Eating Dirt

by Charlotte Gill

  Back in camp, we had miles upon miles of forest to explore, but we stayed within twenty feet of the clearing. Nobody cared to penetrate the deep of it, where the woods grew dark and the breeze no longer penetrated. We pitched our tents as sailors swim at sea, never too far from the ship. At night, after the generator ran down, it was the kind of place that made you think of winter and loneliness, even at the height of summer. In the icy dark, when the temperatures dropped so low the wind could crack a face, the loggers came for the cutting and hauling.

  We were so far north that the sun dipped in the middle of the night without ever descending completely. It dipped just under the horizon, a forever-twilight, moving from west back to east. Scalloped clouds drifted over milky sprinklings of stars. They weren’t so much bright as everywhere, close and yet a million light-years away. Aurora borealis sparked across the sky so frequently that it became unremarkable. During the day, the bush hummed with mitosis and reproduction. It was louder than us, like the distant roar of a superhighway.

  On our days off there was nowhere to go, nowhere to swim in the heat. We lay down in the creek beds and let the water gush over our naked shoulders. We slathered ourselves in clayey mud and then crawled out like swamp creatures. We watched ourselves dry out and crack. We breathed clouds of particulates, pollen, insects, the dust of a billion things growing and dying and disintegrating back down into the earth.

  If we were lucky, a breeze blew through, combing the trees. I liked to look up and watch them sway. They moved separately and in tandem, like people leaning their heads together to talk at a noisy party. They were old, survivor trees. I could wrap my hands around many of the trunks. Examining the stumps, I found growth rings so tight they were no thicker than paper. I didn’t know why anybody would take the trouble to roll out here to hack them down. Maybe the land, despite its wild hackles, was so flat it practically begged to be rolled over.

  We planted trees until the clear-cut felt like our home turf, until we’d filled it up completely with our footsteps and our legions of orphan trees. Finally, we reached the timberline at the far side. When its shadows fell across my face it felt as if I’d planted right to the brink of some dense, monumental thing. It occurred to me that this place under my feet was neither particularly north nor especially empty. The timberline was merely the southern margin of a wilderness so big it felt galactic to stand at the edge of it. It was the very same forest in which I’d learned to plant trees—three provinces and a few thousand miles away.

  OUR TIME aboard the Lasqueti Daughters is almost over. As spring turns the corner it feels as if the bush has kicked into high-powered production, as if it should be left alone, given privacy, to do its work. During these last weeks in the rainforest, Adam and Brian write up our crew lists on a portable whiteboard every day, as they have done for morning meetings since our season began in February. Now, as the days tick down, they draw with their dry-erase markers a thermometer of the sort charity campaigns use to show off the growth of their donations. This scale marks out our cumulative tree tally in increments of ten thousand trees. Once our red line hits the top, we’ll be finished here in these backwoods. How many days will it take? We make guesses and wagers. We feel like bettors in a sports pool, only we’re both the team and the gamblers.

  Soon, we’ll be free of the big slash and the Pacific slopes. We will leave here in search of summer diversions. Many of us will head off to fresh jobs and new crews. And when that stage is done, around Labor Day, some will return for one last tour on the coast with deep farmer’s tans and our car trunks heavy with objets trouvé: moose antlers and interesting rocks and feathers collected from our cut-block travels. Hopefully we’ll still be sane, because after one hundred days of full-throttle reforestation, we can come a little unmoored, a tad sunbaked about the brain.

  By September those who’ve planted their way through three seasons will have tired of the bugs, the heat, and the unforgiving sun brought on by the North Pacific high, whose pressure system forces storms northward. Although the rest of the country has been camping and waterskiing and enjoying the heat, for tree planters the chilly months can’t come fast enough.

