Eating Dirt Read online

  I decided to first address the problem of the lunch table with its own horde attacking buckets full of cookies. As I wedged my way in, the supervisor approached. He was a compact man with hair like Beethoven. He wore a flannel shirt and quilted vest lined with shearling. He walked around amid all this youth like a middle-aged interloper, like someone’s carpenter dad. We had a conversation of one-word sentences.

  Morning, he said. Ready?

  Sure, I answered.

  Good, he said, and I knew that was a lie, too. Good was too easy, the wrong kind of word for this place. Neither one of us was really paying attention. I watched him build a sandwich involving just two ingredients, cheese and bread. I copied what he did, moving down the assembly line. He wore a radio strapped to his chest. It had a flexible rubber antenna tied with a strip of bright pink surveyor’s tape. I wondered if it was there to remind him of something.

  He pointed to a woman with long gray hair. She wore grungy white coveralls and a pink scarf around her neck.

  That’s Lynn, he told me. Go with her.

  Then he evaporated between the bodies of other late risers, with their Ziploc baggies held open, jockeying at my back for the last of the trail mix. I found myself with a plate of scrambled eggs in my hand, scrounging into an old coffee can for cutlery.

  After breakfast I fell in with my rookie compatriots, we of the gleaming new gear. We trudged together with our tree-planting bags clipped to our shovels. We carried our shovels like hobos with handkerchief satchels tied to their sticks. We followed Lynn to a row of white passenger vans. Hers was the oldest, the most beaten and dinged. I could tell she had a soft spot for underdogs and lost causes.

  We drove to work, in a convoy of identical vans, each one filled with planters. The forest seemed to go north forever. As if you could start sawing and felling, gnawing at the forests and be busy all the way to the tundra. Busy for a hundred years. Which was, in fact, what was happening.

  The guy in the passenger’s seat produced a roll of duct tape from the glove box. He began an intricate process of pulling strips from the roll and tearing them off with his teeth. He taped the under and back side of each finger of his left hand. Then again horizontally, in rings between each knuckle. It was a complicated tape-job, like those administered to boxers before a fight. When he was done his hand resembled a mechanical claw.

  The duct tape rolled backwards into a bramble of waiting hands, and then others began this taping routine as well. It made me nervous. I smelled the cloying aroma of peanut butter and jelly. It was the girl whose name I learned, through aural osmosis, was Sarah. She munched a sandwich, even though we’d just finished breakfast. I knew it had to be a comfort thing, the sugar and the carbohydrates, the familiar soft and sticky texture.

  The mood in our van was funereal. As we traveled, the road grew rough and narrow as a wagon trail. The gear on the roof rack ahead bounced each time the tires juddered through ruts. Each of the vans broke away onto its own branch road until we were on our own. We turned off at our destined fork and entered a wide clearing. It was my first real-live clear-cut, though I’d seen pictures on Wilderness Committee T-shirts and in old issues of Canadian Geographic. This clear-cut looked nothing like what I’d imagined. It reminded me of a landfill. The same unremitting texture in all directions—flattened wood and stumps, stumps, stumps. It didn’t take my breath away, and it didn’t break my heart in quite the way I’d expected. It shocked me only in its scale. As I might be shocked in the teeming streets of India or in the blinding white of Antarctica.

  The road wound through the open field. Lynn made stops every hundred feet next to flats of seedlings lined up on the roadside, each the size of a large doormat. The side door rolled open, and my crewmates debarked in ones and twos until only Sarah and I were left. Then Sarah got out, pulling her hood up over her head. After that there was no denying where I stood in the crew hierarchy. We drove to the very end of the road, to the loneliest corner of our working territory. Lynn turned the key in the ignition.

  This is your cache, she said. Caches, I presumed, were the roadside spots where the seedlings were stored. I took it as code for get out.

  Outside the wind blasted through my layers in a woefully chilly way, at the same time frozen and damp. I climbed the ladder up the back of the van to the roof rack and threw my gear down at the road. I smelled the last of the van’s heat evaporating from my fibers.

  Bag up, Lynn told me. Don’t take too many.

