Eating Dirt

by Charlotte Gill

  We’ve planted trees in every kind of dirt, every way our foresters dreamed up, using techniques that Ron might cringe to imagine. We scraped away the rich topsoil with our shovels to get to the gray dust underneath. We crammed trees into oil-stained sands and wood chips—ground that scarcely resembled earth anymore once it had been flattened and rolled over a hundred times by machinery. We planted trees in soil that had been ripped and mounded, disc-trenched and shark-fin barreled. We planted trees tight together and far apart. We carried genetically engineered specimens with weird, curly branches. Fads washed over us. We planted trees dipped in reconstituted pigs’ blood. We tented trees with plastic boxes and foam nets. We draped the ground with napkin-sized bibs to beat down the brush. We planted with dibbles or with odd Finnish contraptions that looked like spud guns. We used seed dispensers that clicked out one tiny seed at a time and then hatted them with plastic cones. Foresters would try everything and anything just to make a brand-new forest. But we keep these thoughts to ourselves.

  Ron reminds us of the simple temperaments of trees. Fir like sun and sand. Cedar like shade and moist, plum-dark humus. All of these things we know, have felt them in the grooves of our fingers, but somehow, in all these years, we’ve rarely heard them spoken aloud. We’re quiet in our shock. We think of all of our forester-overseers who’ve made stabs at doing it right, but we can count them on one hand. In our trade there’s nearly no one who’ll stand up for the forests until he’s fired or retired.

  What is the single most important thing out in the field? Ron asks us.

  We snort and guffaw, toss around a handful of cynical jokes.

  It’s the little trees, says Ron factually. You should be nice to them. You should treat them like infant organisms.

  We endure another moment of shifting silence. We fidget in the dark. In the moment after Ron finishes and Roland moves toward the wall, there must be quite a few among us considering the terrible karmic crimes entailed by piecework. That squidgy shame of people who work in high-volume situations. Those hatchery people who stir yellow chicks around on conveyor belts. Farmers of veal and lamb. People who deal in baby creatures. So much to overlook.

  When Ron is done, we clap. Before we can finish our applause Janice stands up.

  I agree with everything Ron says, she tells us. Except for one thing. I think the most important thing in the field is you guys.

  We glance at each other sidelong. Oh, the push and the pull between Homo sapiens and forests, between loggers and environmentalists. Everybody knows the most important thing isn’t trees or people or even marmots, murrelets, or spotted owls. If any of those things were true, none of us would be sitting here right now. We’d all be elsewhere making a living, mixing cement or licking envelopes or sitting on tall poolside chairs supervising children while they swim.

  Janice is the company’s silvicultural administrator. For the next month she’ll be our quality control officer, our supraboss.

  I’ve never planted trees, says Janice. But I’ve read a lot of books.

  We knock knees under the table. Janice has studied the studies and we have planted the plants, but never the twain shall meet. She flips through a slew of transparencies shot through with bullets and lists and acronyms. She brings us up to speed on company SOPs. She lists the various types of PPE we’ll be utilizing in the field. At the end of the day, she tells us, safety is her company’s number-one priority. It’s because logging has always been dangerous, fatiguing, high-production work. Even today in logging camps the walls are papered with hazard warnings and fatality alerts. They feature grim line drawings illustrating the particulars of every accident. All the crushings, amputations, fires, explosions, and collapses. The hand-drawn victims are usually faceless, but they are always wearing hard hats.

  Hard hats, says Janice, are mandatory for everyone at her company, and so will they be for us. This is a stipulation we hate, since there is not much risk in a clear-cut that something will drop from the sky. We’re to bring safety glasses, in the event of an eye-poking situation. High-visibility vests and whistles. She deploys these objects like a flight attendant wielding a seatbelt buckle. Compress bandages, which look like maxi pads stitched to tensor bandages, in case we jab ourselves in the jugular.

  Fin makes a ring with his arms and puts his head down on the table inside it.

  What the fuck is an SOP? Doug whispers.

  No clue, I say.

