Eating Dirt

by Charlotte Gill

  Trees are community beings. They shelter one another from wind and weather. They communicate among themselves by secreting airborne chemicals. Underground, they hang onto each other with intertwined roots. A lone tree is almost certainly toppled in a big storm, but when a stiff wind blows through a clustered grove, they sway and bend together. Their roots move up and down in the soil, squeezing water through the subterranean passageways like a broad, pumping heart. The canopy combs fog and catches rain from clouds. In winter, snow gathers between the trunks, so that it may trickle out into the land during summer. Trees are nature’s air conditioner. They calm the wind. It’s why farmers plant them in rows at the edge of a field, to stop the dirt from sifting away. And as everyone knows but nobody can prove, where trees grow, the rain follows.

  Plants possess a magic we lack. They spin matter out of air and light, photons into food and into living, breathing tissue. We talk to our Boston ferns and our African violets. We plant trees along the boulevards. We like to have them around us, benignly exhaling oxygen. Maybe we’re a little envious. Kingdom Plantae, after all, is the reason we eat and breathe. Petroleum, too, is dinosaur vegetation, centuries of sunlight trapped deep in the earth’s Carboniferous wafers like butterflies preserved between the pages of a book. And so we even owe our cars to the jungles of antiquity.

  Seventeenth-century botanist Guy de La Brosse grew plants in sterile soil and distilled water. They died. He deduced some invisible force was at work in the dirt, some magical unseen element that caused life to root down and to grow up with unswerving tenacity. He called it manna. A tightly wrapped bundle of trees will try to grow when tossed out into a rocky ditch. Even then, left to dry out and die, the stalks will turn straight toward the sky. Their roots will push down in the opposite direction, fingering around for home. Trees are clever, as any plumber will tell you. Their roots strangle backyard pipes. They prize their way into weeping tiles as if they know there is water inside.

  Trees move at a terrifically slow pace, and at the same time they have accumulated more biomass than any other organism in the world. They are some of nature’s most elegant engineering. As are we. We’re creatures of the sun, too, in ways we are only just coming to understand. And we’re builders. When wood, rock, and even steel are bashed and weathered, when they reach the limits of strength and hardness, their surfaces wear down. When we’re chafed and exerted we don’t wear down or wear out. We grow a callus or a muscle. When we’ve strained so hard we tear our most delicate fibers, by some biochemical feat we knit back together, not broken but stronger. Who can say they know for sure the giver of these gifts of adaptation?

  {

  9 }

  SUNSET

  AS SUMMER APPROACHES, the sky fills with buzzing and flapping—bees and birds, dragonflies that swoop and clack like sticks knocked together. Hummingbirds dive-bomb our heads as they buzz out their taunting calls. They mock our clumsy bones, our pitiful wingless existence.

  In a clutch of weeks it will be the first day of summer, the shortest sleep of the year. The trees, triggered by just the right temperatures and just the right photoperiods, let rip. Their buds erupt into starbursts of tender needles. Conifers grow vertically from just one spot, the tip of the leader branch, which bolts skyward before it sprouts a crown of lateral branches. In good growing conditions a tree can shoot up a few feet in one summer; in bad years, scarcely an inch.

  The spring plant in the rainforest must soon come to an end. Our seedlings need time to flush and grow, to root down before the onset of another winter. Our crew will disband. We’ll spread out in twenty directions, moving on to inland parts that are just now pulling back their snow covers. We trade cedar and fir for their interior and sub-boreal cousins, ponderosa pine and black spruce. We’ll live in tents for the hot months, in bush camps instead of motels. There will be cooks to serve us salads and enchiladas baked in lava flows of melted cheese. There will be bonfires and pretty girls—all the jubilations of summer camp with a little work thrown in on the side. We’ll join the hordes of university students who flood the cut blocks each year once their final exams have been inked. Which is exactly how many of us started this job, once upon a time. It will feel like a welcome change, indeed like a party, because partying is exactly what nature is doing. Rutting and molting, burgeoning and ripening, throwing up its arms in euphoric celebration, a mambo on the grave of winter.

