. They are not tree planters, these strapping boys. They are athletes and university students. But we are Roland’s children, too. At work, if the weather is awful or if we’re having a sad, unproductive shift, Roland carves out room for us and flicks on the seat warmers. We cram in amid bales of toilet paper, Perrier bottles, and Harper’s magazines. He prods through our lunches with his index finger and high-grades the Chips Ahoy. In return we smear the mud around on his leather seats.

  Roland has a heart as soft as a round of brie, but we think he could break a chair in two with his bare hands if we got him angry enough.

  WHEN TREE planters get fired there are no termination letters or requests for resignation. We’re axed or chopped, booted or shit-canned. Gone down the road, quite literally. On the day of our first official shit-canning, Travis is the last to know.

  I’m not on the list, he suggests at our morning meeting.

  Adam puts a hand on Travis’s shoulder. Today, says Adam, you ride with the boss.

  We know precisely what this ride will entail. We’ve seen it before with many of Roland’s unfortunate hires. Roland can’t bear to fire anyone. It takes him many days of agonizing and hand-wringing, but in the end Travis’s occupational breakup will take about an hour, which is the length of time required to drive from Holberg to the highway, where the Greyhound buses connect. The Avalanche whizzes down the road. Roland and Travis sit side by side with their elbows on the armrest, peering glumly through the windshield, like a dad and his criminal son.

  Goodbye, little bastard. Have a nice life.

  For the rest of us, that morning, it’s back to the salt mines as usual. When we arrive at the block, white sunlight knifes through torn, bulbous clouds—a sign the monsoon is breaking up.

  What is that glowing orb thing burning up in the sky?

  I don’t know, we joke. But, goddamn, it hurts my eyes.

  Today the ravens soar by with their heads and tail flaps swiveling, in search of lunches to attack with their cunning beaks. Ravens and crows, both members of the Corvid family, are the weisenheimers of the bird world. As we work, they sit on stumps heckling us with their caws and catcalls. They hop along the logging roads, strutting around in their lustrous black feathers as if they were little Armani suits. Crows are just like us, at home in both the cities and the woods.

  Crows and ravens know how zippers, Tupperware, and Velcro work, as rookie planters often discover the hard way. These birds hang out in complexly hierarchical organizations. They have dialects and gang signs. They mate for life but then cheat on each other. They’re burglars and nest raiders. They collect secret caches of flashy, colorful objects that seem to have no function at all. Rumor has it they’ll gang up on one of their own kind, if they see the need, and carry out an execution. And then they’ll hold a funeral for their departed. A silent vigil before they lift off, all at once, and flap away.

  Do you know the difference between a crow and a raven? Sean asks me in the afternoon.

  Is this a joke? I reply.

  A raven has an extra feather, says Sean, so it’s a matter of a pinion.

  If tree planters have a mascot, surely it’s the crow.

  On the ramble home at the end of the day, we turn to a common topic of discussion: all the ways tree planters can die on the job. You can lose your footing and tumble from a cliff. You can impale yourself on a stick. You can be mauled by bears or scalped by a cougar’s claws. You can get lost in a hypothermic delirium. Your boat sinks, and you drown on the frigid swim to shore. You can quit, get left behind on a roadside, then vanish in the gnarl of the bush. A tree falls in a windstorm, pinning you to the ground. Or you can get drunk, climb behind the wheel of a truck, and flip yourself into a lake on some urgent, breakneck tear. There is a deadly fungus whose spores puff up from the soil. Bend. Plant. Stand up. Move along.

  You can also commit suicide, someone says.

  Despite all of this, our job isn’t extreme or deadly or heroic. We have no power tools, no heavy machinery. No guns, no explosives, no underwater breathing. Planting trees is merely almost dangerous. Only as precarious as the speed at which we do it, or how many things we try to juggle at once.

  THE WORLD record for planting trees is held by a man named Ken Chaplin, who pounded 15,170 red pine seedlings into a creamy Saskatchewan plain in a single summer day. A record achieved with two sets of planting bags, four tree-planting spades, and three pairs of boots. Not to mention about four days’ worth of calories, incredible musculoskeletal stamina, and no small amount of mental fortitude. Similar feats are pulled off with surprising regularity in the silvicultural backwoods, without TV cameras, fanfare, or Guinness Book adjudicators. Using techniques devised, once upon a time, by Brinkman and his crew of ur-planters.

