Lumberjacks cut notches into the tree trunks and hammered in their springboards—spiral staircases that allowed a man to cut above a tree’s wide buttress. As time went on, they climbed higher up the mountains and farther into the bush. The deeper and steeper they went, the more brutal and risky the work became—sometimes it was literally crushing. They built skid roads. They hauled in steam donkeys to winch and inch and budge logs out. They built ever more complexly dangerous slides and flumes for the scudding of logs from mountainside to water. These chutes are the inspiration for rides at modern amusement parks—for Loggin’ Toboggans, Zoom Phlooms, and Zambezi Water Splashes.
Early loggers were restricted by gravity and physics in practically every way, since they had no yarders or bulldozers or, for many years, even combustion engines. When disasters happened the victims might have been several days by boat from medical attention. An injured man either lived or he died, and everyone in camp would have known he met his fate without the aid of hospitals or doctors.
Archival photos from the early timber days show men who spent their lives squinting at inscrutable problems of mass and inertia. They were lean, mostly unsmiling men with moustaches and Popeye-sized forearms. Although they were solid, you might guess from their body shapes that they were also as agile as dogs. They owed their lives to an ability to sprint, to get out of the way of killer trees, which could roll and crash like runaway freight trains. You can still see their handiwork all over the Pacific Northwest. The old, notched stumps crumbled down by time in every kind of second-hand forest.
WOODS LAGOON hits us like a slap. All that land the loggers promised—the hairball gullies and snarled back corners. Cedar trees seem vengeful about their own demise, since they produce astronomical heaps of wreckage. Their branches swoop down before they grow up, and when cut they’re shaped like sickles. The trunks themselves are often hollow inside, their heartwood rotted away. When these fall they blast apart into spears and shards.
This woody trash is infernally slippery, immune to the grip of our footwear. At the same time, it reaches out and snags us, like a field of giant fish hooks. A branch releases from pressure and whips us in the shins. We lose our balance and then fall into a garden of broken sticks. Our trousers tear apart at the inseams, then shred apart into hula skirts. All this slash is ensnarled in branched, woody webbings of salal, like that impenetrable briar in Sleeping Beauty. Salal is the world’s floral greenery, the rubbery background foliage in bouquets. But here and now, I spend my days barging through it with my whole weight, as if through begrudging turnstiles. I travel in ups and downs, in French curls and hairpin turns, not so much walking as wading and stumbling. In this visual cacophony you can drive yourself mad trying to make a forest in neat, straight rows, and indeed Jake goes nuts every day. He curses at the top of his lungs with the regularity of a steam whistle, reminding us to glance down at our watches.
We find depths of exhaustion so profound they feel pleasurable—one of those brain-body paradoxes, as if we were drinking ourselves sober. Sometimes, when we tumble, our limbs refuse to push us back up again to vertical. Sometimes we don’t even realize we’ve fallen, turtled on our backs with our seedlings escaping our bags. We catch ourselves with our faces to the sky, recognizing puffy forms in the clouds, feather pillows and sheep blobs. We’ve worn our steel blades down by inches. Our boot leather is chapped to a pulp.
A giddiness takes over, a deep, careless fatigue. It’s not just Sly shaking his head and muttering. Brian is so sleep deprived his sentences come out in incomprehensible, rapid-fire stutters. One afternoon, he serenades me with an a cappella version of Neil Diamond’s “Forever in Blue Jeans.” We stand next to a truck on a crunchy stretch of rubble. A hot breeze blows over the land, flapping all the tarps. If I keep my lips open, the wind steals the moisture right off my tongue. The bugs struggle up in my lee. I listen to Brian sing the whole song with each of the verses and choruses. I wonder if it’s a gift or I’m meant to join in or I’m simply to be held hostage by a song.
You’re crazy, I say.
Money talks, he replies. But it don’t sing and dance and it don’t walk.
