Eating Dirt

by Charlotte Gill

  RAIN OR shine, no matter the storms, the show goes on. We motor from Port McNeill over to the mainland or to lonely unpopulated islands that seem to exist solely for the benefit of chain saws. Sometimes there is no dock, just floating booms leashed to the land by huge planed tree trunks, jutting steeply down to a lip of shore. Caulk boots, for obvious perforating reasons, are forbidden on board the crew boats. We disembark onto these floating booms to shoe up. We wobble in an unsteady row, balanced on sloshing logs, since there is no way to climb up to dry land without benefit of boot spikes.

  Sometimes, when the water is deep enough, the boats nose up to bouldery landings. We shinny out onto the prow and alight on knuckles of rock. We step down onto beaches spongy with bladder wrack, mud and pebbles sucking at our sneakers. Kelp like slimy green lasagna noodles. And beyond this, there is usually some final, humbling leg to do on foot. A bushwhack through a fringe of glamour trees at the shoreline, then a heated slog up through an old, overgrown cut block. Perhaps these are failed plantations that await eventual restocking. Perhaps some of us planted here years ago.

  Hey, dude, aren’t these your shitball trees?

  As we puff it upslope in single file, we curse at each other’s backs.

  This place is a fucking gong show.

  We know. So shut your cakehole already.

  The woods, once skeletal and wintry brown, are now adorned with greenery. In the belated moneymaking portion of the day we part a sea of leaves, blades, and stalks and tunnel through. We plant trees in root-choked mounds. We find horned slugs as big as bratwurst. We open holes with our spades and murder earthworms by the pound, slicing their wriggling bodies. We come across the creatures of the springtime, narrow snakes and centipedes and beetles with hard, black bodies. Skunk cabbage sprouts up out of mucky soil in yellow phallic blooms. We plant a tree, and it disappears into this shag of wild, fermenting carpet. Free to grow is what they call a new forest once it’s surpassed the competing brush—returned to the wild like a borrowed pair of shoes.

  On the long commutes home, quiet sets in. People drift off in unlikely positions, the hum of the engine droning us to sleep. We make the kind of talk that comes only once we’ve run out of pleasantries. We eavesdrop.

  When she left, someone murmurs, I didn’t give a shit.

  We reread the newspaper until it’s in tatters, traveled all the way—a day late—from Vancouver. Bread-making conglomerates perfect a recipe for a brown loaf that has the mouth-feel of white Wonder. The UN cuts food rations to the Sudan in half, blaming donor fatigue. Six million people living on a thousand calories a day. That’s a pint of Chunky Monkey ice cream, which any one of us could put back in eight minutes, left alone with a tub and a spoon.

  Brad tells a story about accidentally paying four hundred dollars for karaoke while teaching English in Korea. He has a degree in sociology, a discipline he refers to as “the painful study of the obvious.”

  I used to use my right hand, says Fin. But then I broke my wrist. And so I switched to the left. And then when I broke my other arm, I went back to the right. And, boy, I’ll tell you, it was just like coming home.

  Home. It occurs to us as if for the first time, haloed in warmth and cleanliness. Our own beds. The twitter of the phone when it rings. Our girlfriends and boyfriends and spouses who say the whole world should recycle paper just so that we’ll run out of work, get laid off, and be forced to come home. And the children, who are sometimes so young they can’t yet say how they feel. And the parents, who also lack the words. Bend, plant, stand up, move on. Brain above the heart, brain below the heart. And so on. We’ve just begun to get homesick, even if we’ve got no fixed address. For now we look at scraps of rainforest scenery whizzing by. Some venture out on the back deck just to be alone, blowing themselves to bits.

  THERE ARE no statutory holidays in Planterland, no Labor Day weekends or Thanksgivings. But just in time for Easter, it snows. We spend four days idling around the motel rooms, hurrying up and waiting for the work to rematerialize, speed-dialing the boss, as if he might have an answer for the melting of snow or the angle of the sun.

  Our bodies are crumpled, but our minds are wide awake. We’re cranky, hungry for something to swallow, feeling an itch beyond the fingertips. Underneath our boredom lurks an idle despair. The thing you feel when your car breaks down on a woe-begotten highway littered with Blizzard cups, Dorito bags, and used condoms.

