Eating Dirt Read online

  If you could liquefy this energy and turn it into something drinkable, like a green fluorescent protein, you could bottle it and make a squillion dollars. Verdant pastures might spring from deserts. Grasslands from toxic-waste dumps. Humans who drank it would never get old and never need to sleep. Nobody would lose their hair. We could charge ourselves up with sunlight. We could jump over buildings and fling ourselves from bridges and never suffer any injury at all.

  Some people think planting trees is as boring and crazy making as stuffing envelopes or as climbing a StairMaster. I love my job for exactly the opposite reason, because it is so full of things. There are so many living creatures to touch and smell and look at in the field that it’s often a little intoxicating. A setting so full of all-enveloping sensations that it just sweeps you up and spirits you away, like Vegas does to gamblers or Mount Everest to climbers. It has a way of filling up a life with verbs that push into one another, with no idle space in between. So that you just can’t believe all the things you saw or all the living beings that brushed past your skin.

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  5 }

  a FURIOUS WAY of BEING

  BY THE IDES of March, the weather turns a corner, and spring begins in earnest. We come across uncoiling fiddleheads and nascent buds and, soon enough, pendulous catkins loaded with pollen. The forest wakes up from its long, wet dormancy. The air has a different aroma now, not of compost, but of sticky, fragrant life. Even the conifer needles perk up, as if they’ve been caffein-ated. Each day grows by four minutes. The skies fill again with birds returned from their travels—tiny brown creatures with big songs, like the thrush, whose calls sound like the tweeting whistles of sports coaches. The birds are here to breed. An entire air force of swallows and swifts and snipes; martins, dowitchers, and pewees; nighthawks, flycatchers, sandpipers, and wandering tattlers. They’ll all fly south before the summer is over. Down the flyways to Central and South America.

  Helen moves in with K.T. and me. In the real world she’s a painter. She carries her portfolio under the seats in her Toyota van. She never went to art school. Hers are tree-planting landscapes, our rain-drab coastal ranges done in the colors of fondant icing. They make our stomping grounds look like Big Rock Candy Mountain. One of her paintings won a contest at a winery. It appears on a Cabernet Sauvignon label.

  Did you win a prize? I ask.

  They paid me in wine, she says.

  How did it taste?

  Like shit, she says with a grin.

  Helen has a wavy thatch of graying hair. On the block she looks less like a planter and more like a ski instructor. She wears scarves wrapped up to her chin and a toque with a dangling puff ball. In the evenings we hang our wet clothes side by side and listen to them drip onto newspaper. Helen and I make tea and talk in whispers. We talk about art. We discuss what women discuss when left to their own devices. Family, relationships, love. Neither one of us has kids. Perhaps our job is partly to blame.

  At dusk Helen carries two hot water bottles out to her van, where she sleeps.

  But there’s an empty bed, I protest.

  I’m a light sleeper, she’s quick to say.

  There is something intolerable about a couple when you are single and planting trees.

  Every day Helen tells me a new story. She started planting many years ago, when some of the boys on our crew were not yet even in high school. Helen owned a husky dog back then. In those days, the government introduced a wolf cull. One day on a cut block, an overzealous hunter mistook Helen’s dog for a wolf and accidentally shot and killed it.

  Helen and I are both twins. Our siblings have flip-side lives, forty-hour work weeks and mortgages. My brother lives in Arizona. Her sister lives in Ontario. One night, years ago, she drove home with her twin, who lived in the country. It was late at night, and the black pavement rose up to meet their headlights. A procession of fire trucks blazed past them with red lights whirling. They came over a rise and caught sight of an orange glow flickering just under the trees in the distance.

  That’s our house on fire, her sister said. According to Helen, this is how trouble comes to find a person. Before it arrives, you catch it glimmering just under the horizon.

  Time stretches out so that every day feels like a week. We can scarcely recall what it felt like to be at home. Sometimes Helen lingers at the window, pinching back the brittle curtain.

  It rains so much, she says, you could almost forget the sun.

  She talks like a poet, like a broken-hearted person.

