Eating Dirt Read online

  In the evening our feet deliver us to the pub. The Scarlet Ibis, a cavern of darkened wood and old carpet, the same red shag featured in the motel. Beyond the windows, the end of the inlet, a diminishing, muddy tide. A wood stove that can’t keep up with the draft. We spend the afternoon here, tipping back beer, watching clumps of snow drop from the eaves. The owner’s name is Pat, a sturdy, jolly woman with a Dorothy Hamill pageboy and a thing for snug-fitting polyester.

  The locals trickle in, mostly men in their late forties and fifties with pot bellies and slow, easy demeanors. Union-shop old-timers who take coffee breaks at the control levers of graders, yarders, skidders, backhoes. Old loggers whose chain saws have inflicted a million cuts and back cuts, dug into the bark of countless trees. Like us, they can drink. It’s something we have in common. By dinnertime our crew accumulates. We’re celebrating. Travis is gone, and in his place more women have joined our ranks. Rose is a child of tree-planter parents. She wears an urban bob with a bleached streak and a Hudson’s Bay Company Eskimo parka. Melissa is an Australian with a constant smile, a spray of brown freckles, buxom lips. Heads turned when they arrived. There were sudden bouts of shaving.

  We order jugs of generic brew, whatever flows from the taps. K.T. orders a nonalcoholic beer. Our server makes a face and scratches her scalp with her pen. She comes back with a bottle coated with whitish rime.

  Just so you know, she tells him. That’s not frost on the bottle. It’s dust.

  Plates of food arrive. French fries, steak sandwiches, lasagna. We hover, fork tines poised. Missing parties who go to smoke outside or disappear to the bathroom sacrifice their dinners to our insatiable mouths. We weave between tables in an air of happy drunkenness. Pat eyes us wearily. She’s seen this routine, or versions of it, every night of the week for years and years. She stands behind the bar with her hand waiting for the debit machine to spit out a tongue of paper. She blows a strand of hair out of her eyes.

  In the corner sits a mannequin stuffed with old quilt batting and pantyhose for skin. He wears a baseball cap, a flannel shirt, and a pair of bucking pants held up with orange Husqvarna suspenders. His hand stuffed into the handle of a pint mug filled with crumpled brown cellophane. We spend an hour passing him around, snapping photos, holding him in various forms of romantic embrace. We jostle the tables. We spill the beer. We hold our lighter flames to his extremities. The smell of burnt synthetic fiber fills our noses. We’re one beat away from dragging him outside and sacrificing him to the gods.

  THE GRUNT work penetrates. It gets inside us, one layer at a time, from our epithelial layers to the innermost connective tissue. In the beginning we collected blisters on our hands and feet. They filled with fluid, only to break and rub away. Now we’re bruised on the hips from the weight of our bags, hairless on the thighs from the friction. The chapped lips, the broken fingernails. We fray along the edges.

  Manual toil is not just a labor of the hand, like knitting or surgery or diamond cutting. The whole body becomes involved, including the mind. If we’re lucky we reach a Zen state in which impulses flow between the nerve endings in our fingertips to the brain’s motor controls, bypassing our intellect almost totally. Time whooshes by while appearing to stand still, and the mental chatter falls silent. When we stand up straight at the end of the day we’re changed in some small way, as if we’ve walked out of a theater after a marathon movie. We’ve been somewhere else. A return to the self after an existential pause.

  We fall from the trucks at dawn. Nine hours later we crawl back in, stooped like gorillas, feeling as if we’ve been pummeled by small, firm objects, maybe lemons in a pillowcase. Our hands are scratched and scabbed, our finger pads etched with dirt. Swollen and pulsating, they feel like the hands of cartoon characters when they bash themselves with hammers. A fatigue so thorough it bungles speech, so deep the whole world gleams.

  We came chubby and pale at the end of the winter. In just a few short weeks, we shrink down and harden, like boot leather dried too fast. We have calluses on top of calluses, piled up on our palms and soles. We have washboard backs as well as stomachs. Arms ropy, muscled and veined. We consume five thousand calories every day. Food goes down without much chewing—not so much eaten as garburated. At night we nosedive into sleep with our engines still gunning, to the sound of our own venous hum.