  K.T. and I can’t stuff ourselves full enough. Tater Tots, hollandaise sauce, cream puffs, Oreo cookies, pizza pops and cheese-bread fingers, beer, bags of chips. “Turkey dinner” sandwiches from the grocery deli counter stuffed with cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes. We drink coffee dressed with coils of whipped cream, and then we suck back the nitrous oxide from the canister. It’s as if we’re larding ourselves up for some future austerity.

  At night, we party. Our celebrations feel like a letting-go of the days’ constrictions, as if we’ve taken our brains out of their holsters. Perhaps we’re just trying to forget.

  We begin with Rose, who is the unofficial epicenter of every party. It starts as it usually does, with just the girls hiding out from the men. Her room is a perfumey, smoky swamp. On the floor rests a Rubbermaid bin full of her wardrobe. She packs it around like an exotic dancer or a traveling stage actress. For lack of uncluttered surfaces to sit on, I collapse into Rose’s clothing tub, amid the animal prints and the tongues of georgette. A sheer garment hangs over the TV. Glossy magazines kick about on the floor, Us and Vanity Fair. Rose went to art school, and in her off-hours she gets deep into projects. She says she spilled india ink on the carpet, and since Monday she’s been trying to scrub it out. The blotch has spread into an inky explosion, a fatal blotch in the middle of the floor.

  There are two beds, both rumpled. We talk about astrology. There’s a prescription bottle on the bedside table. One a day, it reads. Rose shows me a photo of her as a baby taken inside a tepee. Her mother has dark hair in braids. Rose’s middle name is Blueflower. She flashes her driver’s license to prove it.

  Rachel, our freshest arrival, comes to join us. She admits she’s never planted on the raincoast before. She’s a small woman, so petite she looks like someone who forgets to eat, like hypothermia waiting to happen. We listen to Rachel’s music collection. To Ladytron and Blonde Redhead on an iPod plugged into portable speakers. We drink wine out of liter flagons, out of water glasses that get rinsed, never washed, by the chambermaids. They work a room as we do a clear-cut—left to right, top to bottom, then get the hell out to the next one.

  Rose’s room fills up with people. Melissa enters, wearing polyester pinstriped pants, snow boots, and a hat with furry flaps. She takes off the hat and shakes out her hair to show us how it has knitted itself into dreadlocks.

  Get the scissors! we cry.

  After a while we can’t keep the boys out. They’re bored, ranging around outside the door. We hear knocks, and when we don’t answer they hurdle the balcony railings and slap their hands on the sliding door. Soon, we’re all squeezed in together. We sit in rows on the beds as if in some odd form of church where, for benediction, you get a shot of Fireball or Cuervo Gold.

  In previous seasons there has been naked wiggling on pool tables. There have been illicit white powders, snorted from the tops of restroom hand dryers. Unfathomable seductions in handicapped bathrooms. Liaisons with local girls in mobile homes on the fringes of town. Shots of vodka tossed back like white fire against the tonsils. There has been drunken, crooning karaoke and bouts of sloppy dancing. There have been fisticuffs, doors kicked open. Stabbings by transvestites. There have been conceptions. Betrayals and infidelities. Breakups and tragedy and tears.

  Now we jump between the beds and drop cigarette ash on the bed spreads. We’ve been unleashed into thirty-six hours of freedom, the furthest we’ll get from next week’s round of slogging. We fall into off-duty withdrawal after long days jacked up on endorphins. If there is an intoxicating substance we will drink it. If
we have the keys we will drive it. If there were but one tree left on the planet we’d hunt it down with our bumpers at maximum velocity and wrap ourselves around the trunk. We’re the guilty survivors. Not of the disaster, but next to it. The people to the left of the environmental crime.

  When in Rome.

  Tomorrow is Easter Sunday, the day of resurrection, and all over town there will be plenty of hangovers. Our chambermaid will drop by with an armload of fresh, dirt-brown towels. She’s built like a coat hanger, with dentures, a smoky rasp, and a nurturing spirit that is indefatigable, even with us.

  The Easter Bunny forgot me, she will confess.

