Eating Dirt

by Charlotte Gill

  But we’re still here.

  Before we arrive at the ragged scene the long, lumbering train rolls through. “Logging” encompasses all the attendant processes: the plotting and surveying, the cruising and road blasting, the sawing and bucking and log trawling, and then the long haul to market. But even before the logging plans are devised blueprints are concocted for the management of future forests. Before these silvicultural prescriptions can materialize there must be inventories. The government determines the total trees in the forest, a number derived from aerial photography, remote sensing data, satellite imagery, and surveys.

  How amazing and baffling and difficult this feat must be, the counting of all the trees in all the woods, since forests, in Canada, stretch over 1.5 million square miles from coast to coast and cover nearly half the country. The woods change every minute of every day, growing and shrinking, thriving and dying continually. If such a task were conducted by hand and on foot, it would keep an army of surveyors busy for several lifetimes, and once they were done, they’d need to begin all over again. How to measure all the life in the wild? It’s like trying to figure out how many snowflakes lie frozen inside the Arctic Circle.

  Once a forest inventory is created, the government decides how many trees logging companies can cut. They do this by determining how much wood all the forests have produced—how much the trees have grown—in any given year. A pie chart is drawn and wedges are cut. This is the wood available to be harvested. Naturally, “available” is a hotly contested word with a dozen elastic meanings, depending on how you look at trees and whether you are an environmentalist or a capitalist, an ecologist or a registered professional forester. Perhaps the trees are in your backyard. Perhaps it’s your job to saw them down.

  The forest is measured not in trees or bugs or salmon-bearing streams but in cubic meters. Or board-feet, one of which is a plank of wood just big enough for a grown man to stand on. The Annual Allowable Cut, or AAC, as it’s known, is the maximum harvest that can be hauled from the woods by logging companies. This is an amount doled out every year, like an allowance or a trust fund deposit, but it is not a fixed number. Logging firms can float it up by investing in good silvicultural deeds like planting trees. And so tree planting is a promissory note to the woods. Because we plant trees, logging companies can cut more today. And that is the irony of us.

  Like most of the forests in Canada, this is Crown land, the property of the people, who pulled it out like a rug from other people some centuries ago. Cutting rights are leased to logging firms in exchange for rent paid to the government. Stumpage, it’s called. And this number, too, swings around every year, depending on which way the economic winds are blowing. When times are bad in the lumber trade, rent is hardly anything at all—a stimulus to forestall layoffs and mill closures. But competitors from other countries think that makes Canadian forest products too cheap. And so there are trade disputes and duties and tariffs slapped one atop the other. Followed by long negotiations and many-paged legal documents and treaties to fix the disagreements.

  The logging business is so tangled and complex, so busting with legalese and formulas and acronyms, what normal citizen could be expected to comprehend it all? We can hardly be blamed for asking obvious questions. Just eight generations ago this land was pristinely stacked with virgin old-growth. Where did all that wood go? And why is everyone now so broke?

  JANICE SHOWS up in the afternoon, as if materialized out of cloud vapor. I presume she has arrived by company crew boat or some more expedited form of transport. I watch her clamber down over the rise. Janice is an awkward climber. She maneuvers across the hillside with all four limbs, with a crablike technique that is part walking, part crawling. She wears a hard hat with a chain saw visor and ear muffs, though it’s difficult to imagine her wielding such a tool. She wears a surveyor’s vest weighted with field accessories. I crouch in the slash, dig out my hard hat from my empty back bag. The hatband is wet and smelly, and when I squeak it on the seepage runs down my face like dirty tears. There is no way to hide in a clear-cut. You can only feign ignorance.

  Janice crabs her way up. I keep moving. Nobody goes to the trouble of climbing a slash pile just to give you good news. Eventually she arrives at my side.

  I want you to respect the naturals, she says.

  But there aren’t any.

  You’ll just have to look harder.

  Even when they look like that? I ask, running my shovel blade over a sad-looking hemlock with just a spray of yellow needles clinging to its utmost branches.

  Even when they look like that, says Janice.