  Everything grows fast. Our hair, our fingernails. Blood whizzes through us. When we cut ourselves we gush horrifying amounts of blood, but in the morning we wake to find new skin grown over the wound. At the same time, sleep ages us. We roll out of bed like Tin Men after a rainstorm. Our big toes go numb, become just tingling protrusions, a pull of skin and bone. You’ve got to give a slice of youthful zeal, kill yourself a little bit each day.

  {

  3 }

  ROOKIE YEARS

  IN OUR FIRST years as tree planters the wooden carnage was shocking. The skin of the earth pulled back, revealing a sad, organic gore. We wanted to cry but couldn’t. Said we would quit but didn’t. A numbness of attention crept over us, of the sort induced by megamall parking lots. There was nothing to jazz our rods and cones. We were growing up, paying taxes, burning holes in our own pockets. We were learning to see without seeing.

  Who talked us into this? Who gave us our first taste of tree planting? A brother, an old roommate, a friend who slept on the couch—it’s always someone else’s fault. Whoever it was, they hooked us, poured it into us with their stories of pay dirt and adventure. We let it slip down our throats. We drove rust-chewed jalopies west through the flatlands. We practiced with Popsicle sticks in the flower beds of our parents’ backyards. We were young and impressionable. We needed maps just to find our way back home.

  Now we could plant trees blindfolded in a pair of flip-flops. Lifers, we call ourselves, as junkies talk about one another. Where is the friend, where is the pusher now? He’s a real estate agent. Or she’s a mom behind the wheel of an SUV, with scars on her shins to remind herself how she could bend and yet be strong.

  ONCE, BEFORE I had ever planted a single tree, I lived in Toronto, in a student house, a decaying Victorian manor with bad heating and narrow windows that faced in all the sunless directions. I bought a potted fig tree to spruce up my room. Over the winter I watched its foliage yellow and drop off and whisper to the ground. It wasn’t so easy to make a green thing grow.

  Six or seven people lived here at any given time, not including boyfriends and girlfriends. Aimee was our alpha female. She had big, curly hair. She clomped around in leather boots with wooden heels. She wore scarves that fell to her knees and miniskirts from sutured scraps of leather. I never saw her in athletic shoes of any kind. She introduced me to a lot of printed words. Al Purdy. Gwendolyn MacEwen. Tom Robbins. The Beats. People who ate drugs and lived like hobos and fell wildly in love and lit up the skies with their voyages through the cosmos.

  Aimee was a tree planter. When the spring came around she went out to the Ontarian backwoods and sowed seedlings with her hands. I had never heard of tree planting before. I pictured people conveying seedlings in wheelbarrows. Kneeling in the dirt, patting baby plants down with gentle fingers the way gardeners bed cuttings in potting soil.

  That seems easy enough, I said.

  Planting trees. A job couldn’t get more self-explanatory. I was still imagining girls running barefoot through meadows tossing seeds from their aprons.

  Aimee told me about the first time she went out on the job. At the end of the day she crawled into her sleeping bag in all her dirty clothes. She slept for eleven hours. Just describing it, she sounded tired. I thought she was going to tell me she slept the whole next day, but she got up to do it all over again. She told me she’d seen grown men cry.

  What else? I asked.

  She showed me photos. She didn’t have a camera, but her tree-planting amigos had sent her snapshots in the mail. I looked through these rumpled photographic specimens. Aimee wearing a head scarf, her wild frizz escaping in the wind. Aimee looking wiry
and deranged by fatigue, dirty about the face. Aimee in tank tops, armpit hair poking out at the sides. She wore round, wire-rimmed spectacles, etched with a haze of scratches. I had seen these glasses. She wore them whenever her contact lenses grew gummy with optic proteins. This tree planting had battered the lenses to hell, and she was left seeing the world through a scratchy mist.

  The land depicted in the photos looked flat, the ground littered with gray, broken wood that receded forever into the distance. An ugly place, the color of newsprint, but not one that came alive in photos. No matter how many she showed me, I still couldn’t see what she meant.

  Are these all you have? I asked, craving more.