  In this town there is something wistful and heavy in the air. It makes you a little heartsick every time you draw a breath. The log dump bullies the waterfront, its landing stained rust-orange from the mashed bark of rainforest trees. There are a string of jetties and marina floats and a BC Ferries terminal that services the tiny island communities of Sointula and Alert Bay. And beyond this, a stretch of rocky shore where blue herons stand around looking out to sea like old men in trench coats. Swirling crowds of bald eagles, in numbers you can’t even count, talk to each other in screeching trills. The weather is mostly gray and windy.

  This is the hometown of NHL player Willie Mitchell. The people are friendly, and they converse with the easy demeanor of folks on “island time.” When the local soccer teams win, everyone honks, as with a motorcade on the way to a wedding. Germans pit-stop in rented RVs, northbound to the Prince Rupert ferry. Ecotourists on kayak tours, whale watchers. Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates, the salesgirls often mention, have stopped off in their superyachts to admire the rough, aching beauty. On certain days of the week you can see cruise ships sail by, three or four in a row. You can stand on the shore and watch these monster boats churn. Princess, Norwegian, and Holland America steam by, and then they are gone, Alaska-bound, leaving nothing to mark their passage but a gritty plume of exhaust.

  {

  7 }

  at the END of the REACH

  THE MONTH OF May, in the coastal rainforest, is a time of lushness and warmth before the heat of summer sets in. I trade my synthetic thermals for men’s cotton business shirts. K.T. breaks out his wide-brim hat. The clear-cuts are sultry with humidity. The afternoons are mad with robins and chickadee song and woodpeckers hammering the hell out of snags. The conifers let go their pollen, and it drifts above the treetops in clouds of Martian green. In the evenings we hear the haunting call of the Swainson’s thrush—an upward spiral of beckoning notes that echo out in an old forest like the sound of a sad flute in a cathedral.

  We leave Port McNeill behind. We travel south, across the Strait of Georgia to the mainland. Three road trips and two ferries later we arrive at the Sunshine Coast, though “sunshine” is a relative term in the rainforest. This is a peninsula of voluptuous land, separated from the rest of British Columbia by a pocket of ocean called Sechelt Inlet. We must take a boat to get here, though it lies on the mainland, since mountains divide it from the province’s highway system. Some of us recall the scenery from The Beachcombers, a show about log salvage operators, which was filmed here in the seventies and eighties and still holds the record for the longest-lived drama on Canadian TV.

  We roll aboard our new home, a ninety-eight-foot offshore landing craft called the Lasqueti Daughters, a barge with a hull the shade of carbon paper. Its three white decks stack upon one another at the stern in diminishing layers, like the tiers of a wedding cake. The foredeck is an open cargo area surfaced with rough planking, a prow that ratchets down onto the shore like a jaw. We walk aboard, shouldering a month’s worth of luggage, and let the boat swallow us.

  We’re yapped at by a little snaggle-toothed dog who looks like he’s wearing a sable coat with a copious ruff. The Daughters is loaded with people and duffel bags and plastic tubs. Then three battered, mud-smeared trucks wedge in, as if with a shoehorn, leaving just enough room between their side mirrors to fit a folded newspaper. With so little space to spare, if we want to walk from bow to stern we’ve got to climb over the trucks: up bumpers, boxes, and cabs and down over hoods. But mostly we are crammed with white tree boxes, piled everywhere, ten feet high. We have to shimmy sideways between the waxy, white rows as if pushing ourselves through a tight maze carved out of snow.

  It is a miracle the boat floats. Overstuffed hockey bags. Cartons of cigarettes. Ziploc bags full of B.C.’s other cash crop—fuzzy buds, crystallized with resin. Digital music collections. Laptops. DVDs. Flats of beer. Spare shovels. Books. Magazines. Musical instruments. New spring wardrobes of quick-dry pants and pastel cotton shirts plucked indiscriminately from thrift store racks. We have this feeling, upon leaving the shore, that we should pad ourselves for some unknown adventure, whatever the voyage has in store.

  Sly and K.T. play chess on a table of tree boxes, on chairs fashioned from tree boxes. Melissa and Oakley recline across cardboard corners in the sun, beeping out photos with their cameras. Others take naps on the truck hoods, sacked out against the windshields or on the roofs of the upper decks. We relax as tree planters do—horizontally, wholly. The ocean is the sharp indigo of new denim. A floatplane comes whining and wavering out of the ether. We’re overcome with foolish, vernal optimism. There’s new money in the air.