  I had only one flat at my cache. Two hundred trees per tray. Obviously not much was expected of me. The seedlings reminded me of a small living carpet, like wheatgrass from a health food store, the stuff shorn with scissors and fed down into a grinder spewing liquid chlorophyll drink. I ran my hand across the foliage, which was dark blue-green and pliable. It had a nap, soft or prickly, depending on which way I rubbed the needles. Each seedling grew in a tube of soil, and each tube in a paper honeycomb. I dug out my gloves and put them on. They smelled like new skateboard wheels. I lifted a corner of this living spruce carpet and measured out a portion with my hands.

  Half that, said Lynn.

  I ripped it in two.

  Carefully, she added. She squinted with one eye closed against the wind, and for a second I thought she was winking at me.

  I shoved a mat of seedlings down into each of my tree-planting bags, then clipped myself in. A few dry flurries zipped to the ground. I studied the sky for the onset of weather, but Lynn had already started walking. I ran after her with my shovel in one hand and my raincoat flapping in the other. I leaped after her across a ditch of wizened reed husks and followed her into the clear-cut, which seemed undeniably torn once I stepped inside it, not only logged, but mechanically scarified into coiling furrows. I followed her to the shadowed margins where the tall trees met the devastation. Lynn knew what she was doing—I could tell by the way she strolled. It wasn’t easy, simple walking but more like trying to move through an extinguished campfire.

  Lynn waited for me at the edge of the forest, where I could hear the trunks keening in the wind. She reached into my left-hand bag and teased a tree out from my supply. I watched her aim her shovel at the ground and hit a soft spot between two rocks. In a single practiced motion she bent at the waist and pushed her shovel forward. The ground at her feet broke open in a clean rectangle. With her free hand she fed the root plug down along the back of her blade. Then her hand disappeared into the hole.

  As cleanly and as quickly as she’d bent forward, she stood up. She kicked the hole shut, violently I thought, with the heel of her boot. The little tree stood out of the ground at attention.

  Just like that, she said. Only faster.

  That same eye winked. And then she left me alone.

  I LOST the afternoon in a wet smear of movement and sensation. At the end of the day I felt as if I’d been blown and beaten by the slaps of a car wash. Back at camp I headed straight for the cook shack and threw down dinner. It was fettuccini Alfredo. I didn’t even like fettuccini Alfredo, but it was food, hot and comfortingly starchy. Everybody around me was exhausted and happy not to be outside. I heard laughter for the first time since I’d arrived.

  The next day also passed in a dull roar. The sky roiled around with clouds and showers and fleeting streaks of blue. I found it vexing, when pawing around in my bags, to pluck one tree from the rest, since they seemed knitted together by the roots. Sometimes I dropped my shovel and plunged both hands in to rip the trees apart in frustration.

  The next day, I planted trees with a headache, since my brain was full of blood from bending over. I yanked at my clothing, which had traveled to one side of my body, for this was ruthlessly crooked labor. I learned it was easy to do something once. The trick was doing it a thousand times.

  A week flashed by. Scarcely a morning passed without the van getting stuck in the mud or bogged down in a swampy puddle or hung up by an axle on a stump. Lynn would retrieve the chain saw from the back. We’d get out and gather in a sma
ll crowd while Lynn crawled underneath the chassis with the chain saw snarling. We’d wait for the sound of the blade biting into the wood, for the shreds of yellow sawdust to fly. Once Lynn had finished dismembering the stump we’d spend some more time knee-deep in the ditch, rocking and pushing at the bumper. I was almost happy, my boots full of mud, flecked on the eyelids and earlobes. It meant one less hour spent out in the cut block, alone, planting trees.

  At quitting time, once we’d assembled in the van, we always took turns calling out the number of trees we’d planted. Humiliating, but at least we could be equally humiliated together. One day, Lynn didn’t call Sarah’s name, and only then did I notice she hadn’t come to work. That’s how I discovered what happened to the people who quit. One day, present. Next day, vaporized.

  If you wanted to abandon ship, you had to find the supervisor and admit to him your failure. Then you packed your bags and waited for something to break down in camp so that Jack had a reason to go to town. You could wait days walking among people who knew you were weak, who looked your way as if you’d abandoned the cause.

