Eating Dirt

by Charlotte Gill

  SEYMOUR INLET and neighboring Belize Inlet share a mouth at Nakwakto Rapids, which is itself obscured from open ocean by an island—an uninhabited, tree-covered lump of land that sits like a stopper at the mouth of a bottle. If you didn’t know that whole maritime worlds exist beyond, you would sail right by, none the wiser.

  Nakwakto Rapids is a tidal narrows, notoriously tight and vicious in full gush. In the middle of the channel sits Turret Rock, which is said to tremble in the force of maximum flow. The trees on this tiny, vibrating island have been nailed with signs displaying the names of boats that have successfully shot these rapids. They look like those white highway crosses marking fatalities. Navigational disasters still occur here. Not so long ago, a tugboat sank while pushing through, and its crew only survived by climbing aboard the log barge they had in tow.

  Nakwakto is one of the fastest tidal passages in the world. And yet behind this bottleneck lies a network of waterways, a kind of geographic womb. Behind the narrows, the ocean is so peacefully labyrinthine you might forget it is the ocean entirely. You might think of Venetian canals. At their narrowest point you could throw a stone across. Two centuries ago, hidden behind their gate keeping island, ‘Nakwaxda’xw villages lay protected from intruders. The people thrived undisturbed on these shores long after curious Europeans had made contact with other coastal tribes. Nobody made a nautical chart back here until 1933. It is the southern boundary of a region, which even today lacks roads or cities, once called the Midcoast Timber Supply Area. A hunk of primeval woods now known around the world as the Great Bear Rainforest.

  At the far reach of Seymour’s long arm, inlets lead into smaller inlets, pockets inside pockets. Woods Lagoon is a purse of water ringed by an old cedar forest. The trees rise to dead white spars like wooden bayonets. It is a gnarled ecosystem, sprouted out of rock and thin dirt, pounded through maturity by cataracts of coastal rain. The forests here are something of a natural freak, a testament to the accreting tenacity of cedar, which will try to grow wherever their seeds find moisture. It smells and feels like a place uninterrupted by history, populated by hoary beings from the past. If pterodactyls swooped down from the canopy they’d hardly take us by surprise.

  We used to come here every year, back when the logging camp ran full bore. It was a bustling place, an industrial village nestled in a bowl of forest with log booms lashed to the shore. The bottle-green water was so placid that in a pattering rain it came alive with perfectly circular ripples. Loggers slept in rows of bunkhouse trailers, their quarters connected by breezeways roofed with crenellated plastic. Boardwalks rutted over the years by thousands of footsteps, men going out or coming in, stomping in their caulk boots, formed avenues with names like Stagger Alley, scrawled in Magic Marker on the siding. Whoever had done the signage had the all-caps penmanship of someone more adept with brute tools than with writing instruments.

  Clustered trailers, like a small suburb, organized around a cook house, a laundry room with washing machines labeled for two varieties of clothing, dirty bush garments and less-dirty bush garments—uptown wear, as loggers sometimes call it. A managerial office. Two al fresco living rooms with tweedy, sagging sofas. A satellite phone booth. The familiar bank of showers, toilet stalls, and urinals—for the men only. A dry room where we found a bucket of wax oil with a paintbrush in it, so you could marinate your boot leather without even troubling to unlace.

  The camp was constructed mostly of particle board and two-by-fours. Topographic maps hung stapled to the walls. In the rafters sat huge bolts of industrial garbage bags, margarine tubs to catch the leaks, bales of pink insulation. Plus a cat, who stared down at the mousetraps in the hallways. Although the camp was not as far out in the wilderness as you might find yourself, it was hardly a day skip either. Men worked here in multiweek rotations. They commuted home in floatplanes operated with levers and knobs, with the analog simplicity of old-fashioned cigarette machines. Like the loggers we stayed two to a room, sharing ten square feet of floor space. We slept in narrow beds stretched tight with coarse white sheets, hospital corners done so severely by the camp’s matrons that they cut off the circulation in our feet.