  Some of us stray to the bathroom at the back of the room. Some pour coffee into Styrofoam cups and squeak plastic stir sticks around on the bottom. We move on in our briefing to the matter of ISO certification, which from Janice’s tone means a lot to somebody, somewhere far from here, high up in the glassy cliff of an office tower. None of us can say what these international standards mean or how they affect us, even while our education is in progress. A bunch of words sprinkled over us like magic dust. We think it has something to do with Due Diligence, which as far as we know means going through the motions of giving a shit while you’re doing something terrible to the environment.

  NOW WHEN we commute to work, we take an aluminum-hulled water taxi from the town docks. We leave at dawn when the sky looks like boiled newspaper. A fresh breeze off the strait slaps the halyards against the boat masts. The marina is alive with sounds big and small, metal tinkling and clanging and chiming.

  Our boatswain’s name is Tyson. He has freckles and buzzed, cowlicked hair. He wears sneakers and baggy jeans creeping down on his boxer shorts and a chain that runs from belt loop to pocket. He waits for us on the dock with a mooring line in one hand and a brown bag lunch in the other. We know enough about Tyson to imagine his mother packing it for him. He grew up on boats. His father, Bill, has piloted us to work dozens of times. Their family owns the local whale-watching vessel. Still it’s no small thing to entrust your marine commute to a guy who looks like his other vehicle is a skateboard. What choice is there anyway? Perhaps we are just hopelessly terrestrial, more at peace with dirt than with water.

  We gurgle out of the marina, and then Tyson points us eastward. To the north, Vancouver Island peels away from the mainland. The ocean widens into Queen Charlotte Strait and the Inside Passage, the seafaring route that winds its way through a protected, snow-capped archipelago, northward to Alaska. Industry is everywhere. On any given day we see tugboats towing log booms and barges carrying wood chips and sawdust. We pass the circular buoys of fish farms and their netted corrals of jumping salmon.

  We skim along as if on the surface of a plasmatic skin. Flocks of cormorants putter across the surface and dive under the prow of our boat. Islets dot the water. Trees crowd their shores. The only naked real estate is outcroppings of rock, lapped by the rising tide. No square inch of eligible dirt has escaped the reach of conifer seeds. On lucky days we’ll see orcas and minke whales or whiskered sea lions lazing on knobs of rock, warming their brown blubber in the hazy sun. Harbor seals hitch rides on deadheads. Even the shoals are crazy with life, dotted all over with gulls. There is nowhere to glance without catching sight of some creature swimming or sleeping or trotting or flying over all of this salty, snotty fecundity.

  On the other side of the channel, the mainland is like a tight hide stretched over the earth, torn at the edges, the ocean seeping into the rips. Here, water and land interpenetrate in a maze of channels and passages, bays and lagoons. The currents churn through rocky narrows, fast as rivers in flood. We find our way down the neck of one of these inlets. The land on either side rises from green folds to dramatic mountains inland. The water calms. It looks like rippled glass.

  Eventually we tuck around a breakwater made of logs chained together and push up to a dock, a floating wooden pad nailed with old tires. A ramp to the shore consists of two runs of planking wide enough to accommodate the wheels of a pickup truck. An upturned sea star lies flat on the planks, as if it had flung itself from the water in protest against something deep down and unseen.

  We alight on a landing of tumbledown
hangars that were once used for the repair of backhoes, skidders, and heavy yarding machinery. Rounds of wood are arranged as chairs around wire rope spools where loggers once settled in to wait for boats and flights out. Derelict trucks slowly oxidize, digested by the temperate jungle.

  Our boss keeps a couple of dented trucks for today’s purpose, vehicles that seldom see pavement or highways. And here they are waiting for us, deposited overnight by the transport barge that plies these waters, delivering industrial cargo. Our truck beds are laden with stacks of tree boxes, which are in turn covered by white Silvicool tarps. When we spot these bumps from afar they look like distant mounds of snow. That’s how we know the ride is over.

  We slide onto damp truck seats and haul out, deeper still into the bush, along a set of potholed gravel ruts that once was a smooth, wide logging road. The air is saturated and clammy from yesterday’s rain. Scraps of fog drift around, and the treetops comb the clouds like carding brushes dragged through scraps of wool. What isn’t logged is scrappy, remaindered forest. We pass swamps that look like mossy savannahs, sprouted with sphagnum moss, Labrador tea, and lonely bog pine.