At the end of the day, on the drive back to the water’s edge, the roads are eerily deserted. Adam drives as fast as physics will allow, as if he were trying to blast us into orbit. I guess we must love this sensation since we never complain, the white ribbon of road flying out beneath us, the spiky treetops blurring past. The soundtrack for our commute is Emily Haines singing: Tu sais que je n’aime pas ma réalité. The CD has been wedged in the drive for days, and no one has been able to coax it out. We jostle together in time to the music, to the rhythms of the chassis. We ramble out of words. And just like that, as a cloud runs out of water, we give up on our complaining. It must mean the end is near.
Blood crusts our temples. Black flies bounce on the windows, trying to escape. We crush them with our thumbs, leaving streaks of our own blood down the glass. We talk about the times we’ve rammed our shovels into hornets’ nests by accident. The humiliations suffered because of insects—stung on the lips, the penis, the asshole—and the resulting elephantine swellings. We have a conversation, like the Frost poem, about whether we would rather die of hypothermia or burn up in flames.
K.T. says, When you freeze you feel euphoric at the end.
That’s what they always say, Oakley responds, about the shitty ways to die.
We race toward our off-duty comforts, and the weary anticipation is palpable. The truck screams around bends, kicking up flumes of beige dust. As it hits the road bumps we settle into a nearly comfortable formation, like anchovies dovetailed into a can. Our cheeks are hot pink. Twigs and huckleberry leaves nestle in our hair. We are stunned and tired and indestructible.
Dirt. We’re striped with it, smeared down the sides of our necks. We’ve found mud in all our crooks, washed it from every cranny. We’ve eaten it by accident and even on purpose just to see how it tasted. On our tongues it felt like sand stirred into cold butter. It tasted just like money.
Just outside the camp’s boundary, the road rises like a cresting wave. This geographic feature seems to draw us in. Adam stomps on the gas, and all four tires leave the gravel. We feel a thrilling lightness in the bones, the looseness of skin, hair lifting from our scalps. For just those few seconds we escape the tug of gravity and the body’s freight, and then we settle back down to Earth.
THE HEAD-FIRST plunge, the verbs before the nouns. If this quality were a substance, some blood-borne humor, Adam must have it in spades. He can be martially tidy in some ways and a magnificent slob in others. He moves into new locales seeking entrances and escapes. He has no superfluous flesh at all. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen get four charley horses all at once.
We have noted his fondness for tight-fitting Lycra shirts. We have seen his teeth crumble out of his mouth. I’ve played dozens of Scrabble games with Adam, and I can never decide if he’s cheating or winning or perhaps a little of both. We have come across him on a logging road lying under a car chassis with shop towels stained by transmission fluid. We horrified ourselves from a distance, mistaking the car’s pink juice for blood. Once, on a foggy, out-of-the way cut block, he ate some wild berries to moisten his mouth. They were poisonous, and before long he puffed up and turned purple, crashing into anaphylactic shock. We strapped him to a basket stretcher with a bottle of oxygen and heaved him out, the whole crew tugging his formidable dead weight. The way rescues have been done since loggers started crushing and burning and gashing themselves open in the middle of nowhere.
We’ve seen Adam grind Ford trucks backwards through creeks and over stony beaches at low tide. Seen him MacGyver cooling systems with bits of hose and duct tape. Every year Adam can be counted on to flog at least one vehicle to death. He’s even destroyed two trucks at once—one parked, one traveling fast in reverse. When he collided, he told me later, he still had his foot on the accelerator. We’ve seen Adam so angry he charged up stairs, takin
g the risers three at a time. When he reached the top of the flight and flung a door open, we worried for the target individual, whose room he found at the end of the hall.
But on the other hand, if we need anything at all, he brings it without a moment’s vacillation.
I need more, we’ll shout.
One hundred pounds of trees on his shoulders, straight up if need be, undaunted by slopes or ravines, by distance or dizzying heights. And when he’s dropped his cargo at our feet, sweating and wheezing, next thing he’ll light a cigarette. If there is more than one Adam in the world, we’re both grateful and chagrined he doesn’t work with us. We make good money from the force of his turbojets.