  That night, Sarah was an empty mattress in the bunkhouse. The next day she was a space between our shoulders, which eventually our biomass expanded to fill. I allowed myself the dream of quitting once a day, and it usually happened before I’d even slapped my first tree into the ground. In truth it took a lot of effort to quit, just as much as it took to keep going.

  THE DAYS warmed, and then the bugs emerged. They rose out of puddles, softly at first, then rising to a great crescendo. At first, a few circled muzzily around my head. With every day that passed they grew smarter and faster and more aggressive. Mosquitoes could penetrate a single layer of clothing with their diligent, probing beaks, and so the hotter it became, the more clothes we were forced to wear. Black flies landed and crawled around on woven fibers, looking for a buttonhole or a zipper left undone. When they found a gap, they crawled in and buzzed around inside our clothes, savaging all our tender crooks and notches.

  Olive oil, citronella, lavender, Tiger Balm, Off!, Skin So Soft. There was no slather, no concoction that would keep them out for good. We wrapped ourselves in headscarves and balaclavas fashioned from T-shirts. We duct-taped ourselves into our clothing. But there was no escaping the sound, the maddening drone of insects whose territory we’d strayed into.

  So many ways to fall down. A branch caught you midstride between calf and shin, like a rod thrown into bicycle spokes. Stepping over a log, you caught your toe on splintered arms and woody knots. You stepped without looking and rolled over onto your ankle. Or your tired quads refused to lift your leg to the height required. A twig caught the lip of a boot sole. In the midst of digging, you nailed yourself with your shovel blade in the knee’s patellar soft spot. Stumps lurked in tall grass. They hammered you in the shin as you passed over, where the skin was thin and massacred from the last time you’d done it.

  Horseflies landed, burrowed through my hair and bit into my scalp with their pincers. I spent many an afternoon slapping myself across the face. The days ripened, and the skies turned a merciless blue. I saw my co-workers, who each wore a halo of black flies. Outside this orbit, horseflies whizzed in bigger loops, like electrons around a nucleus. I squinted through my own veil of winged creatures. I felt them bounce from my cheeks before they touched down and bit into me, one jolting itch at a time. At the end of the day I touched my temples and found the grit of crystallized sweat and crusts of dried blood.

  By late spring quite a few tree planters had quit, but I didn’t. I stayed until a billion blood cells had died and been reborn. Until my hands looked like rawhide and my breasts had melted away. By the time it got hot enough to put on a swimsuit, I had fuzzy, scabbed shins and a baked neck. When I glimpsed myself in mirrors I saw a teenage boy in drag.

  There was something alluring, addictive even, about the job. I liked the feel of loam between my fingers, loved the look of a freshly planted tree bristling up from tamped soil. Planting trees was a whole, complete task. You could finish what you started in just a few seconds. You could sow a field in a day. It meant being outside, unprotected from the elements, but at least weather affected everyone equally. Best of all, in a cut block you could erase your old self. You could disappear almost completely.

  Aimee got a letter from Dave. He’d been working out west. She showed me the photo he’d sent: Dave on the top of a mountain with his hair up in a ponytail, wielding his shovel at the camera as if it were a samurai sword. Snow coated the mountains in the background. She would be on her way out soon to join him. Planters, I was learning, were creatures in perpetual motion, leaping at the next spot of ripe dirt, the next town, the next contract. They could drift apart, cleaved by the very activity that had brought them together in the first place. You could cross paths with someone over and over. Or you could spend a half a lifetime waiting to see your old friends again.

  THE WOMEN’S washroom was also the men’s, and technically it wasn’t a room at all. The showers had tarps for walls, and men and women cleansed themselves side by side, coeducationally, standing on forklift pallets instead of bathmats. There were no shower curtains, only hoses and showerheads, water heated by inline propane pods.

  The showers had a vestibule, also strung with tarps. Dirty workers stripped down en masse so that no moment would be wasted. No drop hit the grass without first doing its job on an inch of grimy skin. Here was the human body in all its ungroomed imperfection. Leathery hands and ruddy faces juxtaposed with the virgin territory everywhere else, unexposed places that never saw the light. Angry boils and sprays of hot pink pimples. Tattoos. Bruises on thighs the size and shade of eggplants. Scrapes. Scabs. Dirt under the toenails. I had never seen so many naked bodies with all their flaws and simple imperfections. I didn’t know people could abuse their bodies this way, like objects with no nerve endings, like beat-up pairs of shoes. I saw what the word sinewy meant.

