Eating Dirt

by Charlotte Gill

  On the upper decks we invade the sleeping berths. There are four doubles and one dormitory we’ve already started calling the bachelor suite. We have coupled remarkably well, despite all our differences. Brad and Melissa have fallen in together and claim one of the doubles. Carmen and Neil share a berth as well. Rose has made a boyfriend out of Fin. He wanders the decks shouting her name, like Stanley from A Streetcar Named Desire. K.T. and I haul our belongings to the cabin Peter recommended. He’s right. It’s nice. It won’t be long before Adam and Brian sniff out our find and try to wrest it from our grip. We sit down on our backpacks to wait.

  Peter sleeps in the wheelhouse on a king-sized mattress. Keira has a cabin so small it seems to exist only between the walls. To reach it, she climbs a companionway from the kitchen up into the ceiling. Later, I learn that Keira is the daughter of tree planters. She has taped to one of the cupboards a yellowing photo of her and Carmen playing as little girls in a muddy camp amid a jumble of spare tires. We talk about this photo and then catch sight, through the galley windows, of a yellow stream of urine released from the upper decks. Keira sighs and shakes her head. The bathroom is just aft of the galley. Its door yawns open and shut with the bobbing of the boat. It will swing on its hinges a thousand times before this job is done. Two showers, a sink, and a single toilet that for the next month all twenty of us will share.

  AS WE round the point, Egmont slips from view. We pass through a spot where the waters of the open strait commingle with outflows of Sechelt and Jervis Inlets, like three open mouths breathing into one another.

  Jervis Inlet lies before us like a backdrop from Lord of the Rings, one of those ominous entrances with forested mountains and granite cliffs rising abruptly from each shore. It looks more like a wide river than the ocean. Snow-dusted peaks with trees sprouting up from rocky perches. Green streaks of meadow where avalanches have mown down the woodsy growth, year after year. It’s the kind of place where no people live, not really. Where, if you glance in the right direction, you could fool yourself into thinking nothing has changed in a thousand years.

  Jervis runs fifty-five miles from head to mouth, a zigzag of water with three elbows and three deep, narrow reaches dredged by prehistoric glaciers. Like many coastal fjords, its stone walls rise vertically from the water, obliterating the notion of a shore. The water is so deep that boats often do not have enough anchor chain to secure them to the sea bottom. Instead of anchoring their ships, European explorers tethered them to the enormous tree trunks that once lined the shore. The inlet gives no hint of tapering until an abrupt kink at the very end reveals no treasures, no paradise, no elusive trade route, just a cul-de-sac of sedgy mudflats. Here George Vancouver arrived with high hopes of discovering the Northwest Passage only to turn back in dismay. All our hopes vanished, he wrote.

  It was once a busy territory, home to the people of the Sechelt Nation before disease cut the population down to a smattering. There is still a camp located at the old Deserted Bay village site, owned by the band. They rent it to people like us. There’s also a religious summer retreat perched on rocks deeper down the inlet, where it’s possible to be waved at by Christian girls in bikinis if you pass by in a boat at the right time of year. Situated at the lip of Princess Louisa Inlet, it was once an upscale resort, the Malibu Club, visited by Hollywood royalty not long after World War II. Otherwise, Jervis is a wild place, awesome in its ragged beauty to the point of feeling hostile. No one goes unless they have something specific to accomplish.

  A place of secrets.

  Last year, our forester pointed at some cliffs at the far end of the reach.

  I don’t want anybody to go past that point, he said.

  Why not? we asked.

  He spat a stream of tobacco-brown juice at the ground and ignored the question. Just don’t go past those bluffs, he repeated.

  The wildest part is deep down at the back of the inlet. That’s where all the rain comes from, where all the fog seems to settle. A corner of the world so wild and huge, so hauntingly bereft of human presence, that to go there is to feel unwelcome. Just a few years ago, this boat took another crew down Jervis Inlet. At the farthest reach, while they were at anchor, a tree planter hijacked a skiff in the middle of the night, made his way to dry land, and hanged himself on the shore. There are few tree planters on the coast who haven’t heard this story or some version of it. Who haven’t heard the Lasqueti Daughters talked about as if it were a ferry plying the waters of the River Styx.