There may be “slow food” and “slow travel,” but there is no such thing as slow tree planting. Or logging gently, since tree-friendly wood has not yet been invented. Until then, if you want a piano or a paper plate or a hardwood floor—if you want an omelet, as they say, first you must break some eggs.
Adam lives in a little town on Vancouver Island where everyone knows everybody else, and you can walk practically anywhere in ten minutes. He spent his last night as a bachelor with so much nervous energy he built a rock wall with his bare hands by the light of headlight beams. Now he has a wife and two small boys. When he returns from his tours in the bush, does she make him strip down in the garage before setting foot in her house? Does she make him swear not to muddy up her washing machine? When we see her in town, Mrs. Adam, she can barely look at us, as if we are to blame.
WE ASSESS the damage in the gray light of our cabins. Bruises dot our thighs. They come in exactly the shape of the objects we fell upon, thin as a pencil or wide as a softball bat. We leave our shovels on the deck overnight, and they’re rusted by the morning. Leaks in the roof and buckets in the galley. The bush makes attempts to digest us.
Aboard the Daughters, the hallmark of our resignation is the bathroom. We step on tree bark and hair and bits of gravel in the shower stalls. A dozen kinds of shampoo. A back-scrubbing brush. Lady razors. Assorted bars of gooey deodorant soap. Rose’s panties hang from the towel rack. The rubbish bin overflows with crumpled sheets of brown paper towel, which means somebody’s used them to dry off after a shower.
We are unsympathetic to the injured or the departed, since they’ve left us to carry out the deed. Our numbers have dwindled, our co-workers fled back to civilization on floatplanes summoned by satellite phone. They claim injuries, family passings, pets with cancer, and commitments to other bosses. Wherever they’ve gone, we are the stay-behinds. We imagine them planting on utopian plains, where the ground is flat and the air is cool and bug free, where there the logs are so slim you can step over them instead of detouring around. Where the rain, we like to say, is only practicing.
In trade we gain Julien, the boss’s son. He’s as burly as his dad but with the finesse of a trained athlete. He doesn’t plant trees. He’s a hockey player. Unlike us, he’s symmetrically muscled. We can tell by the way he walks. He’s here on a daily wage to chauffeur and unload, to gopher and ferry, to deliver tree boxes when the road’s washed out or when the clear-cut’s too deep to be feasible. He’s always eating something lean and healthy, some form of low-fat vegetable roughage. He is educated, kinesiologically speaking, about fats and carbs, about fast- and slow-twitch fibers.
Our mental rubrics are more like on-off switches: it works or it’s FUBAR. It hurts or it doesn’t. Full or just plain empty. Julien does push-ups on the roads while we work. We watch with disgusted bemusement. What a strange luxury, this fanatic idea of our time—the workout—the superfluous wastage of calories.
Come on out here, we holler. We’ll give you something to cry about.
Our job is immune to technology. We have GORE-TEX and fiberglass and PVC, but in the end it comes down to just us and our bodies and the trees. Researchers have studied us. They’ve swabbed our skin and drawn our blood into stoppered test tubes. They’ve strapped us with heart monitors and pricked us to measure our glucose levels. These experts want to quantify how far, how long, how hard a body can go. We’ve filled out their questionnaires. What do we eat? What kind of gloves do we wear? What kind of maniacs are we? But nobody has done a study on the contours of our minds.
If we could return ourselves like appliances from the Shopping Channel, surely we’d request different components. We could use better knees, for a start, secured with an extra ligament or two. Hands with tougher fingernails. We might ask for bigger feet and better balance. And if only we wore sharkskin, since we’re stuck with an epidermis for an outer covering, not a carapace or fur. Our teeth are hard as rocks and our bones are as strong as wood, and yet we burn after a few short hours in the sun. It seems curious indeed that the toughest parts of us are on the inside. Our only consolation is the skin’s sensitivity. For every blister and scratch, we gain sublime touches in trade—the sun on our shoulders or a puff of wind through our hair or even the texture of someone else’s skin.
