Eating Dirt

by Charlotte Gill

  It takes several years for a new forest to become a carbon sink. Planting trees in the Northern Hemisphere may be less beneficial than common sense suggests, perhaps even detrimental. A green canopy absorbs more heat than the open land it replaces, producing a net warming effect. We can plant too many of the same kinds of trees and wind up with a monoculture plantation, reducing habitat and increasing susceptibility to disease. We can sow exotic seeds in the wrong place, never knowing what kind of invasive, ineradicable monster we’re creating. Not to mention operator failure. There are as many different ways to plant a tree as there are human moods or thoughts rattling around in one’s brain. There are greedy trees and lazy trees and trees planted in fury or resignation.

  There’s no difference between old-growth and a forest made by hand once a few centuries have gone by. Primordial forests are not necessarily all that old, and neither are they all that virgin, much of the time. They’ve been killed off, over the planet’s long history, and they’ve recovered. Strictly speaking, the earth doesn’t care if the trees come and go. But perhaps, in the future, we will. There are more of us than ever before, and a few billion more to come. As the planet warms, we may come to see clear-cuts as an obsolete extravagance. We may wish we’d looked at forests in a different way. Worth more standing than they are lying down, better off as trees than as logs.

  PLANTING TREES, they say, is a young person’s punishment. But even that isn’t really quite right, because you can be a grandfather and still do the work. Indeed you might be a tree planter approaching senior citizenship and be able to keep up with the young bucks. You can be ninety-nine pounds and scarcely five feet tall and perform just as well as a football player. You can be a man or a woman; it makes no difference. Such are the ingenuities of the human body, which have as much to do with our brains as with our musculature.

  Alas, no one can be a tree planter forever. Everyone must give it up. In fact every minute of the workday provides at least a few good reasons to hang up one’s shovel. If none of the sensible factors are discouraging enough, surely our bodies will retire us one day. Some of us will burn our tatty boots in the last of the season’s bonfires. Or we’ll fling them unceremoniously into the cut block, one at a time, for some surveyor or logger or tree planter of the future to find.

  After we quit we’ll never stop wondering what it meant to the world, if anything at all, these little patches we made, our hectare groves that dot the countryside. In one hundred years there will be no sign of our crew, perhaps not even a trace of anything we made or did or built in our lives except perhaps our children’s children. And yet, more seedlings have been planted in the province of British Columbia than there are people living on earth. It would take one person many lifetimes—more than one thousand years of walking—to touch a hand to every tree trunk.

  Forests for the Future. Forests Forever, as the slogans and the T-shirts say. Not a salve or a fix for the planet, not exactly. We gave the trees some small purchase in the world, and they gave us the same in return.

  {

  10 }

  EXIT LINES

  AS THE SOLSTICE approaches, the Lasqueti Daughters unties from her moorings. We retrace our watery footsteps, commencing our retreat toward civilization. We make but one more stop, dropping anchor along the edges of Seymour’s main navigational channel. The water is placid. Seals thrash about near the shore. We see the occasional yacht motoring past, flapping the American flag.

  We catch sight of another tree-planting crew in their boat, anchored on the other side of the inlet. We inspect them from afar with Skipper Peter’s binoculars. We know this boat. We’ve seen the crew members lurking around on the wharves in Port McNeill. They steam back to town whenever their outlands are buried in snow. We’ve seen them surfing the Internet at The Haida-Way, caught them browsing the bulletin boards at the Laundromat.

  Their boat is decrepit—at least it looks that way from a distance. We imagine a bunch of guys sleeping cheek by jowl in stacked berths, packed in as tightly as a submarine crew. Their boat has a moldy vinyl dodger, only ever half-zipped. They come out onto the deck carrying mugs and beer cans, wearing fleece pants and baggy sweaters. They look as if they haven’t seen razors or barber shears in months.