  BY NOW we want to give Adam and Brian one of those celebrity conjugations, like Bradam. Every day they split us into two battalions, like the plastic soldiers in Axis and Allies, a board game they play late at night, standing up, after most of us have gone to bed. During the day, they shift us around on the cut block using military verbs like “deploy” and “extract.”

  They are a unified front, a platonic work marriage. They deliver us home, and then their night shift begins. The after-dark accounting, mapping, delivering, and plotting, the reconnaissance runs for tomorrow. The spare tire changes and the vehicle repairs. Every night, when they scheme for tomorrow, they face some logistical quandary. They need to move ten tons of seedlings to the top of a mountain, only the road’s washed out, the map is wrong, and their headlamps have run out of batteries. And at midnight, the truck’s rad hose blows out. Or they meet a locked gate to which no one has a key. Or there is no road. Just a trail, a lake, and a derelict aluminum dinghy left behind by the logging company. They bash their way down the trail only to find this craft floating thirty feet from the beach. Adam charges into the water without stopping to take off his boots. To his knees, his waist, then his chest. Then Brian reaches down into the sandy muck, digs out the rope, and pulls the boat to the shore.

  Back at his down-island home Brian has a beautiful Colombian wife and two mocha-colored daughters. His wedding ring is so loose on his finger it looks like it could slip off his hand at any moment. He can fall asleep anytime, anyplace. Brian has no crew favorites and no soft spots. You can’t work Brian. He won’t budge. You can’t wheedle and cajole. If you’re a girl you can’t even trot out the tears. If you vex him or complicate his day, Brian won’t say much. But he’ll make sure you see the chaff end of every cut block, until you forget what it’s like to have a good day.

  Brian has just shaved his head, as he does every year. It gives him the look of a Buddhist penitent, or a jarhead, or maybe a bit of both. Brian talks as fast as an auctioneer. His words try to come out all at once, before they’ve been strung into sentences. It happens when he’s tired or when things go sideways on the block, which they tend to at least once a day.

  Adam’s knuckles are scabbed. His fingers are shaped like kielbasa. Most of the time he looks indestructible, like Achilles, like someone with ninety-nine lives. Like most supervisors, he used to plant trees himself, as if he’d been born for it, like so many Poles who set their hands to the job, as if the capacity for physical work was genetic. If the average tree planter rams a shovel into dirt 200 times an hour, bends over 1,600 times, lifts more than 2,000 pounds, and walks ten miles per day, the Adams of our world find ways to double the score.

  Adam used to go into a cut block as if into battle, crashing through everything that stood in his way. He was the kind of tree planter he likes to refer to as the megaballer, an ultraproduction machine. Megaballers are men, plus a handful of women, who can earn several hundred dollars, one thin coin at a time, every single day. Some get there by verging toward the sloppy; others, toward the obsessive-compulsive. They’re driven by earnings but also spurred by more subtle motivations. They are the kind of people who can’t walk past a game of basketball without wanting to join in and slam dunk it or see a mountain without wanting to climb it and spear a flag in the summit. They are industrial athletes. In pain, they will tell you, a lot of the time.

  Mighty contests transpire on a cut block. When two high-ballers work side by side, it may not be long before a con
flict ensues, even if the battle is silent, imperceptible to all but the opponents. All through the work day they’ll pound out a blistering rhythm, casting glances, sprinting back to the tree cache to count the empty boxes. It is a sporting event, like one of those marathon tennis matches that persists for grueling hours until someone grows tired and cracks. Sometimes these alpha struggles break out into actual fights, often over unimaginably trivial things. Once the blood sugar and the endorphins and willpower have worn off, only anger is left. The old, bold motivator. Sometimes we all try to find things to think about just to stir our fury so that we’ll have the energy to keep going.

  We don’t need to be highballers to succumb. For anyone, planting trees can become a monomaniacal chase. We spend our days wearing occupational blinkers, scouring the ground with our eyes for just the right kind of grassy hummock, just the spot of telltale moss. Dirt-lust. A drive to propel ourselves to the next spot and the next and to get the damn tree in the hole. Every time we hit the spot we experience a tiny burst of elation. Success! It dissipates, and then we must replace it with another shot, the short buzz of a tree sent home.