  Hunter-gatherers of old tracked the movements of food animals, the herds or the flocks or the schools of fish. Millions of people still live this way. Planters of trees are also peripatetic creatures, though our quarry is just a paycheck. Come July, we travel in cars and trucks in search of an ever-unfolding spring. I’ve spent all the summers of my adulthood among the stumps, washing out to the clear-cuts with the rest of the tree-planting army. In my memory these months compile into thousands of bag-ups, and the summers merge into one long season, cut block after cut block, heat waves interrupted by winterludes. Each spring I packed my car with camping gear, sleeping bags, and spare tires, and I ventured outdoors, until the time came to head back inside in the autumn. Some years I lived nowhere. Home came with me in my Volvo station wagon, as a turtle carries its shell. Even now I don’t kayak or rock-climb or visit the cottage. Summer has always meant work to me.

  I planted trees at the edge of the northern prairie, in the neighborhoods of pump jacks and gas wells. I planted in tall grass and clay, which after heavy rains turned to liquid gumbo, a substance so slippery you could glide a truck off the road without even turning the wheels. I planted the remnants of old forest fires, working among scorched trunks that covered the hills like blackened matchsticks.

  I planted trees on northern plateaus where the land rose and dipped in swells of brown and rust. I passed through whole forests turned brassy by the mountain pine beetle, an insect that travels in biblical clouds like black sesame seeds tossed up in the air. A plague that has killed off a nation-sized forest, since the winters have grown too warm, with climate change, to kill the little insect. If you stood near the right clump of pine, you could hear them chewing. A sound, people said, like Rice Krispies popping in milk. A smell like inferno waiting to happen.

  I toiled on dry hills overlooking the American border. The other side looked exactly the same in its geographical features, and yet here worked our Mexican counterparts, sweating it out with antiquated mattocks, for less than peanuts. Peanut shells. I planted cuts for the second and third times, where all the trees had been killed by bud worms or weevils or the roots had been infected with toxic fungi. Part of the job of refreshing these cut blocks involved pushing the old, dead trees to the ground so they wouldn’t shade the new seedlings. Sometimes the roots were so rotten I toppled trees without even needing to lean into my hand. I replanted old clear-cuts where the seedlings had been trampled by cattle. All those years of replanting and trampling and replanting all over again. Sometimes I ran into cows in the field with their beamy ribcages, the grass clipped short as a putting green by their teeth. For a while I was sure I could make a job just replanting the tree farms that had died.

  I planted trees on bilingually intermingled crews. Some people spoke no English and others spoke no French, and yet somehow we made our feelings known. I learned the curse words of the Québécois, which seemed to come at the end of sentences, like amen. In the evenings we built campfires. We sat cross-legged on flattened beer boxes with our hands put out to the heat. People brought out instruments from their glove compartments and their backpacks. Recorders, piccolos, bodhran, guitars, harmonicas, and instruments made of nothing more than gourd and wire. We listened to it dribbling out from cassette tapes, and then CDs, and as time passed, MP3s. It leaked from headphones. We walked to the showers humming. People sang on the block. There were notes in the air, always. That’s how I knew that at the end of the world, we’d have music to keep us company.

  Wherever I went, no matter how I traveled, I saw others of my kind in transit. Silvicultural workers crisscro
ssed the highways to get to their next destinations. I caught sight of their trucks mounted with fiberglass insulation boxes. I saw them on the ferries and hitchhiking on the roadsides. They were the ones in the beat-up cars with equipment piled up in the back seats. Foam mattresses and Silvicool sacs and guitars. I saw them loping down sidewalks with their shovels strapped to their backpacks. They were everywhere you’d find chain saws and feller-bunchers, wildfires, tree disease, and unkillable pestilent insects. Everywhere needed trees.

  I found jobs near Prince George, the tree-planter gulag of Canada. A township in the middle of what had once been airy, undulating pineries. The local mascot was Mr. PeeGee, an effigy of a log-man wearing a hard hat. His head, I’d been told, was crafted from a septic tank. No matter where I walked, the town smelled like pulp-mill emissions, like brimstone. I didn’t mind Prince George. At least it didn’t hide what it was.