  THE JOURNEY continues through the night. It’s tough to sleep with the engine groaning away. We pretend to ourselves in our bunks that we’re just about to drift off. And then, finally, we’re startled awake from thin dreams with the night at its predawn darkest. We hear the grinding clank of the anchor and then silence. We wake again inside our mummy bags—it feels like minutes later—to the smell of wet bacon.

  The early risers hoist themselves up, slide into sea-damp clothes, and descend the companionway to the galley, where Peter has assembled our breakfast. It’s 5:45 AM. He has the rumpled look of a man who’s been standing up all night, squinting into black sheets of ocean. Arrayed on the counter is a heartening spread, glistening with grease. Scrambled eggs and sausage in quantities sufficient to feed our small army. This man has seen how tree planters eat and has dealt with crews who burn fat as well as fossil fuels. Hot lipids look good to us. Calories smoked in our metabolic furnaces like rice paper in a flame.

  I am not a morning person. Yet I’ve learned it’s better to get up early to avoid the pandemonium of reaching hands, the urgent press as the clock ticks us toward departure. Outside on the deck I find a lunch table laden with fresh bread, platters of cold cuts, cheese and tomato slices arrayed in fans. It’s a foggy morning. A sunrise chews at the sky’s murk. Doug, in his beret, sits at a galley table with an old National Geographic spread before him, one with a feature on seahorses. Tomorrow it will be an issue about timber wolves, and the day after that, back to the seahorses. Nick hovers at the coffee urns with a mug hooked on his thumb. Steam dribbles from the coffee maker. Peter saws bread with a large serrated knife. The sound is woolly and comforting. We don’t talk. It’s the last quiet we’ll hear until we are alone with our work, which has its own intolerable roar.

  WE ARE to begin at the inlet’s middle reach and work our way deeper into the land as the days progress. First stop, a long jetty built from crushed, gray boulders, a road surface cobbled on top of this, smoothed with the finer granulations. An empty log boom attached to its flanks like a huge wooden hoop. Peter steers the boat to the end of this jetty and drops the lip of the barge down on the edge. The trucks groan to life and roll off. We follow on foot with our baggage slung over our shoulders. We look like a troupe of ragtag mercenaries tumbling onto a beach in search of a war.

  A chill blows down from the high, snowy slopes. We can see our breath, though we’re deep into spring, as if we’ve slipped backwards into winter. We arrive at a heart-shaped landing fringed with alders and maples, shaded with unfurling greenery. From here we rattle out to the cut blocks, three trucks in a line down a lumpy road, like a procession of slow-moving elephants. The woods are smeared with dew.

  Our land for the day unfolds as we round the corners—a long, steep swathe banked against a mountainside. It’s a big cut, a fresh one. The land is the color of toast. Half of us are destined for the gentle lowlands. The other half for the rough end higher up, where white rocks sit like huge knobs of salt, the boulders of a talus slide where the mountain crumbled out from underneath itself many centuries ago.

  Might as well bust out the shin pads, says Neil. I already know where I’m going.

  Got that right, says Brian at the wheel with an over-the-shoulder smirk.

  We roll down our windows to get a better look, and the cab fills with the smell of resin. Orange stumps dot the field. At the edges of the cut stands a wall of Douglas-fir trees, each as uniformly aged and shaped as the next. Their trunks look like telephone poles
, some collapsed against the neighboring forest, blown back in winter storms. Tree flesh, cracked and mashed, lies splintered as far as the eye can see. A second-growth forest, or at least it used to be.

  What’s the price? we ask.

  The price is the price, says Brian.

  We blame it on Roland, as usual.

  Trucks grind up the hill. At the top, we alight. We find the evidence of the original harvest, the old stumps rotting down into chunky mounds. Old cedar stumps, it doesn’t escape us, surrounded by the fresh remains of a different kind of forest—an arid, new plantation.

  ADAM GIVES us our plan for the day. K.T. and I will share our land. It’s a rare thing, and a little bit melancholy, since we work at separate speeds, never crossing paths all day. The most I’ll see of him, besides his lines of trees, is the dirty shirt he shucks off at lunchtime and leaves hung on a branch to dry.

  Split it down the middle, Adam tells us now.