  We’re fresh from the rare glory of three days off in a row. Most of us burned a straight line home and fell into bed. We blinked our eyes, and now we’re back again. Our citified smells drift in the breeze. Bounce sheets, cosmetic potions, the perfumed emollients in the shower racks of home. Our men have shaved and gotten haircuts. They flash untanned strips of skin at the neck and ear. We’re lingeringly happy, for the most part. A little frazzled, too. Especially those of us who’ve spent the weekend with children hanging around our necks.

  Those of us who look the most relaxed are the ones who don’t ever go home. Melissa’s family owns an inn in Tasmania. Doug spends his winters in India. They’re always crossing oceans, but when they plant trees, home is wherever they happen to be. Doug wears sunglasses and his beret, like someone embarked on a luxury cruise. Melissa still scuffs around in her winter boots. When your true belongings live on the other side of the world you’ve got to make do with one wardrobe. Carmen has put in an offer on a house. She chews her fingernails and bobs her foot, fretting about the mortgage paperwork, which will now be left unattended. Adam’s mood has also changed during his time off. Home tires him out and ramps him up in equal measure. Now he runs around shirtless, heaving spare tires and fuel drums, though the weather is just a few degrees too cold.

  Logging operations now reach far beyond the limits of any village. The harvesting was done, sometimes years ago, from logging camps that have long since pulled their nails and folded down their walls. Or from floating barge camps that featured vending machines and wall-to-wall carpeting and even helipads. They’ve been tugged away to other locales. Or the cutting was done in inaccessible mountain nooks, the logs slung out by air cranes. And so, all up and down the coast, tree planters live on boats, since there are no motels and no campsites, sometimes scarcely a landing on which to park a truck.

  There are no telephones or mail of either the electronic or the enveloped variety. Only the boat’s VHF radio and the boss’s satellite phone, which costs a buck a minute, whether the call is urgent or frivolous. We’re less than one hundred miles north of Vancouver, but it might as well be light-years. We’re incommunicado, which is as much an anxiety as it is a great relief.

  THE LASQUETI DAUGHTERS pushes away from the shore like an ark in reverse, a boat built for the export of all the weird, misfit specimens. Land and sea peel apart. We bob in a gentle swell, cracking beer tabs though it is barely noon. At the peninsula’s northern edge, we pass the small hamlet of Egmont. We cruise by the waterfront real estate, modest cottages perched above lumps of purple rock. Marinas full of green-bearded watercraft. Many of Egmont’s residents live on the east-facing slope, with a view of the inlet’s far shore. Som
e years ago this panorama sold to a consortium of NHL players, a logging contractor, and a California tycoon in the biggest land deal the area has ever seen. An eight-square-mile block—most of a mountain. The world would want to know, said the hockey players, about the incredible wildlife, about the secret, rugged beauty. All this place needed, they promised, was a time-share resort with a pool, spa, and five-star hotel. It never happened. They logged it instead, from the top all the way down to the bottom.

  We steam past this clear-cut now, marveling at the thoroughness.

  Looks creamy, we all agree.

  Who planted it?

  Not us, we lament.

  Next, the conquest for bunk space. We’re greeted in our expeditions by our skipper, Peter, who has tufted white hair, a stubbled face, and moist blue eyes. He speaks with a rusty English accent. He wears an untucked flannel shirt with the cuffs undone, corduroy trousers, and oxfords with professorial soles.

  If I were you, he says to me, I’d take that one right there. He points to a window on the upper decks.

  The Daughters is a woodwork maze of varnished passage-ways, nooks, and compartments. In the central part of the main deck is the galley, the kind of kitchen you might find at the back of a vegetarian café. Shelves and compartments full of coffee mugs, serving platters, and ecstatically painted bowls. A collection of high-end commercial appliances. Utensils hang from the walls and the ceiling. In the middle of it all, Keira, the cook, wears a pair of industrial ear muffs against the noise of the diesel engine, its cylinders hammering beneath our feet. She’s processing cheese with one of those deli appliances that could slice your entire palm in a moment’s inattention.