  Mostly we see hemlock trees, since these coastal forests are built largely from that species. The indomitable, much-maligned hemlock. Common as lawn grass, the most unexceptional tree in the glade. Its name brings to mind Socrates’s poison cup, though the graceful Tsuga heterophylla is unrelated to the toxic herb. It is a shade-loving, valley-bottom specimen. It has a droopy leader and a tipsy aspect, like a tree in a Dr. Seuss illustration. If you’ve been walking in the woods of the Pacific Northwest and you have needles in your shoes or down the back of your shirt collar, chances are they came from a hemlock. It has so many flat, short needles it can practically grow in the dark.

  Hemlock, in the logging trade, is a junk tree. A lowly species, humbly priced, hardly worth the cost of dragging it from the bush. It suffers from the curse of omnipresence, since it’s always the tree standing in the way of the other, more valuable species. And so it meets its fate. Although it’s difficult to say just what is wrong with hemlock, other than its badmouthed brand. The wood is strong and straight and even-grained. And yet, historically, it’s been no good for much except the chippers and digesters of pulp mills. Forty years from now, when there are 9 billion of us on Earth, maybe we’ll wonder why we were so picky.

  Today I ride with Adam. At every fork in the road he stomps on the brake to consult his wrinkled map. He scans the trees for old placards marking the block numbers. There are none, or they’ve been eaten by explosions of bush and vines and moss. We lean toward the glass, scoping for signs of the day’s financial opportunities. We do it out of habit, this daily read of the land, like skimming the morning paper.

  Saplings whip the undercarriage. The road grows choked with plants until we’re driving at the speed of an oxcart. Finally we nose into a wall of vegetation. Adam turns the map upside down and then right side up again. He studies it, pinching his bottom lip. The land beyond the windshield defies cartographical simplification. No edges are crisp; all the boundaries are blurred by things growing and transforming in time. Alders whisker up from the ditch. Leafy runners creep down the road like the veins of alien vegetable invaders. Our hearts fall, along with hopes we didn’t even know we had. We are no match for this kind of wilderness, with its abandoned, shambling fertility.

  Adam, says Pierre. This can’t be it. I think it looks planted already.

  We’re here, Adam decides. Then he turns around and eyes up the faces in the back seat. He looks us over one by one. I try to avoid his gaze, but then he catches my eye and flashes a grin. The one with the dimples, the expression he always uses when he wants me to do something fruitlessly awful but necessary.

  WHEN THE time comes, I don’t so much climb down as tumble in, penetrating the vegetation the way people wade into swamps, arms held above the shoulders. Rainwater clings to the branches, and within seconds my sleeves and pant legs are drenched with it. I pick my way over and under a perimeter of strewn logs on the slough at the roadside. Beyond that I’m met by a steep downhill slope burred with salal and huckleberry and last year’s brittle fireweed stalks. They snap against my thighs like dried linguine noodles. The air smells of celery. I can’t hear a single chain saw, no clanking machinery, no squeaking brakes, no distant hum of logging trucks. It’s a particular kind of stillness once the cutting’s been done—a silence like waterlogged wool.

  There are scarcely any traces of human existence, save the regrowing hills, some of which were carved up long ago, the wood used for things of terrific historical urgency, wooden airplanes and railroad ties and newsprint, which have long since passed from usefulness into the landfill. I scan the view, hoping for some sign of modernity, a flash of metal or a straight line or a splotch of artificial color. But there’s nothing, not even one thin power line.

  Even a razed forest tries to resume where it left off. This land, if left to its own devices, will grow back in a chaotic jumble of leafy herbs and ferns and tough woody shrubs. The scrub may be replaced, after many decades, by deciduous species—red alder or big leaf maple—which shed their foliage over dozens of autumns, nourishing the soil. If conditions are right after a century or so, conifers will creep in along the fringes. Douglas-fir will outpace the leafy trees, growing and intertwining and thickening the canopy until it closes over completely. Several hundred years may pass. Eventually cedar and hemlock push up between the firs until, a thousand years after the forest fell, it arrives back at the place where it began.