  When one person plants a huge number of trees all by himself, it’s an athletic feat. When many people plant trees all together, it’s a movement. In July 2009, a group of three hundred Pakistani villagers stitched 54 1,176 mangrove seedlings into intertidal mud flats at the mouth of the Indus River. They were all volunteers. Their town was once a thriving port city. But now upstream irrigation siphons off much of the river’s flow. Without this freshwater discharge the soil suffers from saltwater intrusion, which poisons their once-fertile agricultural lands. Mangrove trees are a hardy species, able to withstand the region’s extreme temperatures and high salinity. But the mangrove forests of the delta have all but disappeared. So too has the marine habitat these trees once provided, compromising the fishery on which many of the locals depend.

  Tree-planting efforts proceed every day, sometimes with official billing, but mostly with no headlines or photo ops at all. Oftentimes they take place in fragile, compromised environments. Lands with long, high-traffic histories. Generations of plowing, grazing, and by-hand deforestation have exacted a slow toll that nature can no longer pay back. Chances are, the tree planters are locals. In another time they might have been called peasants. They are the fishermen and shepherds whose livelihoods are tied to the environment in the most primary and susceptible of ways. They plant trees because they’ve been involuntarily retired from their traditional ways of life, by edict or circumstance or both. Sometimes they’ve been assigned to the task by their governments, put to work in rehabilitative tree-planting programs. They are farmers whose fields have turned to dust.

  Some live in hideously degraded conditions. Their hills are denuded, their valleys alternately ravaged by droughts and flooding. When dust storms howl through, the sky turns burnt orange. In the aftermath the villagers find their houses drifted over to the eaves with dirt. They’re forced to dig themselves out of their front doors. When it rains mountains disintegrate, deluging the rivers with tons of mud and grit. Year by year lakes fill in with sediment. Deserts expand. Dry dunes swallow up highways and encroach on major cities. It’s a constant war for the locals, who must shovel and bulldoze it back.

  These scenes might seem biblical, or like glimpses of a dystopian future, but they are a reality in present-day China. After centuries of tree felling and intensive farming, firewood collection and charcoal making, much of China’s landscape has been irredeemably altered. Many of the original forests and grasslands are gone, cleared to make way for settlement and agriculture. China is 27 percent desert but possesses only 10 percent of the world’s arable land, and with this slender allotment of fertile ground the country must feed more than a billion people.

  The largest tree-planting initiative in the world is unfolding in China. The Chinese have planted
billions of trees since 1978 in a collection of projects known as the Great Green Wall, an environmental rehab offensive designed to undo centuries of erosive land practices. The work is done largely by an army of subsistence farmers. The Gobi Desert is expanding at a rate of about 950 square miles annually. Sand dunes are but an hour’s drive from Beijing, and it’s thought they could reach city limits by 2040. The jury is out on whether all this tree planting is having any effect. Skeptics say the problem is too complex and entrenched, the land too parched to support a forest. Only time will tell.

  THE FREEZE creeps down the mountainsides. We wake up to it at dawn, blanketing the contours beyond the windows with an eerie, purplish white. When it snows everything grinds to a halt in the woods. Nature pads itself against us. Even the chain saws fall silent.

  Some of us attempt the drive to Port Hardy, though the pass is snowbound, the road to civilization deep and unplowed. On the road from Holberg, where the line on the map turns from solid to dotted, there is a cedar snag nailed with thousands of shoes. Boots worn by intrepid hikers on the way to Cape Scott, as if the old soles exhausted themselves on the voyage. As if these visitors had climbed up and over and become different people, grew new footprints on the other side.

  It’s here that we meet a traveling kitchenware salesman, in the notch of the pass. His name is Gunter. His wheels are caked with snow. We help him dress his tires in chains, which he produces still tagged and boxed from the trunk of his Jetta.

  We’re tree planters, we tell him.

  Thank you for healing the planet, he says.

  After that he gives each of us a glinting knife, the kind that never needs sharpening.

  Some of us spend the day back in Holberg without even venturing outside. We hole up in front of the TV, roaming the highs and lows of the satellite spectrum. We sprawl over unmade beds. Tree planting is like this, full-throttle production interrupted by jags of furious waiting. No one does it better than us. We push endless variations of fat and sugar into our mouths. We’re bored by our own taste buds, and the boredom feeds our hunger.