  Janice disappears over the hilltop in search of someone else to attack with her plot cord, that long pink cable she uses to conduct her quality control samples. I pull out another tree, one of a batch that has seemingly come out from a clearance sale, from a corporate nursery whose workers employ, in their hasty packaging, a loose and lazy wrap. By the time I get it into my palm, half the dirt falls away from the roots. I finish the job, whacking this infant organism against my thigh. Soil fans into the air with shimmery bits of vermiculite. I dig a little grave and shove the broken stem down, burying the evidence of my deed.

  In the afternoon Adam stops to see me. He stands on a stump and looks down on me as I trip from one tree to the next. He wears a cranky, pinched expression. Janice has been giving him hell.

  How’s it going? he wants to know.

  You have eyes, I say.

  I don’t like planting trees in front of Adam. He keeps a silent tally of the trees I plant and the seconds I waste under his gaze. He watches me bang in seven trees. He lights a cigarette. That’s how I know he plans to stay awhile.

  I just saw a couple of cougars, he says.

  He met them on the road as he swerved around a corner. Golden and muscular, they tensed when he met them, though surely not from surprise. It used to be we saw only parts of these wild felines, a tawny flank or a tail flashing as they leapt out of sight into the bush’s high nooks and branches. Now they hang around like big housecats guarding lawns, with swishing tails, brazenly staring us down.

  It happens all the time, these animal encounters, now that wild and suburban territories interpenetrate. No grizzly bears live on Vancouver Island, and yet, not so long ago, a young boar paddled over from the mainland. Was he swimming toward opportunity or fleeing the hazards of his rangeland? He was never tagged or studied, because when he reached the far shore, a local shot him. In north-island villages cougars have been known to attack people in backyards and on the sidewalks. They stalk the tiny and the vulnerable: children, pets, and livestock. Cougars are excellent predators. They’re also expert disap-pearers. I have never seen a cougar, though I’m sure a cougar has seen me. Naturally, such an elusive animal is very hard to account for.

  WE FLING strips of flagging tape to mark our trees, and the wind whips them away, wafting our red, blue, and yellow shreds high into the air. We have a view of the water from our hillsides. The inlet comes alive with ripples, then riffling whitecaps, until it’s blowing so hard we can hear our nostrils whistle. Some of us are caught out in it, wearing only polypropylene undershirts. We shiver just looking down at the water, since later we’ll have to cross it.

  Brian comes by. He shouts to us from the window of his truck that we’ll be knocking off an hour late. With the blustery weather all the floatplanes in the area have been grounded. Tyson, in our boat, had to make another lap into Port McNeill and back again, on account of some contractors down the inlet who got stranded.

  There is no accounting for the ocean, as any fisherman can attest. You can predict the weather but not the precise shapes of the sea. There are too many variables: tides, currents, waves, and wind. Some people think nothing of venturing out into its convulsions in a kayak, a rowboat, or a dinghy. I was raised inland, and to me, the movements of the ocean are ceaselessly awesome. Tides seem so normal and yet so nearly cataclysmic, great deluges of water coursing into one another, bathing the world.
The sea unsettles me. I often feel a tightness in my chest just gazing out at its shimmering surface, which masks such abysmal depths. Sometimes, even a thousand feet above sea level, looking down at its infinite blue, I have to glance away.

  At the end of the day I climb into the truck. I’m met with a blowing heater and the sodden limbs of my workmates. I guess from their postures that we’re all exhausted. We’ll suffer the long commute but not willingly. I feel that strange sensation on my cheeks, a ghostly residual prickling after a day spent blasted by the elements. It’s pushing 6 PM. The sky looks swollen, about to split. Janice rides with us, an extra body pressed into the back seat, her shoulders shoved up into our armpits. She’ll have to boat home with us now that all the company transport has fled the inlet—at a sensible time, before the weather swept in. For a moment I feel bad for her, as if her presence among us says something about her place in the division-office pecking order. It can’t be easy to be a small woman in a workplace like hers. A woman, period. For the first time it occurs to me that she’s probably a lot tougher than she looks.