  At night a black bear roamed the hallways looking for food. We could hear him wheezing outside our doors. In the evenings we watched him eat huckleberries from the bushes outside our windows. He was much more dexterously delicate than we imagined a bear could be. He stepped on the branches to lower them to the ground, then pursed his lips, like a human mouthing a string of grapes. We half expected him to unzip himself, like a man in a fur suit. We met a raven named Walter by the camp residents who flew alongside pickup trucks as they sped down the roads. If you rolled down the window, they said, he’d eat a sandwich from your hand.

  If women worked here, they were cooks and custodial staff. The odd forestry professional or summer student. We shared a single, tiny bathroom with a note beneath the mirror that read: This place is our oasis. Please keep it clean!!! The sign featured a clip-art palm tree. This water closet of sparkly melamine and rusted porcelain was the only place in the entire camp that smelled remotely feminine. The shelves bowed with half-full bottles of fruity shampoo and pink cans of shaving cream, left behind by the females who’d come and gone.

  We ate like men, like princely carnivores. Roast beef with mashed potatoes. Steak and mushrooms and baked potatoes. Ribs and macaroni salad. Caramelized protein char propped up with a side of carbs. No quiche, no curry, not a single asparagus spear. Once upon a time, in logging camps, there were no vegetables, no milk that didn’t come from a can—nothing fresh at all that couldn’t survive a long cargo trip. If we didn’t know how to eat what was put before us, we learned quickly, without a peep of special vegetarian pleading.

  Signs flashed everywhere reminding the residents of the social strictures. Use a fork, not your fingers. Take your hat off in the cook shack. No pissing in the bushes around camp. Drive school-zone speed until you get past the workshop. Beer everywhere, but nobody brought it into the cook shack. Mind on task. Safety is job one. Obvious back in the civilized world, but out here anarchy loomed in the leafy fringes. People required reminding.

  Slightly apart and up the hill sat a bunkhouse referred to by the camp’s residents as Heli-World. All the outbuildings were attached except for this one, which was removed, like a guest residence. It contained a private bathroom and a billiard table. Heli-loggers lived here. Men who bushwhacked their way through a forest nobody else could reach by road or boat.

  Heli-loggers fall and buck their logs tree by tree, and then the trees are slung out by helicopter. Logs weighing tons swing overhead, out to the ocean from the hanging grapple of an air crane, whose booming rotors, even at a distance, are enough to give a weak heart palpitations. The logs are worth thousands of dollars each. They have to be, since the cost of running helicopters like these is hundreds of dollars every minute.

  Helicopter logging wasn’t one job, we learned, but an array of tasks so hideously dangerous it was a wonder they were even legal. Some fallers cut the tree trunks nearly all the way through, within inches of falling down. A helicopter came along later with a dangling hook and plucked these trees from their stumps like candles from a birthday cake. Some loggers wielded chain saws with cutting bars as long as a man is tall, in steep, cliffy terrain. Climbers bucked branches before the trees were even felled. They ran up a trunk with crampons and harnesses carrying half their body weight in gear—including the chain saws that dangled from their belts. They climbed high into the canopy, buzzing limbs as they went. Then they sawed through the spar, strapped to the tree by just one thin belt, which rested inches below the cut point. The treetop cracked away, and the trunk swayed with the force of the toppling stem. Sometimes they didn’t even put a hand out to hang on. They were fit, strong, and slightly nuts. There must have been something at their cores, some hyped internal metronome. They felt right in sync pulsed up with adrenaline. They loved a vertiginous height.

  The loggers we met
were lean, wiry men. Or they were huge, with tough, beefy hands and necks like WWF champs. We met Crazy Bill, who wore white cowboy hats and, in his off-hours, had a passion for four-by-four driving at fatal speeds. We met guys with nicknames like Dog Balls and Bre-X and Shorty. Men who’d cut themselves open in the middle of nowhere or been strung up by the ankles with yarding cables. A burly man, delicately named Skyler, who got drunk during the Stanley Cup playoffs and ejected his TV through a window. Some of them started logging before they’d finished high school. Some had dads who’d done it, too.

  They went to work before dawn and returned to camp by midafternoon. We trailed in a couple of hours later, and they were usually well into happy hour, killing time before dinner. They took off their boots and aired their sweat, sitting around in the sun on gutted vinyl benches and log rounds. They talked about the hideous contours of the land they worked—sheer and bluffy, impenetrable with understory brush. Salal so tight and tall they had to cut their way through. They were still in their bucking pants. T-shirts with the sleeves torn off, the cotton stretched loose at the neck holes.