  K.T. doesn’t waste a moment shoving his feet into his boots. He sets out in just a thin thermal shirt, despite the cool of the morning, a sign he plans to fire up the jets. I try to keep up with him—there’ll be no way to catch him later—but my laces won’t feed fast enough into the grommets. My hands have lost all their finesse. He loads his bags and clips in. He slips over the brown slough of the road. I hear the clink of his shovel as he sets himself to work. He makes the task of planting trees look effortless, like bending to tie a shoe. I slide down the road slough after him and cut my shovel into a clutter of rock. In time, the orange square of K.T.’s shirt slips off into the distance and finally out of sight.

  Halfway into my morning, a sneaky rain floats down in a mist so fine it feels dry, like snow. It begins so airily I don’t even notice until my hair is dripping. It soaks me through to my innermost layers, as if the weather had picked my pockets.

  Adam pit-stops to dump off more trees. He calls down from the road. How is it down there?

  Bony, I shout.

  You don’t need a PhD to note the difference between a virgin forest and a recycled one. The ground here is stones embedded in sand, covered over with crusts of sun-dried moss. Digging into it with my shovel is like working a spoon down into a jarful of teeth. I scrape handfuls of dirt together and shove them around the stems. Deep rainforest replaced with low-fat soil, a trompe l’oeil. A forest-looking forest.

  FOURTEEN THOUSAND years ago, this land was buried in Pleistocene ice. The ecosystems underneath flattened, scree-strewn, beaten down under the weight of glaciers. A few millennia later the ice receded, and life crept back in from the fringes. Lodge-pole pine edged north from California. A few thousand years after that, as the climate cooled and moistened, Douglas-fir and Sitka spruce took over. And then, about the time humans took up agriculture, the monsoons came to visit the Pacific Northwest.

  The rainforest titans began their creeping ascendancy, hemlock and cedar sprouting up in the mist, a patient, prodigious succession. The forest floor thickened into a living, breathing sponge, endometrial in its plush complexity. A broad quilt webbed with fungi and bacteria, fed by the composting tissues of plants and animals. Even now, old-growth soil is ancient and alchemical. A world beneath our feet that’s oceanic in its unknown fecundity. Crustaceans live in it. Out of this dark fundament, life is born of inert matter, from rocks and clay and sand. Trees germinate here: light-drinking organisms that suck molecules from the air and transform them into a wondrous polymer, which is both strong and flexible. And when they are done living they disassemble and return to the earth. Dust to dust. We’ve touched this stuff, dug it up, rubbed it between our fingers. A cabernet-toned humus so plentiful you could dig for an hour without seeing anything that resembles a mineral, no trace of gravel or grit.

  Dirt. At home we try to scrub it and bleach it and vacuum it up. We try to deny it with our various under-sink surfactants. But in a place such as this, dirt is a precious, underrated thing. A tree planter’s bread and butter crumbs. It’s also nourishment, substrate, and habitat. Just one layer of biologically active soil, as thin as a sheet of newsprint or as deep as a few feet thick, on which all living things, sooner or later, depend. Plants sprout from this dirt and are eaten in turn by all the other creatures of the food web. This soil relies on its own living architecture to hold it in place, just as mammals need their bones. Around here it blankets steep ground and is lashed by winter rains. It has been subject to the punishments of heavy machinery—scraping and compaction and erosion.

  After a cutover, all the layers of the forest are hacked away: the canopy, the understory trees, the woody shrubs and the soft-stemmed weeds and ferns. The sky comes crashing down to the ground. This is an incredible amount of material—for every square foot of forest floor, many times that in leaf cover. The web of branches that once caught fog and rain is bucked up into brittle flotsam. The soil, once bathed in understory gloom, is undressed, blasted by the sudden, brash light of the sun. All the dusky, micro-tilling fauna are exposed to baking heat and plunging frosts, where once they were protected by the canopy.

  Earthworms swim around underground passing grit through their inner tracts, breaking down pebbles into loamy castings. Worms and mites, ants and springtails and nematodes and microbes. They do the work of chewing and churning, bringing minerals to the surface and moving organics downwards. Their secretions dissolve rock. Over time these tiny beings make the dirt. Without the miniature life of the forest floor, the living matrix begins to unravel. Water must find new ways to flow through the ground, since there are no roots to drink it up and slow its progress downhill. Occasionally the running rain will sweep everything along in its path, all the way down to bedrock. Sometimes we plant these mudslides, too, nailing them with fast-growing alder.