  At the dock, the wind sounds like surf, blowing ball caps from our heads, plastic IGA bags from the truck boxes. Our tinny crew boat bobs and slaps at the dock, its engine burping smoky bubbles. Tyson sits at the wheel with his hand at the radio knobs. He listens to the marine weather report, that robotic male drone that skippers tune to before they ship out. He flicks it off as we board, watching each of us duck in through the rear hatch. He laughs grimly, like someone about to be joined in his misfortunes.

  It’s blowing twenty-three knots, he tells us all. But, don’t worry, I’m good to twenty-five.

  With two weather fronts colliding, the sky is a chowder of wild colors both dusky and bright. A mere Force 6 on the Beaufort scale, precisely halfway between dead calm and a hurricane. A small-craft warning is in effect, which around here is as useful as a UV advisory in Death Valley. The clouds are blown to shreds. Clots and clumps whiz along. The sun descends, poking shards of orange light at the ocean.

  We crowd onto the vinyl benches. Some of us scarf down sandwiches while we still can, day ripened and soggy, dribbling flecks of tuna down our wet clothes. Some of us, considering seasickness, opt to stay hungry. We skitter around with the laminated nautical charts in the seat pockets. We turn up our iPods and push the toques down on our foreheads. Rose swings aboard with an unlit cigarette in hand. She wears sunglasses with oversized lenses, like a hungover celebrity. She sits down on the deck, on a hump of backpacks. Then digs for her lighter, which is one thing she never loses. She grew up on a float home, as a child swam every day of the year, and even now is never, ever cold.

  Tyson shakes his head. Tell Rose to come inside, he says. He has sudden authority for someone so young.

  We bang on the glass and wave Rose inside. She tucks the cigarette behind her ear and comes in, and then the door is slammed tight. That’s the last of the open air we’ll breathe until we get to the other side. We have goose bumps, our bodies cooling. Our clothes are still wet, clinging to our thighs. We are with the ocean as we are with the weather. We just don’t know how we’ll react until we’re out in it.

  Get ready, Tyson turns to tell us. It’s going to get bouncy.

  Bouncy. I consider this word and imagine things silly and fun, like those castles kids bash around in at birthday parties.

  Do you puke on boats? Brian asks K.T. Just wondering, he adds, before I sit down next to you.

  We pull away from the dock. Tyson throttles up with his knee propped on the seat cushion. We skim down the inlet, drawn out into the storm by the pull of the tide. Beyond the mouth of the inlet Queen Charlotte Strait widens before us, transformed since morning into a long shiver of waves. Home is just a darkened smudge in the distance. Vancouver Island, so big and yet so far away. We have an hour ahead of us, perhaps two. Some of us, sitting in front near the windows fold their arms across their guts. We’re a tight squeeze with Janice among us, though in some ways it’s better this way—a rough crossing, all wedged in together.

  Have you ever read that book, K.T. asks me, A Perfect Storm?

  It’s what he always asks when we get ourselves into this situation.

  The ocean is decisively foul, the tide running against the wind. It rumples and rolls, as if it were trying to tear itself apart from the inside out. A fisherman friend once told me that if you fall overboard at this time of year, you have just twenty-two minutes of consciousness. To be rescued or to get yourself to shore, if there is a shore close enough to swim to. If you can be found before you succumb to hypothermia. Indeed, in this big wild, if you can be found at all.

  We take the straight shot across, where there are no islands, no lee to buffer the winds. We get hit broadside by waves, and as we push out into the strait they swell and crest, collapsing down onto themselves. When we roll down into the troughs there is nothing but water, as if we’ve landed on the surface of an oceanic planet with not a scrap of landfall in sight. From Tyson’s contortions we gauge it’s less piloting a boat than riding waves, each pushing and tugging from three directions at once at the boat’s moaning propellers. We’re alternately swamped and then teetering, all the water dropped out from beneath us.