  There is only one woman aboard, the cook. She is a friend, we learn, of Keira’s. One night this cook motors over in a skiff to pay a friendly visit. She looks like one of us, but different, too. She’s wearing a bra, for starters. A ball cap, a baby doll T-shirt, and hiking boots. A pair of too-big sweatpants rolled up at the waistband and wet at the hems. She steps over the gunnels, strides into the galley, and leaps into Keira’s arms. They hug like long-lost sisters. This cook, when it’s time to return to her boat, takes one last look over her shoulder. A little forlornly, we think. Keira waves goodbye from the poop deck. Then she wipes her hands on the dishtowel tucked into her pants and heads back into the galley.

  Keira’s friend brought a note from our counterparts across the water. It was sent by a friend of K.T.’s. They are old buddies from Newfoundland, where they both grew up. They went to work together in their first years as tree planters. It was their escape from The Rock. They planted side by side nearly two decades ago.

  The women among us are firm in our agreement that no matter how bad it gets, we’d rather be here than over there. Damp, narrow bunks. Nearly no women. At least we have doors that close. Our men start to speculate, as soon as the cook is gone, about how much money the other crew might be making. They all want to know how much their fastest horse is earning. It’s the measure of something, of everything, we might say. There is talk of defection, jokes about the swim to the other side.

  Few crews ever travel this far back, as if no one else could be bothered. This isn’t the first time we’ve crossed paths with these familiar strangers across the water. We’ve seen their tree boxes piled up on our landings. Last year, we met them in a logging camp, a gang of men with work-worn smudges for eyes, pushing their plates toward the cookhouse steam trays. They went at the food as if they hadn’t eaten in days. Their eyes grazed the naked shoulders of the girls among us, the spaces between the straps of halter tops. They kept their heads down and went to work at their plates, shoveling with their forks in their fists. They had the look of people who did nothing but pound and slam, who bled themselves out in tree-planting combat, who smoked pot all night to dull the ache of their battered bodies. We bantered across the tables, but we didn’t intermingle. Like those vanishing clans who’d rather hold grudges than speak the last words of a dying tongue.

  LASTLY, ADAM tells me, there’s the matter of the cleanup back in Woods Lagoon. He sets his hand on my arm. I glance down at Adam’s wrist. He wears a dive watch with a heavy stainless face, an altimeter, and a numbered bezel, as if there were both high climbing and deep diving to do. I know I’ve been assigned the garbage patrol.

  Doug will go with you, he adds brightly.

  We’ll do this alone, a satellite crew of two. Julien will deliver us back down the channel in the skiff, which is printed with the name of the maker—aptly for Doug and me: Lifetimer.

  Before breakfast, Peter gives Julien a hasty tutorial on the operation and troubleshooting of the skiff. It’s an overcast morning, and the rain prattles lightly on the water. Doug and I kit up in our rain gear. We climb in, and Julien rips the cord on the outboard. The motor coughs. It takes more than a few smoky belches to get it to sing out into the morning.

  Oh boy, I say.

  I have done this dozens of times. Long, ridiculous bushwhacks on foot. Or in rowboats across scummy ponds. I’ve driven for hours to plant a handful of trees in a roadside, only to turn around and drive all the way back. I have commuted to work with fishing lodge crews, crammed in among pineapples, tiki torches, and six-foot plastic marlins. Game plans that can come to no good, that only highlight the daily absurdities of planting trees.

  Now Doug and Julien and I zip across the water, which is green and gently rippled. We backtrack
deeper into the inlet. The wind blasts our hair. My eyelashes flatten against my lids. It takes half an hour to return to Woods, and when we arrive we find it almost wholly depopulated. The big barge has gone. In its place floats a house, a cottage parked on a wooden deck with grass sprouting up through the planking.

  The camp caretakers live here now. They come out to greet us as we putter up to the dock. A woman shuffles out onto the deck wearing tight pink bicycle shorts and a voluminous T-shirt. She smokes a long cigarette, holding the blue cardboard pack in her palm. She tells us her name is Carol. She wears tinted contact lenses, and they remind me of those glass-eyed dolls with lids that fall open and closed, depending on which way you hold them. Carol’s husband joins us. His name is Darren. Carol is a smiley woman. We discover the farthest that Darren and Carol have ventured from the barge is about a hundred yards up the road. Mostly they hang out on the deck in Adirondack chairs, admiring what’s left of the scenery.