  Finally the mornings come coolly. The evenings arrive earlier and earlier by the day. The ground is dry and hard, shrunken like a cotton blanket gone around one too many times in the dryer. We ram our shovels down and cut it open. It puffs out dust and dried spores. Or we hit knobs of stubborn, toughened roots. The fireweed puffs out its downy cotton, which lets loose when we brush through. It clings to our sweat. After bashing around in the fields we look glued and feathered. The hornets are angry, and when we step even slightly in the wrong direction, they send out the Luftwaffe for attack. The conifers have set their buds—they’ll grow from these points next year.

  The blackberries ripen in the cut blocks. Our shirts are polka-dotted with purple juice, as if we had accidents with red wine. Our part of the world offers no starchy, luscious fruit. Native sweetness comes in the form of berries. The fields are a parade of tiny offerings, ripening one species after the other. Salmon, thimble, huckle, blue, salal, and black. As the seasons roll along the berries deepen in color from pale yellow to indigo. As with fireworks, nature saves the sweetest and the best for the end. A merciful touch, since they feed the animals who must fatten up before the coming of winter.

  In autumn, our work takes us up to the saddles, the ridges, and the mountaintops, all the snow-mantled sites of March and April. At subalpine elevations, we encounter life-forms that thrive in penthouse locales—marmots, squirrels, and birds who spend the late season high up, far out on the limb. Tough, minuscule blooms muscle up from cracks in the rocks. Some of these flowers grow wild nowhere else on Earth, and they’re in color for just a short wink in a year. Crusty lichens plaster the rocks—they’ve learned to suck moisture out of the air. Carpets of moss bristle with sporophytes, tiny reproductive stalks that look like miniature snakes charmed out of their baskets. There are spiny plants that look not like succulent rainforest vegetation but like blackened AstroTurf, like weeds that eke out a living in the desert. It’s not so far from the truth, for these are exposed, fragile ecosystems. Summer comes late and winter returns early, and for much of the year, water is elusive or frozen. The fact that trees grow here is a small miracle. And even more miraculous is the sheer tenacity of the trees that might struggle to grow back.

  The red cedar and the western hemlock of the valley bottoms give way to their hardier counterparts, mountain hemlock and yellow cedar. Yellow cedar grows widely on the coast, but seldom in thick concentrations. It nestles between other species or in tight groves in northern coastal rainforests, and for this reason it’s also called Alaska cedar. It has flat, bluish foliage that grows in finer, lacier arrays than its red relative. A cut block with fresh yellow cedar stumps has a peppery, starchy smell. When these trees fall, they leave behind red-purple bark and splinters of yellow inner flesh.

  Yellow cedar is a member of the cypress family. It’s a hardy, admirable species. It grows in places others wouldn’t dare, where snows are heavy or the soils rocky. Yellow cedars that find a home on high crags are sometimes so windblown and storm-thrashed that they become trained by the elements to crouch along the ground. Sometimes they sprout in pockets of dirt sandwiched between boulders. They may spend their whole lives hanging on for dear life. Yellow cedars are not prolific reproducers. They build with stubborn slowness, and their growth rings are tight and thin. But when they germinate in sheltered, fertile bowls, they can lift to magisterial heights.

  Yellow cedar is my favorite kind of tree to plant. A load of yellow cedar will bully aside any other species in a set of planting bags. I can bash them around, and the roots never crumble. They aren’t pretty, but a row of freshly planted yellow cedars looks satisfyingly upright and vigorous. They have fabulously obscene foliage, and I can spot them from twenty paces. When they are young, they’re the green of a highlighter pen, as if nature was feeling flashy. And when I carry yellow
cedar in my tree-planting bags, I’m usually someplace exotic and steep. There is typically a good breeze and an excellent vista. And if I’m at the top of a mountain and not trudging through snow, it means the end of tree-planting season is near.

  Late one autumn afternoon we might look up and see geese flapping south in honking chevrons. Or we’ll wake up to a morning that’s as crisp as a finger snap. All at once, the balm of summer is over. An afternoon storm might close over. We’ll yank out our rain gear from the very bottom of our backpacks, and when we shove our arms into the sleeves, foreign tree needles fall out of the folds. Shreds of dried moss and insect carcasses imported from other clear-cuts, hundreds of miles away. There is that smell again, our old friend, the punk of rain and rot, the aroma of the winter monsoons. Not an ending, but another kind of beginning, since our year is not a straight line of calendar days but a circle.