  Just wait till you see what’s coming to you, they snorted.

  We planted the land they’d cut the year before. We walked in their footsteps. It gave us a fleeting kinship, though probably they would disagree. Sometimes the loggers partied with us on the nights before our days off, even though they were paid to work every day they were in camp. They pulled beer cans from bottomless pockets. They laughed at us for needing days off to rest.

  So weak, they scoffed.

  We tried to explain how our bodies took a beating, how we never got more than one day of rest. In their off-shifts, they got a whole week. They were gorillas, and we were greyhounds. We busted out guitars, and they sang along with us out of key. We howled out tunes into the most sacred quiet of the night. Classic rock songs everyone knows by heart: “Sweet Home Alabama.” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

  Eventually the fun came to an end. One morning, after a flamboyantly loud night, the camp foreman lumbered down the halls, looking to blast any one of us loitering in his sights.

  Bastard tree planters, he cursed.

  He was a big man in a trucker’s cap. A solid paunch hung over his waistband. His feet were the size of bread boxes. But he drank chamomile tea from a white coffee mug with the tag looped around the handle.

  Some of us remember our first time in this camp, nearly a decade ago. We were the first tree planters the loggers had ever seen. An old-timer once told me he thought it was good that girls worked in the woods now, alongside men, even though some of his co-workers weren’t so keen. They like it simple, he said. Just men, the wives and kids stowed safely at home. They liked how it was in the time before policies and bureaucracies and environmental regulations, back in the days before rules.

  Once, he said, he’d watched a pod of killer whales chase some porpoises into the lagoon.

  A marine slaughter, right there, he said, pointing at the view.

  For days and days, the water foamed pink with blood.

  AROUND HERE we plant western red cedar, the celebrity species on the coast. A cedar stand is a climax community, often centuries older than a Douglas-fir forest. The bark of these trees is supple and soft. Stripped away from the trunks it looks like russet hair.

  For the original peoples of the Pacific Northwest, cedar was a prime raw material. Arbor vitae, the tree of life. They used the roots for baskets and wove a rough linen from its fibrous bark. They had ways of cutting planks and peeling bark while leaving the tree standing. They made canoes from hollowed-out logs of cedar, which is prized for its decay-resistant qualities. The canoes were over sixty feet long and could carry forty people, plus provisions, over long stretches of cold, bad-tempered ocean. The coastal tribes were mariners, and they put out to sea in fleets of cedar canoes. These tribes became trading partners. And although the three major language families of the coastal aboriginal peoples comprise dozens of tongues, many are so similar they’re often thought of as dialects. The history, the language, the geography, the cedar—all are intertwined.

  In Coast Salish lore, cedar was bequeathed to humankind by the Great Spirit, who planted it on the grave of a kind and generous mortal. From the cedar tree the people made longhouses and weapons and tools. They made nets, harpoons, towels, and even diapers. They made totem poles and coffins and beautiful, smooth bentwood boxes. Cedar was the most versatile substance they had, as ubiquitous as plastic in our world.

  One of the biggest red cedars of modern times once stood on Vancouver Island, in Cathedral Grove, a tiny preserve of virgin rainforest carved through by a tourist highway. The tree was over seven hundred years old and measured fifteen feet across, but it was set on fire by vandals in 1972. Today the world’s largest known specimen is the Quinault Lake Cedar on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. It’s over twenty feet in diameter and contains 200,000 board feet of timber.

  Everyone knows what cedar wood looks like, even if they have only seen photos. It’s soft and lightweight with a silky finish. It has the reddish-brown hue of human skin bronzed by the sun. Fresh-cut cedar smells like Christmas and pencils, saunas and brand new shingles, like lemons and cinnamon and pepper. It is a luscious, expensive smell, too much and not enough all at once. The living tree has flat, ferny needles, if indeed they can be called needles, for they are more like tiny, waxy leaves. After a rain the branches grow heavy, until the tree takes on a weepy, downcast look. But on a fine, breezy day a cedar tree comes alive with movement. From a distance it looks like a woman wearing a dress made entirely of green feathers.