  I planted trees in foothills and on high plateaus. Places seldom visited by tourists, by any people at all. I came to know the literal meaning of the word panorama—since clear-cuts made for unbroken views at once staggeringly beautiful and brazenly shorn. Some of these cut blocks were prehistoric upheaval sites, the remains of splendiferous tectonic clashes. Wafers of the earth’s crust piled up in the distance, land rumpling like ice floes in a jam. The mountains sheared upward, baring the petrified sediment of former seas. I bashed open stones, and they came apart like clamshells, split into etchings of prehistoric marine worms. Snowflakes spiraled out of a blue sky. The creeks were a bright azure, cloudy with rock flour. The air was cold and dry, and it was electrifying just to breathe.

  So rocky, I complained to my foreman.

  He was a small, middle-aged man with a thick moustache. He wore the same pair of jeans every day. He smoked John Player Specials, which was the brand you chose when you planned to puff yourself into the grave.

  Not rocky, he clarified. Just stony.

  The price, at first, seemed incredible. A whole thirteen cents per tree. But alas, it was complicated. The soil lay hidden underneath moss, bark, and old forest floor, and it took most of this thirteen cents to free it from its coverings. This had to be done with a scalping procedure performed with the shovel blade. I swung my shovel high. I dug and scraped, like dogs dig holes in lawns. Once, I’d heard tree planting referred to as backbreaking and thought it was some kind of metaphor. Screefing, they called it. I didn’t know the man who’d invented this task, but I knew he’d never planned to do the work himself.

  Sometimes I went to bed without eating dinner, without even bothering to shower. I woke up in the morning with hunger knocking at my ribs. My body felt wooden, dried in a kiln overnight. It was a struggle just to pull my socks on. This was illuminating, in a way. A taste of what it might feel like to be old.

  In these northern realms, nearly everyone on the crew had been recruited from parts of Canada too distant to know what they were getting into. A herd of robust prairie boys, blond and Christian. They grew excited with their knives and forks when the big hunks of meat emerged from the kitchen at dinnertime. There were east-coasters, Maritimers, whose dads had been lobstermen and brewery workers. They were by far the rowdiest, as if the distance they’d traveled had something to do with the force of their celebrations. They stuck together. I thought of them traveling as one, swinging from the rigging of a pirate ship across a raucous sea.

  It’s a bad year, said our bosses. Fewer trees, more of you.

  That’s why the prices had plummeted. They always said that. Work for less or don’t work at all. They paid us according to complicated formulas. When our paychecks arrived we stood around tugging on our ears and scratching our scalps, comparing stubs. The accounting got so creative sometimes it ate away half our wages. Our foremen made a cut of our earnings, as deck hands net a portion of a fisherman’s catch. They hired men as exclusively as possible, because men could be relied on to be competitive and hard earning. The result was a camp of mostly males, which led to a culture of furious contagion. Young men working like human pile drivers just to outdo each other. Even the women got caught up in work fever. Most of us were single. Unattached to places, people, and rules, and sometimes even to principled ideas.

  In all that time I learned to think planting trees was wholesome and good, as long as you admired it from a distance. Trees made air. They sponged up the rains, and their roots held onto the dirt. From a distance it was the Mother Teresa of summer jobs. At the same time planting trees was a complicated gesture, a two-faced business. The locals seemed to know the difference. So did the loggers and the small-town residents whose view was our clear-cuts, who opened their windows to sulfurous pulp-mill fumes, though their noses had long since learned not to register it. They treated us like shoplifters and vandals and rowdy freeloaders, which sometimes, it must be said, we were. Unlike them we were temporary and transient. We didn’t have to live on the shorn ridges or the pine-beetled plains. And we got paid, sometimes handsomely, by the very same companies who supplied the town wages, the mortgages, the taxes, and the car payments. By the very same business that cut the trees down, which canceled the altruism right out of the equation.

  WHEN AUGUST rolled around the summers turned scorching. The work dried up, just like the water in the creeks. And so the tree planters edged out in search of further employment, as far north as you could go before tumbling over the border into Alaska, Yukon, or the Northwest Territories.

  In the North, you could drive for hours between gas stations. The roadside ditches brimmed with coffee-toned water. Organic fluff blew around in the wind, like summer snow. What the woods lacked in height they made up for in breadth. They seemed to be made of just a few ingredients. Water, sphagnum moss, trembling aspen, but mostly spruce, which is what we planted, almost exclusively. The land felt flat and endless and old as rock, as if mastodons might come crashing out of the underbrush. If you slipped into the bush and wandered in the wrong direction, you might turn in circles for days.