  Green fades to oat-straw yellow. All is seedy and weedy and crackling. The plants have grown high, and reproduced. Now they wither and crust around the edges. Rodents burrow. They store caches of seeds they will soon forget. Maybe one day these will germinate—in this way, they too are tree planters. The summer rush is over, and the creatures of the forest have switched to reserve mode to make the best of what moisture is left. They hang out waiting for the rain to fall so that everyone might drink again. Nature has done its big job. Like a ball thrown up in the air, all has risen, crested, and begun its arc back down into earth. After many years spent outside we come to see this—the parabola—as the contour of life itself. It’s the path the sun takes across the sky. The shape of a story. Ours included. Beginning, middle, and end.

  Soon thoughts will turn to the off-season. Some of us will drive straight to the city, buy an airline ticket, and hop a plane to some international destination. Some will collect unemployment insurance, kick back in front of a wood stove, twist off a beer cap, and drink the winter away. Some will crack out paintbrushes and musical instruments. Adam and Brian will go home to their families.

  By the time the autumn rolls around the natural world has fulfilled its promise, which is to grow, build, and propagate. Every species delivers its genetic legacy in the form of offspring, assuring a place in the future. At the end of our season, what has our purpose been? What about this broad seedling quilt we had a hand in making? These fledgling plantations will give us oxygen, in theory anyway. If all goes well, they’ll draw carbon from the atmosphere. These infant organisms might live until the end of their crop rotation—around eighty years, as long as a human life. Or perhaps by some fluke or oversight, they’ll be left to grow out their long natural lives. Some may live until the year 3000. In that time animals and languages will pass into extinction. The map of the world will be completely reinvented.

  Perhaps a thousand years from now, some of our trees may approach old age. They’ll begin to lose their needles. They may drop the last of their cones. Perhaps one might succumb to rot or infection until sap no longer flows. Over decades, its trunk will molder and soften. The tree will be dead but still full of life, since birds and insects will hollow the wood until it resembles swiss cheese. It will become a snag, a woodland condo for creatures small and smaller. This tree will eventually topple, so rotten in its roots that the wind may push it over. Different creatures will take up residence in the log, all the wet-skinned ground-dwellers, like salamanders and frogs, which need a summer refuge from the hot sun. Nest-dwelling rodents will tunnel inside and find shelter from the winter cold. Seeds might flutter down on the rotting bark and germinate, and our old tree will nurse new sprouts. Then eventually, perhaps after a century or more, this deadfall will melt into the earth, its stringy, decomposed fibers nearly unrecognizable as the xylem and phloem they once were.

  DOES PLANTING trees work? Can it fulfill its many promises? It’s a question of waiting around for a few hundred years to find out, since that is the basic difference between an ancient forest and a razed field studded with tender seedlings. Time. A primeval woodland is time incarnate. Sunlight made solid. Carbon turned to wood, molecules into cells. An old-growth tree needs centuries to build that bulk, which is why a natural forest stores more carbon than an engineered one. Trees run on cycles that span several human generations. They live in epic chronologies.

  Until we learn how to fold up the centuries or to mimic photosynthesis there’s no substitute for patience. Human hands can replace the trees but not necessarily the forest. Tree planting sets the stage, perhaps hastening a revival, but still we must wait. For something happens underneath an established canopy that we can neither replicate nor control. An ancient forest is a life-giving environment, like a coral reef or a wetland, where creatures flock to find shelter and nourishment. It’s a biome defined by relationships—complexly layered, synergistic webs containing millions of organisms for every acre of space. How does everyone get along? Inside the apparent chaos is a precise and intricate order. Every plant, animal, and microorganism submits to a bio-evolutionary compact that equalizes rates of birth and death, immigration, and the evolution of old species into new ones. Countless beings dovetail together into limited space while sharing finite resources. This is biodiversity. A richness of community that, like any human neighborhood, is also deepened with time.