  Aimee’s boyfriend’s name was Dave. Dave was a tree planter, too. Once in a while he visited from Halifax, where he claimed to be studying design. He showed up across unfathomable stretches of Canadian geography, emerging from the darkness beyond the kitchen window, giving whoever was washing the dishes a fright. He came out of the winter blitz wearing a mere corduroy blazer, a scarf wound several times about the neck. He was a lanky man, of indeterminate ethnicity, his jacket secondhand, the arms too short. He carried a small, battered backpack and a guitar in a worn hardback case, plucked from alleyway trash on the way over. Urban hunter-gathering, he called it.

  All winter long our house was full of Aimee’s friends. They came with backpacks stuffed tight, suitcases with braided rope for handles, beat-up vans that you could hear coming a block away, mufflers wired to chassis with coat hangers. They came for a day and stayed for a week. They carried brandy and brie. They smelled like smoke and sweat and sandalwood soap, the spice of the wild, wide open world in their hair. They all dressed differently. They wore different smiles. But they were the same somehow under the skin and behind the eyes. They had a conspiratorial way of glancing at each other, like they were getting away with something. They liked to get drunk and laugh. They tossed their heads back, and I caught sight of their fillings. They spoke the languages of the places they’d traveled to, wherever they’d spent their winters. But they spoke another language as well, a patois of bulletlike verbs and nouns to do with the planting of trees. Cream. Duff. Slash. Crummy. When they talked about work, I could barely understand them. They had a way of making English sound grubby and strange.

  Tree planters seemed to have some curious thing in common—a furious way of being. I knew this from the way Dave burst into a house, breathlessly, like he’d narrowly escaped exhilarating disaster, tumbled from a fire with his clothes still smoking. He was always moving, bobbing, flowing from one action to the next. He insinuated wind. He never called first, and he never arrived by the front door. And when he left it was as if he’d vanished, picked a moment when you weren’t looking so he wouldn’t have to say goodbye.

  Take me with you, I said to Aimee.

  The summer would be upon me soon, and I felt the weight of its emptiness like an anvil on my chest.

  It’s backbreaking, Aimee warned me.

  I was adamant. Your back seems fine to me, I said.

  In the eight months we’d lived together, I had never seen her cry. I’d never seen her anxious over exams or upset about a sub-stellar mark. I’d never heard her complain about mess or cold or waiting. I had never heard her utter a jealous word. I’d seen her eat stale crullers and drink bad black coffee. I could stand to have my back broken if this was the way a spine could grow back.

  IN PREPARATION for our voyage, Aimee escorted me to a store out in the industrial fringes of the city. It took several buses and a lot of walking to get there. She led me through the aisles, loading foreign silvicultural objects into my arms. What kind of a boss expected you to shell out for equipment you didn’t know how to use, with money you hadn’t yet earned?

  A set of tree-planting bags, in heavy-duty vinyl, for carrying seedlings. A pair of tall pumpkin-colored rubber boots with heavy Vibram tread. She acquired some items, too. Some duct tape, a few pairs of webbies, gloves crosshatched with drizzlings of rubber. She purchased these the way she bought everything, by the indiscriminate handful, paid for with dimes and nickels.

  I tried on this equipment right there in the aisle, in case a dry run might change my mind. I clipped my new tree-planting bags around my waist. One pouch on each hip and one in the back, stitched down on a foam waistband with two suspender-like straps. They seemed equine to me, like feed sacks.

  I feel like a burro, I told her.

  The shovel was cumbersome, bigger than the sleek trowel I’d envisioned. I lifted it to shoulder height a few times and felt my deltoid burn.

  It’s heavy, I told her. Heavier than I thought.

  Welcome to my world, she said.

  WHEN THE time came we fled Toronto on a Greyhound bus, our backpacks in the belly underneath. We arrived at the bus station in Thunder Bay a night and a day later, without ever having escaped the province of Ontario. My ankles were swollen, my eyeballs furry.

  Eventually a green pickup truck arrived. The driver was a man named Jack, a short guy with stringy hair and a ski jacket glazed with motor oil. He had black grease all over his hands. He pointed his thumb toward the truck’s back end, and we heaved our backpacks into the open box. Propane tanks stood in the back, tied down with red ratchet straps.