  It takes at least four hundred years to regrow an old forest naturally, but the kind of time required to make soil is millennial and geologic. You can’t build a forest floor in a nursery or manufacture topsoil in a mill. The dirt is the dirt, and that’s all there will ever be for as long as it takes for the woods to grow it back. The forests of the world may sequester carbon—1,146 billion tons of it—but two-thirds of this is stored not in the trees but underground, in soil and peat.

  If soil has a fate, it is to travel to the sea, where it will sediment and harden and rise up in some distant future with the force of tectonic buckling. Perhaps millions of years after mountains are made, these rocks will grind down again. From stone to sand, from river to sea. In a treeless place, with the rain and the slopes, this process is quick-cycled, the dirt slipped down the creeks like a disintegrating sweater put through the wash. The third-hand forest, when it grows, will be leaner than the one it replaces. And the next one more brittle still. Logging even has a name for these diminishing returns. Falldown.

  Our workplace is a crash site. Two forces in juxtaposition. One is old and slow, accumulating biomass. It wants nothing more than to build. The other is fast and rapacious—our appetites, seemingly without end. Most days we’re too busy making money to see it this way, but sometimes we look up from the rubble and the wood chips. We feel the breeze cool the sweat in our eyebrows. We gaze down at the ocean, where this same earthly breath ripples the water. Tide running one direction, wind running the other, like the quivering fur of an animal rubbed the wrong way. We feel a mild ache in our chests. A brush with a thing that’s been lost forever. Or maybe we feel nothing at all.

  WE’RE NOT puffing along like a steam train anymore but conserving fuel until the end. We’ve still got weeks to go. Our feet and hands are swollen. We have been this tired before, though we scarcely remember when. It must have been last year. We look out through a haze of fatigue. It tinges each breath, flattens the taste of food. Even our hair is limp. But our tiredness is the chronic kind, the sort that makes us jittery and hyper. At night we suffer from a strange insomnia. We drank all our beer within our first week, and now we’ve run short on ways to anesthetize ourselves. We stay up past bedtime in the galley, playing cards and listening
to satellite radio. Or we lie in our sleeping bags eavesdropping on laughter, the clinking of mugs—the sound of clandestine stashes, of port and St. Remy. The talk, the jokes, the gossip sizzles in our ears. Sleep, by comparison so brief and monotonous, whisks the day away as if it never happened.

  We may be sick of looking at the same old faces and forgetting what week it is and grinding through our daily prostrations. Despite all of this we bask in a peculiar contentment—for no reason we can think of except that we’re warm, fed, and dry. Stripped of choices, we’re ship-bound, with nowhere to be but snugged in among our occupational siblings. It’s the annoyed delight of people marooned in a snowstorm or a power outage. Nothing to do but light candles, play crib, eat chocolate chips and drink wine for dinner.

  In the little cabin I share with K.T., the floor is the size of a queen bed. The ceiling is constructed of beautiful varnished wood. Each panel is a solid sheet nearly five feet wide, without a single knot or flaw. It’s not the kind of wood you see very often anymore. When I lie in bed I consider the size of the trees and also the men who felled them. Luxury wood. The wood of the rich and famous.

  K.T. and I have a square window, a ceiling sloped down toward the decks and the bow. All the lines encourage our gaze out to the gray sweep of the ocean. We’ve spent two weeks aboard the Daughters, the tree boxes dwindled down on the decks like melting snowdrifts. Mess moves in to replace them: a couple of forty-five-gallon fuel drums. Blown-out tires. Strewn articles of clothing. A blue windbreaker. Tree-planting bags clipped through the handles of shovels. A fluorescent prawn trap buoy, a coil of green hose. The sun dips, and we’re plunged into a lavender dusk feathered with cirrus clouds.

  K.T. says, I’ll give you ten bucks if you massage my forearm.

  Your money, I remind him, is worthless here.

  K.T. and I have two narrow bunks built into our walls, one stacked atop the other like bookshelves. We lie in our separate berths, talking to each other from above and below like Akbar & Jeff, those cartoon twins in fezzes. We smell the dishwater in the sink downstairs. A mouse has been scrabbling. It chews and scrapes in the deepest part of the night. We hear it but never catch it. In our cabin there are signs of leakage from above, brownish streams down the walls.