  An old forest is a protected environment, as constant as a rare book library. The trees themselves may be the most awe-inspiring feature, but their trunks, roots, and branchy latticework serve as ladders and thoroughfares and dwelling places for countless organisms—birds, mammals, and insects, mosses and ferns and fungi. The canopy is a big green umbrella, providing precise combinations of moisture, shade, and heat at every altitude from deep dirt to branch tip. Whole megalopolises of wild things call this home. They intermingle and depend on one another for food and protection, population control and decomposition. From eyeless soil dwellers to birds who balance their eggs in high, mossy crooks to furred critters who live so high in the canopy that they may never in their lifetimes touch terra firma. A forest is trees, but it is also everything that lives on and inside and underneath the trees. A clear-cut tears many of these relationships asunder, for a few centuries anyway. It creates biological confusion, a jumble of drastic suddenness for which the residents are unprepared. A clear-cut is like sending a Jamaican out into a snowstorm wearing flip-flops and shorts. Logging, like the devastations of a fierce wildfire, hurls a forest backwards in ecological time.

  Even now, this place drinks the hours. I glance down at my watch; the whole morning has passed in what feels like minutes. I lose my footing and slide five steps downhill. When I want to descend it works the opposite way, and I’m snagged like a plastic bag on a branch. The moment I move more than a few unimpeded steps I’m waylaid by physical annoyance, whipped in the eye or poked in the gut or slapped in the face by branches. I swing my shovel like a machete, even though I know it’s a useless waste of energy. If I can’t find a way to flow with these hostile textures instead of against them, my frustration comes back to me in kind.

  It must have felt something like this when the first Spaniards and Englishmen floated up to these shores. Many would have considered the entire continent a geographic headache, an obstacle to get around on the way to Asian spice lands. A man could walk in any direction and face chiseled peaks, swamps, ravines, and frothy, bone-chilling rivers. It must have been frightening and miserable and enraging knowing once a summit was climbed there’d be another one right behind it. If you broke a leg or came to blows with a bear or succumbed to a fever or hypothermia or hunger in this seemingly foodless, evergreen jungle there would be no one around to help you. You could shout all you wanted and nobody would hear, except the ravens, peering down from their treetop lookou
ts.

  AT NOON I grumble back up to the road, soaked to the skin and on the hunt for someone to complain to, but back at the tree cache there’s no one. I shove a brownie in my mouth. Sly crunches up over the rise with sweat trickling down his temples.

  Tabarnac, he says. I quit.

  Then he folds down onto his knees like a camel. We take our time bagging up again, since there isn’t much to be gained by hurrying. We talk about all the other jobs we might possibly get if we could only escape this one. We could be letter carriers. Landscape artists. We could be bricklayers or graphic designers. Sly says he’ll go back to Quebec at the end of the season. He’s got a girlfriend waiting, or half-waiting, which is all you can do when your lover works in the bush three thousand miles away.

  I’ve seen Sly every day since we began, and the contours of his face are as familiar to me as a sibling’s. He has one of those bodies whose fat stores burn up early in the season, and now his face recedes into its own concavities, all brow, nose, and chin. Sly and I wonder aloud at our high calorie-to-dollar ratios. We wonder why we keep coming back year after year. Perhaps it’s the allure of dirt, a kind of industrial gardening addiction. Perhaps it’s Stockholm syndrome, contracted, as it is in cults, from hunger and deprivation. When we want to quit, there is nowhere to go. No way to flee without a boat or a floatplane or a helicopter.

  And so we fill our bags up again.

  Our pay trickles down from a logging company. A business nested inside larger conglomerates, management firms with names you might mistake for investment brokerages or real estate consortia. It’s not so far from the truth. High above us are parent corporations with fingers in many pies, from logging to property development to breweries. Janice’s employer—and ours, too—is on the verge of a buy-out. This merger follows fast on the heels of the last one. Back in town, the company signs are still wet from the old paint job. They used to carry the logo of Weyerhaeuser, the American forestry giant, and before that, the Canadian logging juggernaut MacMillan Bloedel. Before Janice was silviculture manager there was Steve, and before Steve there was Kevin. All of them shipped out to other jobs and divisions.