  We advise Darren and Carol of our plans for the day. We’ll travel up the main line, out onto one of the claim’s many dwindling spurs. We’ll be back by lunchtime, we promise, at the latest. And as soon as this sentence leaves my mouth I know they’re famous last words, though I can’t yet say precisely why. There are a thousand reasons to get snagged, hung up, and waylaid planting trees. There’s cake for dessert tonight, and chances are I’ll never get to taste it.

  What channel will you be on? asks Julien. Just in case.

  Oh, says Carol. We don’t have a radio.

  I glance at Doug. His eyebrows rise up on his forehead, and his lips gather over to one side. Doug’s a stoic sufferer. His spine has been dangerously compressed by years of bending double. Soon enough a doctor will make him choose between planting trees and walking.

  We tear off down the road in a borrowed truck, one of two left behind by the logging company.

  We roll up at a brushy cut block we’d started two weeks ago, which I’d hoped someone else would be sent back to finish. As we come over a rise we startle a chubby black bear. He stands up on his hind legs in the slash. Julien honks the horn. The bear waddles over the knoll, annoyed by the hassle of having to run away.

  I shove my boots on, fill my bags, and follow the bear into the field. I climb a side hill of coarse woody trash and salal. I find the trees that I’d planted just two weeks ago. They look strange to me now, more tenuously alive than when they left my hands. I fill in where I left off. I make my way to the ridge top and peer over the edge at a down slope thatched with blow-down. My heart sinks. I’ll have to go down there and make the best of it. At the bottom I glimpse a marsh, spiny at the shore with reeds. The distant reach of the sea laps against the flow of a creek, where salt merges with freshwater, the outflow stained by the tannic juices of cedar trees.

  I pass the morning finishing what I started, weaving my way over and under the fallen trunks. By the time I crest the hill the sun burns behind the clouds. The air has grown muggy, and the black flies are out in a fury for every last drop of blood before the human mammals leave these woods. I find a long log protruding like a diving board from a slash pile. I know it will be springy, and so I step out onto it, balancing at the very end. I bounce there for a time, feeling the cool lick of the wind for the first time since the blast in the Lifetimer.

  Out of this stillness comes an airy, muscular whoosh. I glance up at the underside of an animal with a giant wingspan, with feathers the gold-white of a vanilla candle. It glides just feet from my head, so close I could reach up and touch it. It passes over me, angles down, and skims the treetops that fringe the sea below. Then it skids gracefully down onto the water before blending into the textures of the forest. It’s a strange-looking creature—a swanlike bird with a long, crooked neck. Part crane and part egret. It looks like no kind of goose or duck that flies around here, as if it had been blown far off course. One of those birds who roosts in the Arctic and winters in the tropics but outside of those two brief destinations spends most of its life on the wing.

  In another hour of work I reach the top of the hill. I spot the truck with its hood propped open. At first I believe Julien has lifted it to create some shade so that he can sack out behind the steering wheel. But then he appears at the edge of the road.

  Do you know anything about mechanics? he shouts.

  It’s not my strong suit, I call back.

  And there it is, the inevitable snag. I drag my heels back to the truck, my footsteps cracking and crunching wood. Julien gets in behind the wheel to better demonstrate his difficulties. He turns the key. The dashboard lights up. And from somewhere deep in the guts of the engine comes a fatal clicking sound.

  Doug returns.

  Do you know that trick with a shovel and the solenoid? he asks.

  I’ve seen it done, I say meekly.

  We chuckle dryly. We ponder our predicament. Julien rubs his chin. He announces that he will jog back to the water’s edge to get another truck.

  Are you sure? I ask. Julien wears a windbreaker, cargo pants, and leather hiking boots. It’s fourteen miles to the dock. I’m stabbed with a pang of that quintessential tree-planter desire, the supernatural wish to fly.

  Yes, says Julien. He’s sure he can go the distance without too much trouble at all. I’m abruptly grateful for the gift of his athletic training.

  If you’re not back in four hours, I tell him, we’ll come looking.