  There were no traffic jams. Every meal was a picnic. In the field there was no queuing for the restroom. We just stopped, pulled down our pants, and let go. And if we forgot to bring toilet paper with us to work, there was no hiding that either. There was always someone at end of the day with a torn shirt sleeve or a missing pant leg. Around here we used the language of unadorned fact. I learned that toilets were not called latrines or outhouses, but shitters. The reason there was never any toilet paper in them was because people stole it, hoarded rolls in the corners of their tents. Although trees were for hugging, not for killing, toilet paper was still a hot commodity. As was anything soft, dry, and still unbelievably white.

  I queued up to feed in the cook shack, and I queued up to make myself clean. Until I began to feel squeezed through a machine with gears that slowed but never stopped, that slapped out the ingredients of basic human necessity. I emerged at the end of the conveyor belt, clean, fed, watered and ready for nightly shutdown. As if we, like the trees, were also a kind of product.

  At night, before I fell asleep, I could feel things happening, changing under my skin. Cells raced, blood poured around. Even my eyelids felt different. Now when I shut my lids the light didn’t penetrate. I put my head down and was tossed overboard straight into dreams. Roots, stones, and naked dirt, streaming before my eyes.

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  4 }

  GREEN FLUORESCENT PROTEIN

  CASCADIA IS A place name that’s poetically accurate, since during the monsoon, water runs everywhere. In early spring we wake up to ominous TV weather icons, black cartoon clouds throbbing out snowflakes and dotted lines of rain. Days of purple skies, as if the sun just couldn’t bring itself to come up. Of double wool and kayaking pullovers and rubber gloves whose fingertips fill with rain. Or, we lift ourselves out of bed to snow-dusted mornings. Frost glitter. Sun flurries and fog rays. The beautiful, confused weather of winter wrestling with spring. As it is in much of Canada, March, on the raincoast, is the month of boomeranging winter.

  If you drive an hour west out of Holberg along t
he rim of Quatsino Sound, eventually you come to the open sea, a landless vista at the edge of the Pacific Rim. When the sky isn’t gray, it’s a powdery blue. Low rollers dash apart on bergs of black rock and then slide down the pebbled beaches. The ocean looks dark and bottomless. At the start of the season we work these western slopes, where the snow melts first.

  If we threw down our shovels and began to walk south, we’d cross mountains and fjords and rivers for a hundred miles and eventually we’d arrive at Clayoquot Sound. A lush valley where several thousand people once rallied to save one of the island’s last stands of virgin timber. Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Midnight Oil, plus a salad of activists, grandmothers, and imported urban ragtags. On the way, we’d come across Red Stripe, a mountain shaved on all sides, from shoreline to peak, by disastrously intensive logging. It now erodes quietly into the ocean. Yet no one has ever waged a war of the woods up here. Perhaps it’s too far to drive down rickety roads. Perhaps the trees aren’t all that pretty.

  “Harvesting,” it’s called, as if these old trees were cultivars, sown and tended by human hands, just like hybrid corn.

  If this particular mountain were a face, some of us would be toiling away on its forehead, where everything has a funny way of traveling up. Sound, wind, birds. Other planters slip over the brow ridge and down the cheeks, and we hear them cursing and taunting each other.

  Hey, fucknuts! Too tired to do your own garbage today?

  Oh, honey. You gonna to be okay? Want me to come down there and dry your eyes?

  Officially, marijuana is banned at work. Unofficially, it’s like salt in a kitchen. Someone has lit a joint, and the smoke floats up in notes of skunk and moldy grass clippings. We hear snatches of a male baritone singing “Sweet Transvestite” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Perhaps we hear others badmouthing us, and we’re surprised to find ourselves bruised. It’s the work that does it to us. The repetition is like psychic sandpaper. We’re too tired to fake the social niceties. We’re a little stonewashed around the heart.