  Clock watchers in office cubicles try to empty their days of minutes. We try to squeeze as many verbs as we can into every ticking second. At the same time, we try to lighten our bags—like foraging but in reverse. Long term, the effect is Pavlovian, a sort of target fixation. As with those skydivers who jump out of planes and forget to pull the cords on their parachutes, so focused are they on hitting the bull’s-eye on the ground. Perhaps this is what modern workers feel when they veer into the commuter slipstream, gunning to get somewhere fast.

  We come to see objects in strict geometries, the world as a well-spaced forest. At the beach we poke absent-minded rows of dune grass stalks into sand. We plant five imaginary trees around fire hydrants on city sidewalks. We take comfort in grid-ded plains and closed clusters, as if we were waging war against entropy itself, against offending stray things.

  Planting trees, we get this fever. A tingling under the skin, an itch in the bones. Bend. Plant. Stand up. Sprint along. When we come over a rise and discover a hidden cream patch, we’re overcome by the urge to have all of it, to hoard our secret discovery. We get this feeling deep down, as if it were whispered by our cells. If we don’t go out and tap that opportunity right now, if we don’t go out and attack and kill it, someone faster and leaner and hungrier will come along and steal it right out from under us. Some days we plant trees as if our lives depended on it. Some old Darwinian thing.

  Soon enough, we’ll have plastered these hillsides, emptied this contract of trees. It will be time to move on to the next job and the next town. Wherever we go, there are always more trees to plant, more clear-cuts and more stumps. One day we’ll get so efficient and expert we’ll be right on the heels of the loggers. Maybe we’ll even overtake them. And then finally we can sit down to rest.

  No wonder we lose sight of the big picture. We’re all trees and no forest. Around here the woods are for export. The logs are boomed up and shipped out to sawmills, cut into structural timbers of every dimension. Or transformed into engineered products that have been laminated and glued and veneered. The wood is split apart into cedar shingles. Or stewed into pulp or rolled into paper. It’s shipped to the United States, Japan, Europe, and China. After the biggest harvest ever in 1987 the province of British Columbia supplied the world with enough logs—89 million cubic meters—to fill two million logging trucks, all in a single year.

  All over the world, every day of every week, trees are chipped and digested and emitted as paper and cardboard and every kind of tissue product. The pulping liquors are refined into concentrated tree juices for the making of scented oils and lacquers and acetones and turpentine and nail polish and nail polish remover. Tree extracts are poured into shampoo, shaving cream, toothpaste, and all kinds of cosmetics that lather when you rub them against your skin. Wood is spun out into gossamer layers of cellophane and rayon. It’s converted to alcohols and plastics, acids and resins. Latex and rubber. Eucalyptus and palm. Tree extracts are squeezed into self-tanning cream and acne gel and anti-aging potions. They’re stirred into snack foods like frozen pizzas and microwave popcorn and that most shelf-stable of snack foods, the Twinkie. Wood cellulose is even added as a cheap thickener to mashed potato flakes. Wood is ground down into powder and formed into bowling balls and sporting helmets. Not to mention explosives. With this wood flour and xylose—wood sugar—you could hypothetically bake a tree cake. The world eats up 3.4 billion cubic meters of wood every year. If you converted this volume to utility poles, you could string telephone wire around the equator more than four thousand times. Half of this amount is used for firewood.

  As tree planters, we are simple, monotasking professionals, purveyors of visually effective green-up, or VEG, as industry calls it for short. We provide raw materials for people who’ve not yet been born. By the time these future forests arrive, the world will be packed with 50 percent more people, but we’ll be long gone. Even now, every minute of every day, someone wipes lunch from his moustache with a paper napkin, then crumples it and throws it away. Someone else flips through a lingerie catalogue, each page a wafer-fine tree slice in her hands. If you die and become an organ donor, I have heard, the empty place in your body cavity is packed with sawdust before burial. Perhaps this dust also comes from around here, some little part of the forest returning with you to the earth.