  Julien unzips his jacket, shrugs his shoulders, then punches a fist into his palm. He strides away from us, over a hump in the road, then breaks into a trot.

  Doug and I refill our bags and return to our work. We finish according to our original estimate, just after noon. We sit in the narcoleptic truck and pick at our lunch tailings.

  At the stroke of four, I turn to Doug. Time’s up, I say.

  A half an hour into our walk, we catch sight of a dust flume in the distance. We hear the rattle and squeak of a chassis, and finally a truck approaches. Darren sits at the wheel. Julien rides shotgun. They slow and then halt, and when Julien slides out to make room for us he’s so chafed he can scarcely walk.

  On the way back to the skiff Julien tells us about his jogging odyssey. On the way he ran into one cougar and two bears. He was more worried about the cougar. A movie popped into his mind: The Gods Must Be Crazy. He remembered that little boy of the desert who outsmarts a hyena by holding a scrap of wood above his head; a hyena won’t attack a creature that looks big enough to put up a good fight. Julien wasn’t totally sure if such a rule applied to cougars, but he scrabbled around in the slash and pulled out a foot-long piece of tree bark. Then he ran for a mile holding it high aloft.

  As we clatter back to the dock, I catch sight of Walter, the local raven. He flaps into the truck’s wake, flying from perch to perch, stump to stump, awaiting one last meal.

  We return to the water’s edge. Before we pull out Carol and Darren give us a bottle of cloudy liquid. They tell us it’s vodka they made themselves with potatoes. As they wave us goodbye, the rain starts in again.

  On our return to the Daughters, the skiff runs out of gas. In the process of changing tanks we flood the engine. Doug, Julien, and I sit there for a dozen minutes letting the gas line drain as the current pushes us down the channel. The hillsides are so tight with trees they absorb sound. I listen to the water lap the aluminum. Raindrops tap the water. We call out on our handheld radio, the junior model that nobody wants to use, the one with the range of a baby monitor. Predictably, we get no answer.

  Every few minutes we take another stab at the outboard’s rip cord. It sputters and chokes. We wait another long while, flowing the wrong way with the ocean’s steady push. Julien gives the fuel bulb a squeeze and then winds his arm up for one last shot.

  I hate this shit, I curse. Although in fact this is a lie. I love almost every part of it.

  Well? says Doug.

  Julien cracks his knuckles and reaches for the starter.

  I cross my fingers and close my eyes.

  THE
FINAL day of the coastal season brings one of those late-spring days when we can’t decide what to wear. We’re either soaked and cold or stewing inside our raincoats. We spend the day in clothes that are always on the verge of drying out in time for it to rain again, our pants clinging to our inner thighs.

  How many more to go? we shout.

  We want to know the seedling countdown, though not even Bradam know the right answer to that. In the eleventh hour, our supervisors don’t care what we do, just as long as we take out the last of the trees and don’t bring any back. We can hear their mood over the airwaves. They discuss extraction plans. They burn tree boxes and scrape up wet, plastic detritus from the roads and fling our old banana peels into the slash. They scorch our traces down to ash piles. We see towers of smoke. After today they’ve got trucks to wash, maps to color-code with pencil crayons, and spreadsheets to reconcile. More work than an ending should really involve. It could be a separate job title in itself. The After Planter.

  The last day of a tree-planting season isn’t something to be filled up with wages but rather hours to be emptied of seedlings. We plant the last of our bundles. We scoop out from our bags all the cast-off dirt, the Styrofoam pellets and shiny flecks of vermiculite. We fling it by the handfuls at the ground. We stagger our way down the block and then ski down the cut bank onto the road. We pop the buckles on our bags and slip the logger knots from our boots.

  But then, inevitably, we catch sight of someone out there, slogging it out by herself while the rest of us sit on the roadside. It’s Melissa. And although she’s deep in the back, we sigh and bitch and clip back into our bags. We trudge out to meet her. She gives us a big, dirty grin. It might be Rose or Oakley or Jake or Rachel. It doesn’t matter who it is, or even if we like them, because we’re still going to head out to help them lighten their loads. It will get us all home that much faster.