  Scientists say we do ourselves a great disservice when we think of forests as lumber in waiting. In part, because we don’t fully understand what we’re extracting when we cut down the trees, especially in an old-growth forest. The boreal, for example, has long been considered an environment of low species diversity, characterized by vast swathes of monotonous, singletree ecosystems. It’s now believed that we’ve been looking in the wrong place for biodiversity all along. Nobody knows the entirety of creatures that live in northern, boreal soil. Many thousands of species of soil fauna are thought to exist that have not yet been discovered, let alone studied.

  Mysteries exist not just underfoot but overhead as well. High in the canopy of the old forests of California and Oregon lives the red tree vole. A nocturnal rodent that builds its nests on tree branches a hundred feet in the air. This mouselike creature spends its entire lifetime in just one tree and never descends to the ground. It eats Douglas-fir needles exclusively. Its only water source is rain licked from the foliage. Generations of voles may live for centuries in a mature Douglas-fir. Although they’re only six inches long, these rodents are a keystone species, a vital food source for martens, fishers, and endangered birds of prey. Beyond this not much more is known, since they are painfully shy animals. Hard to find—in the dark, halfway to the sky—and even harder to study.

  Primary forests also moderate climate in ways that haven’t been fully explored. Trees release water vapor through their foliage—evapotranspiration. In ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest an acre of canopy trees breathes out enough water to fill a swimming pool every year. The leaves release plant compounds, airborne hydrocarbons, that stick to water molecules in the atmosphere, thereby seeding the clouds. These clouds travel on the wind to drier regions in South America, delivering rain. They also moisten the Atlantic trade winds, influencing rainfall patterns as far afield as the corn belt in the American Midwest. Rainforests act like watering cans, soaking up heavy precipitation and redistributing it elsewhere.

  It’s always been thought that rainforests are the product of heavy precipitation. But a radical new hypothesis suggests that the converse may be true. According to this theory, mature, intact rainforests act like meteorological pumps, condensing water vapor from the air. A drop in local atmospheric pressure ensues. The rainforest, in turn, sucks in air and moisture from adjacent areas, in effect creating wind. This theory has not been fully studied or proven. But if it’s true, then rainforests aren’t just the beneficiaries of weather but also the makers of it. Climate is determined not just by convection currents and temperature shifts, but by living green processes, too. Thus, the consequences of sweeping deforestation might be much more far-reaching than anticipated.

  Somew
here along the line we’ve come to believe that a tree is a just tree and that all forests must be equal. But a plantation does not necessarily a forest make. To begin with, tree seeds don’t spread themselves like windblown spores or dandelion fluff, sailing over infinite distances. When a cone falls, it lands close to its parent, never too far from the canopy. Here it germinates under the cover of older, foster trees, protected from heat, wind, and snow. As the tree matures it needs others of its kind—competition—to grow up straight and tall, to reach toward the light. Tree communities were never designed to arise from bare earth. In this sense a forest is a prerequisite for itself.

  Second-growth, tree farms, managed forests, plantations—that’s what cut blocks are called once the planters have traveled through. As if the trees were widgets and forests could be thrown up as uniformly as subdivisions or coffee shop franchises. Trees are habitat providers and soil builders. They sponge up moisture and release it slowly. They’re CO2 -scrubbing, living humidifiers. In this sense forests are the planet’s great moderators. They soften the elements. We plant trees with high hopes, if not for a future timber supply, then for the natural perks—also known as “environmental services.”

  Trees provide carbon credits and environmental benefits, but only as long as they’re alive. Silviculture is an imperfect discipline, and there are so many ways a tree can perish. Of root-rot plagues and insect infestations. From blight and mistletoe. Floods and landslides and long, hard winters. Fire and drought and climate change. Forests are just as susceptible to mortality as any human being, but when they die they become a liability. Carbon traffic begins to flow in the wrong direction. Its sequestered stores dumped into the biosphere by way of decomposition and fire.