  We slid onto a bench seat with room for three. I sat in the middle and had to move my thigh aside whenever Jack shifted into third or fourth gear. The truck interior smelled like oil, human and mechanical. We traveled down a deserted two-lane highway out of town and into the industrial wilds. The sky dimmed from navy blue to a black so matte it felt absorbent. Eventually we turned off onto a lumpy road. Yellow grass whiskered up between two ruts, the kind of road that reminded me of teenaged tailgate parties and meadowy make-out destinations. The headlights beamed into a clearing. Then we stopped, and the truck fell into darkness. Jack got out. His door squealed on its hinges.

  Welcome to paradise, he chuckled deviously. Then he disappeared into the night.

  My eyes probed for edges, signs of life. I made out dots of light in the meadow. They were geodesic dome tents glowing pink and blue and mustard yellow with the flashlights and candles burning inside. I could hear a guitar being plucked and someone singing off-key. We may as well have landed at a lunar outpost. I felt filthy, streaked with travel dust. I’d become filthy just from opening Jack’s door handles and wiping my hands down the thighs of my jeans. The soles of my sneakers were caked with mud. My jeans were also muddy at the cuffs and wet to my knees from the grass.

  We beetled across the field, laden down with our backpacks. I’d been chilled for hours, and my fingers felt like wood. We came upon a cluster of hulking structures, the size and shape of boxcars. Aimee had a tent. I didn’t. We were divided by this fact along with many others that suggested themselves to me now. I thought of Toronto. It seemed as far away and inconsequential as Pluto.

  Godspeed, she said.

  If it were a substance, the speed of God, I felt like it might come in handy in the future. She slipped away into the meadow. Stars shone like pinpricks in the sky. I was a rookie. Aimee was a veteran. We’d be split up because of this fact, sent to work on different crews. I could feel that the drift had already begun, and so I missed her already.

  I picked one of the trailers at random and climbed the steps. It had a door handle like a meat locker’s. I crept in, my backpack straps creaking on my shoulders. The room smelled of sleepy breath, old sweat, dried mud, farts escaped into the night. I navigated in quiet crashes.

  The sleeping bodies around me were female. I could tell from the sound of their breathing. I felt my way onto the upper tier of a bunk bed. My mother had sent me a sleeping bag from home. I knew when I pulled it from the stuff sack that it was the one that was too short, the one my brother and I used to fight to avoid. I went to bed still wearing my clothes. I slid my legs in, curled into a ball, and stretched the bag tight over one shoulder.

  IN THE morning I pushed open the trailer door and stepped outside in
to an overcast dawn. I wore a pair of army pants, two sweaters, a cotton button-down shirt, and a cheap yellow slicker that I’d picked up at a variety store that—it would soon become apparent—had no business selling outdoor clothing. I wore the orange boots from the tree-planting-supply warehouse, and they announced themselves in a halo of radioactive DayGlo light. The grass crunched with frost. I felt like a traveler fresh off a plane, blown back by alien cold with strange coins glinting in my palm. Where to find the toilets? Where next to shuffle my feet? I joined a stream of people heading toward a complex of interconnected trailers, all tarps and mismatched rooflines, like an industrial shanty. Steaming breath trailed around their heads. I let the smell of cooking lure me, for where there was food I presumed I would find warmth.

  I found the cook shack thronging with bodies. Fifty, one hundred, two hundred? Each one of them was dirty—an opaque band at the pant hems and sleeve cuffs that traveled upwards to the torso in diminishing gradations. I could smell fermented sweat. The only people who weren’t caked in mud were the cooks, and they were coated in a guano of splatters up and down their aprons. I saw no sign of Aimee.

  This was a place of slapdash utility, furnished with long benches and folding tables of the sort found in church basements. This kitchen was a whirring machine, more about feed than food. Chafing dishes were laden with scrambled eggs. Trays of bacon and sausage slid in and out of the ovens. Toast went around in the wire baskets of a grilling machine. Every few seconds another four slices dumped out onto a metal hopper. A girl stood by with a paintbrush dipped in melted margarine and slapped each piece as it fell. Huge ladles protruded from blackened stainless steel vats on the stove, each burner flaming full-bore. And everywhere I looked there were people pushing up with urgent, empty plates.