In our outdoor office there is no denying the merciless absurdities of the natural world. Plants grow, and small critters graze them, and other, bigger animals snap these victims in their jaws. It’s a feudal arrangement, nature’s energy chain, fraught with struggle and sacrifice. After the providers come the consumers, the emptiers, the raiders of seeds and roots and fruit. The stealers of honey, the grazers of the seas. And finally, the apex carnivores, the murderers, bloody in fang and claw. Topped by Homo sapiens, the only predator on the planet that straightens its teeth with brackets, wire, and glue.
Our genetic forebears weathered plagues, droughts, and famine. They fought and ate with their hands. Our bodies are still made to be flexed and worked. We have Achilles tendons—and thus a long-legged, springy step—though our closest primate relatives, chimps, do not. For two million years we chased down antelopes without the benefit of Nike or Adidas. Our bodies are still capable of traveling shockingly long distances, not in planes or in cars but on foot. We evolved to take a beating.
Although we’re not the strongest or the fastest creatures on Earth, we are capable of incredible feats of relentless persistence. Humans have lived normal lives in extreme environments in nearly every corner of the world. The people of the Kalahari live in a place so dry and hot it has no lakes or running streams for several months of the year. The Inuit thrived in the High Arctic for generations without electricity, petroleum, or even smelted metal at temperatures that plunge to 40 degrees below freezing. In their darkest months they have no sun at all to guide their way, only polar twilight.
At the same time, we’re lazy. We’ll eat the cheesecake instead of the spinach salad. We’ll take the elevator before climbing the stairs. It is possible to live in our modern world without ever breaking a sweat. We suffer for it, since an estimated 1.5 billion people in the world are now overweight, an epidemic whose numbers have exceeded those of global hunger. Perhaps it’s not entirely our fault. Cravings for delectable fats and for the sedentary life are the legacy of our hominid ancestors. For most of our prehistory, humans lived dangerously on the razor edge of nourishment and starvation. Eating involved a chase and a fight to the death. Or endurance contests of picking and gathering. Food had to be prized open or dug out from the ground. Or it hung high up on the end of a brittle branch. There were other animals to be outwitted who wanted these nutrients, too. No sweet, fatty substance came without exacting a toll nearly equal to its caloric reward.
In the modern world planting trees makes no sense at all. It shouldn’t make us happy. And yet we were born with the tools at the end of our arms that are perfectly attuned to the task. Eyebrows catch our sweat before it runs down into our eyes. We can bend over two thousand times a day without complaint. We can lift and carry, toil and dig, from dawn to sunset after virtually no physical training at all.
Perhaps we feel something deep in our fibers that no one else seems to anymore. Our job isn’t extreme or masochistic or backbreaking. It’s not even all that hard. Actually, it’s exquisitely normal
. Our sore muscles are merely the equipment dusting itself off, exerting itself as it has done since naked apes picked themselves up off their forelimbs and began walking on two legs. We can’t help but feel we were made for fresh air and long hours of movement. For manual labor, whose simple rhythms match those of the breath and the fleshy lub-dub of the heart.
But how can we say for sure? We’re not scientists or doctors. Our skills seem obsolete. Some of us never even graduated from high school. In just a few short months the planting season will be over. We’ll head back indoors for the winter. And outside, beyond the windows, there will be that longed-for cold, that hunger we used to know.
PLANTING TREES is the opposite of instant gratification, since you must wait for each little sapling to show its signs. There are no guarantees against failure. All over the world the task is basically the same. From eucalypts in Brazil to the cedars in British Columbia to the teak plantations of Southeast Asia. There is something very old about the ritual, some kind of penance in the genuflection.
We have imbued trees with our metaphors. A planted tree symbolizes the wishful try. And new beginnings, since we plant a seedling when a baby comes into the world. Also when someone leaves it, so we have something lasting to remember the person by. It’s a gesture of repair and good intentions. We sit in leafy shade when we need to pause, to meditate, or to wait for the storm to pass over. We plant trees to soothe our guilt when we fly in jumbo jetliners. Planting trees can be very sentimental.
Eating Dirt Page 19