  BEFORE THE white man arrived, the people of the Pacific Northwest lived next to the forest on the lip of the ocean. They dwelled among the trees, but they weren’t averse to pushing against the wall of wood at their backs. They relied largely on the bountiful proteins of the sea, but more of their supplemental foods were found in clearings than beneath the darkened canopy. Berries grew in sunny openings, and game also foraged there. The people encouraged these meadows by starting fires, which were not always what we now call “controlled.” From these man-made fields they dug camas, a lily bulb that tastes like sweet potatoes when roasted—a prized carbohydrate in a land without staple grains.

  They logged, too, though theirs was a painstakingly selective version of the practice. Their fallers were experts. They knew how to choose precisely the right tree for their purposes and how to cut it down so that it toppled in a strategic direction. They did this without metal implements or domesticated animals. With any luck at all, they’d find a tree close to a river or near the beach, though sometimes they penetrated the forest for several miles to track down just the right one. The logging itself involved rites and ceremony. A faller would pray and fast to prepare. Before taking anything at all from a tree, the people talked to its spirit, to explain why they needed the wood, bark, or roots, and to thank it for its generosity.

  For the coastal people, cutting was a team endeavor. They burned a tree at the base and chipped away at the trunk with stone adzes until it swayed and came down. The cutting alone might have taken days and days. Then they skidded the tree on rolling logs—each of which required cutting as well—with as many as sixty men pushing and groaning and tugging on ropes. These human drive teams were often composed of slaves. Without axes or band saws or teams of oxen, it was visceral, time-consuming work, expensive in calories and sweat and probably lives. Once they’d dragged the log into the water it took several canoes to tow it back to the village. Any kind of logging so strenuous and labor-intensive left a light mark on the land.

  When Euro-American settlers reached the Pacific Northwest, they faced all of the same challenges and more. They were hell bent on bigger alterations, on clearing land to make way for farms. But cutting gigantic coastal trees proved a formidable task for people who’d come from easterly regions, where the trees stood like chopsticks by comparison. Where logs could be cut, hauled, and floated down rivers with
relative ease. Rainforest trees were so big and unwieldy, and the terrain was so rough and dense, that preparing it for agriculture or grazing would have been a fight against the very composition of the land, a feat akin to moving mountains.

  In the days before power tools it might have taken two men with axes several days to cut through an old rainforest tree, whose bark alone required hours of chipping and sawing. When such a tree fell it cut a swathe of sky into the surrounding canopy as it cracked through hundreds of branches. When it struck the ground the impact rumbled out like a tremor. The trunk might have bashed a crater into the soil several feet deep. The downed tree was so heavy it had to be cut into chunks and then dragged out, piece by piece, by horses or oxen. And behind the stump there would be dozens of other trees looming between homesteaders and a clean, tillable field. Once they’d finished cutting, they faced stumps with roots so thick, expansive, and tangled that the whole project must have seemed gruesomely overwhelming. It was easier just to set the whole thing alight.

  In 1850, only a billion people walked the surface of the earth. The rainforest must have seemed wild and lonely and bereft of human company. As if what it badly needed was opening—order, light, and most of all, room—so that more people could come to live. Trees grew ubiquitously, in ironic abundance, since lumber was outrageously expensive. There was no ready way to cut, haul, or process wood without engaging the help of whole teams of men, all of whom required payment. And once the waterfront timber had been logged, further supply lay deep in the bush. And so forests were seen as something close to worthless, an impediment to the eye, plow, and cart. A stump field was a sign not of environmental violation but of progress, of nascent cosmopolitan cachet.

  Small-time logging began on the west coast in the latter half of the nineteenth century, just as Canada came into being and the United States was in the throes of the Civil War. Independent hand-loggers employed teams of men with job titles like donkey punchers, whistle punks, and swampers, as well as the original teamsters, who were the foul-mouthed drivers of horse and oxen. These outfits cherry-picked old-growth trees near the shore, sometimes falling them straight into the ocean. The logs were then boomed and shipped to mills in the south. When this easily accessible wood was gone, the men used draft animals to drag logs out of the bush and down to the shore. Theirs was a rudimentary form of selective logging, or high-grading, some might say.