  PEOPLE HAVE been planting trees for almost as long as they’ve been cutting them down. The ancient Maya sowed an array of helpful tropical species. The original peoples of North America also planted trees—hickory, chestnut, beech, and oak, all of which produced nuts that could be ground down into meal and flour or steeped in water to make nutritiously oily nut milks. In some parts of the United States, fruit and nut trees grow wild with remarkable plenitude, in concentrations considered too high to be coincidental. They’re abandoned orchards, cultivated by ancient residents—a kind of living archaeology.

  The same phenomenon occurs in the Amazon rainforest, even though it was once considered an unpopulated, untouched wilderness. High densities of fruiting trees are believed to be, in part, the handiwork of prehistoric civilizations. Like other Amerindian peoples, Amazonians planted the “three sisters”—corn, beans, and squash—along with cassava, potatoes, and avocadoes. But the soils of the Amazon basin are surprisingly infertile. And so these ancient agriculturalists approached farming in a different way: if you can’t beat the jungle, make more of it. Instead of relying solely on annual ground crops, they planted trees with vitamin- and calorie-rich fruit. Even today Amazonia is full of mocambo, açaí, and cupuaçu, a fatty fruit that tastes like a pear crossed with a banana. Aguaje, which looks like a pinecone but tastes like a carrot. Peach palm, guaraná, Brazil nuts, and ice cream bean trees. Food, in spots where such perennial crops had been planted, would never be far out of hand. There would always be something hanging ripe overhead. The convenience foods of prehistory.

  Tree planting appears in the Bible: cedar, acacia, myrtle, olive; fir and pine and box. Logging and planting—the two have always gone hand in hand, since no one needs to replant a forest if one is left standing. Thankfully, arboriculture is basic and self-evident: dig a hole, insert tree, and cover again with dirt. Human hands seem to know what to do without any diagrams or instructional manuals. Perhaps it has always been done as we do it today. Planters of old, making up for lost treasure.

  Wood has been precious forever and ever, a versatile natural substance that requires no tending or weeding or watering. Forests have always just been there. Cutting trees is as old as civilization itself. Some of the earliest written accounts of lumbering come to us in the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world’s oldest stories. In this Sumerian poem, Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, ventures to Cedar Mountain, deep in a remote wilderness, to find lumber. He wants to fortify his empire back at home, to dress up his walls and temples. To gain access to these coveted forests, Gilgamesh must f
irst do battle with a monster-protector who guards the trees from greedy humans. These woods are sacred. The gods live under the shelter of the boughs. Gilgamesh defeats and kills the demon and then goes on the hunt for the tallest tree in the grove. He hacks it down and then all of the others. He builds a raft from the logs and floats them back to Uruk. When he returns he’s rewarded with fame and the sensual attentions of a beautiful goddess.

  The story has some basis in history, since the cultures of Mesopotamia had big appetites for timber. Wood was their steel and concrete, their crude oil. The complex agrarian societies of Sumer and Babylonia, their cities and infrastructure, were all built from wood. Citizens used it for cooking and heating, for the smelting of metals into tools, weapons, and machinery. For the firing of bricks and ceramics. For construction. But as their populations grew, Mesopotamians exhausted local supplies. They logged the alluvial flats of their homeland and then continued cutting uphill, stripping the lowland slopes for the wood or to make room for development and agriculture. When accessible stores ran out, wood became scarce and valuable. Renters took their doors with them when they moved. Rafters were bequeathed in wills.

  Eventually the woodcutters of the Tigris-Euphrates valley fell upon neighboring territories. They traveled many leagues, journeying as far as Arabia and even India to satisfy domestic demands. Their missions were fraught with danger and risk, since foreign lands were often fiercely defended by resident hostiles. The return trips would have proved doubly challenging, since the woodcutters had to drag the logs back through unknown terrain while vulnerable to ambush and attack. And so the lumberjacks of antiquity were not only resource extractors but warlords as well. Their operations doubled as military campaigns. When they returned with their payloads they were embraced as heroes, just as Gilgamesh was when he came home.