  No way out but even fewer ways in. Up here, the land was so spongy and saturated during the warm months it was difficult to tell where terra firma ended and water began. The forest sprouted up out of muskeg—a soup of black muck topped by rafts of sphagnum moss. In many places the ground was so liquid and ever shifting that the only vehicular access was down ice tracks in the winter. Or along the seismic lines—long, treeless corridors used by the petroleum industry for their pre-drilling explorations. Camps were air-lifted into place, piece by piece, mess tents and cook stoves and all-terrain vehicles. These contracts began with helicopters, which might dip down by a random field or a strip of lonely road and pick up a major appliance in a cargo sling. You could watch a refrigerator levitate and disappear into the forests waiting beyond—a familiar thing in the wrong place, like a car floating down a river.

  Until eventually, when no infrastructural pieces remained, the people became the cargo. I scurried to the helicopter with my duffel bags and shovel. I ducked my head under the whif-fling blades, the sunlight strobing in my eyes, not knowing much about where I might be headed. Only that I’d call it home for as many weeks as it took to get the job done. I climbed in and buckled up, and the helicopter lifted over spiky green treetops. I looked down at orange-rimmed swamps with watery centers. They looked miniature, like puddles glistening with gasoline rainbows. Boreal forest stretched out in all directions, seemingly without end, like the pelt of an enormous sleeping monster.

  The trees broke, and we hovered above a clear-cut so big I had to squint to see the edges. From the air it looked like a small prairie. The helicopter set down, and I got out with a group of my co-workers. The helicopter engine whined an octave higher and kicked up a blast radius of dust. We crouched and watched the chopper rise into the sky, taking with it our last chance for escape. The motor drained away. The sound was replaced by the buzz of a million mosquitoes, singing for our hot, red blood.

  We lived on the edge of our worksite, like miners camped at the lip of a crater. We
erected our dome tents in the leggy spruce that fringed the clear-cut. The forest floor was a timeless, mossy shag. When I stepped into it I sank to the ankles. I wondered how long it had taken for this living carpet to grow, how long before we killed it with our weight. It would take two days on foot to get to the nearest telephone, flush toilet, and electrical outlet, assuming you set off in the right direction.

  We had no trucks, only an ATV. And so the crew walked to work like Snow White’s dwarves in a line, all of us trudging through mud, woody chaff, tall grass, red paintbrush, and fireweed in bloom. We shared footsteps, like people do in snow. When we arrived at our daily patch of the clear-cut, we filled our bags with spruce. We put ourselves to work in the coiling trenches like needles set down in vinyl grooves. We bent over at the start of our days and didn’t stand up straight again until it was over. When I glanced back at my lines I could see the little trees leaning to one side or another. I knew it didn’t matter. No company forester would venture all the way out here just to get down on his hands and knees to scrutinize my handiwork. So I kept on nailing them in with bleary abandon, scarcely wondering if they’d survive the winter.

  The afternoons cooked. The sun baked our necks and shoulders. It seemed cruel that a place so savagely cold in winter could get so hot in summer. As if the land knew no middle ground, only extremes. The heat grew boggy and moist. Salt dusted our cheekbones. Our lips turned dry and white. Always the sweat ran, down the spine, through my scalp and down my cheeks. Every time I bent over it dripped off the tip of my nose. There was an insect for every hour of the day, as if they’d arranged their shifts. I spent a lot of time slapping myself across the face.

  We carried our drinking water with us. If we ran out we could take our chances slurping out of a creek—if we could find one that ran clear. Mostly we went thirsty. In the distance I saw one tree left standing in the entire clear-cut, like a single point of stubble missed by a razor. It was a skinny thing with lopsided foliage waving in the air. In a few weeks we’d plant our way across the cut block and make it to that tree. Hundreds of dirty, sweaty man-hours would tick by before then, but at least there’d be something to mark the days. Some sign of progress in a cut block as featureless as a sand dune, where it seemed we could plant forever without making headway.