  The water is the color of graphite. The wind licks the foam from the waves and whips it into the air. The wipers can’t keep up with the slosh of water. Tyson keeps wiping our steam from his view. Sheets of water pour across the bows. We sit two to a bench, pressing against one another. As the boat rolls and pitches the people in the outside fall out of their seats. They do this a few times, and then they just stand up in the aisle, hanging onto the seats, moving their bodies like people do on surfboards. There is a mug on the floor with a broken handle. It scuttles, but nobody bends to pick it up. We zip our jackets, push fists down into the tubes of fleece sleeves.

  I sit aft, wedged against the windows. There’s only a quarter inch of tempered glass between me and sea. When waves clobber the boat, a pattern begins to form, a swamping followed by a roll so that I’m pinned to the hull by the weight of the boys, looking out the windows as if through the pane of a glass-bottom boat. Looking down into it I can see inside the waves. I think I might even see fish.

  Some people are afraid of snakes or elevators or open spaces or even butterflies. I’m not too worried about sharks, slimy things, blood, home invasion, or even being left all alone. But I’m quite terrified of the ocean. Not of boats precisely, but of the substance itself, its ruthless, indifferent enormity. When people fear heights they say the worst of it isn’t vertigo but the unfathomable urge to leap, to give oneself over to it. When I’m aboard a boat in a storm I feel a horrifying desire to claw my way out and dive overboard, to fling myself like a sacrifice into its murk.

  There is a cluster of islands that marks the halfway point in the center of the strait. We pass by them every day. It’s a relief but also a sickening milestone, since we still have another half to go. I grip the seat cushions, hanging on to the vinyl piping with my fingernails. My nerves are as tight as piano strings, every pore hair open, every cilium bristling at attention. Even my eyeballs feel tight. I often tell myself I should live more intensely, but I think I would crumble if I had to feel this much every day.

  Barges sink. Boats capsize. Floatplanes go down in the fog, and helicopters crash into mountainsides. People die out here all the time. They die the way people do on highways—a tragedy that lasts but a little while until it blows over, and then it’s business as usual. The victims are at work, mostly. A cheap kind of death, as occupational fatalities often are.

  Then the sun goes down, the sky fading from indigo to black. And then there is nothing to see in any direction. It might be an improvement, this blindness, no view of the next approaching wave. No pinpoints of light on the horizon, just the slosh of dark water against the window glass. The rhythmic whine of the engines, struggling to stay on top of the waves. Still there is the smell among us of work and sweat and adrenaline.

 
Tyson’s driving is a full-body workout. He stands for the entire crossing, steadying himself with lower body wedged between the seat and the wheel. Through his T-shirt I can see his back muscles working. He’s got the lumbar curve of someone young, who’s not yet abused his spine with years of labor and bad posture.

  Finally we creep around the northern tip of Malcolm Island, where there is a lighthouse. A single optimistic dot of light. We turn south, upwind into the sea, the hull alternately cresting then pounding the waves. This takes another hour. No one is wearing a lifejacket.

  Nobody relaxes until we chug past the breakwater, and even slipping into the calm of the marina we have nothing to say. It’s nearly nine, and our clothes have crisped on their own by the heat of our bodies. We slouch up the ramp in our sneakers with all our luggage, our bags and straps drooping from our shoulders, wet with salt water. The wind howls. In the orange streetlight of the parking lot, Roland awaits us, wiping his moustache and hand washing with his invisible soap. Already our thoughts have gone home ahead of us. We’ll have to eat, go to bed, and get up again in the morning.

  I jitter up the ramp. All the smokers light up. Janice climbs the dock ramp behind me.

  She says, My company would never have done that.

  The straight shot across in open water, she means. Undoubtedly her company would have found a safer, longer route. But we aren’t of the company, only next to it. And even though people are the most important thing there is, there will be no safety briefings, no near-miss reports, none that we’ll hear about anyway. But certainly there will be more man-days, more cost cutting and maximized efficiencies, and more new forests spread as thinly as possible across the claim. Janice’s voice cracks when she talks. She’s as tired as we are. And tomorrow, back at the office, she’ll have her own brand of surviving to do.