How many do you have left? we ask.
They look into their left-hand pouches to count.
Doesn’t matter, we say.
They give us half, and we do it for free. Until there is nobody left straggling. We reach down into our bags, and our fingers scrape the bottom. The last tree comes and goes without our even knowing it, just a blind pawing of the hand. This is how the finish arrives—over before it started, an anticlimactic dribble without ceremony or surprise. Now all our trees have been delivered to the ground. They’ve begun the wild life we’ll never see, in this place we’ll never revisit. Only later do we think about what it means, if we think of this final seedling at all. We never know if we’ll feel that sensation again, the push of the left hand into the dirt. The tug of the right hand on the shovel handle, and that old, comforting grind in the rotator cuff. What if it was the last tree of our lives?
In the future we won’t see a farmer’s field or a roadside berm or a beach dune without wanting to nail it with seedlings. We’ll hear the gurgling base notes of diesel engines, and a shiver will pass through our spines. We’ll never understand why people need ski poles to go hiking. We’ll confuse our dogs with people, since they were our cut-block sidekicks, our scouts and lookouts, for so long. Warm canned beer will suit us just fine. We might name our kids Willow or Cedar or Sequoia. At dinner parties, we’ll be the first ones to clean our plates. We’ll have a certain lasting appreciation for duct tape and Ziploc bags. For cashiers who whip our groceries past the laser, for highballers of all kinds. And deep in our storage cupboards we’ll keep that old trinity—caulks, bags, and shovel—long after we’ve retired. One day we’ll regain the feeling in our big toes, but our knees will never be the same.
What have we learned in all this time? How are we improved after a million stooping acts? We’ve cried in frustration, seen pain so brilliant it glowed. We’ve sobbed with laughter, submerged ourselves in paroxysms so violent our ribs were sore the next day. Does this happen elsewhere, in cubicles, in elevators? Is it possible in ironed attire? We know how to climb landslides. How to walk on the guts of the earth so that our feet never touch the ground. We know how to hang on by the fingernails and toe spikes. We know how to fall down backward and forward and also how to get up. Where will we take these skills at the end of our tenure? When we quit this miserable, beautiful life.
NOW, THE furious race to get back to the Daughters, to escape this wild place before it swallows us whole. We speed along at breakneck pace, only to reach our destination and wait some more. We stand around on shore counting minutes until the tide comes up so that we can drive the trucks aboard. On the beach we kick off our caulk boots. We pour out brown viscous water from our lefts and our rights. Finally, when the barge pushes up to the shore, we walk aboard in our stocking feet, tongues of wool slapping the planks. When we peel off our socks we find we’ve got pickled feet. Brad shows Keira his whitened, bloated toes. She retreats into the kitchen and comes back with her camera to take photos of these oddities.
When the last truck has driven aboard, the boat lifts and closes its prow and we begin the journey back to our many versions of home. As we travel down the long tube of Seymour Inlet, I sit with Peter in the wheelhouse. He’s got a laptop stuffed with digital navigation charts. They flicker and re-orient as we move. On the way, a pod of white-sided dolphins leaps and frolics ahead of the bow.
By the time we reach Nakwakto Rapids the tide has turned, a bottle emptied and then filled again, yet never completely still. The Daughters struggles against the current. We chug along at less than half a knot. For a time I wonder if we’ll make it through at all or if the tide will turn us back. After twenty minutes of grinding we pass through.
We watch the sun go down over the water. We motor past islets covered with trees. Stony reefs. Schools of jellyfish float near the surface. Summery air puffs against my face. It’s almost too warm. If I close my eyes I can trick myself into thinking I’m no longer in Canada but in some clement, tropical clime. In my chest there’s a heavy feeling, of melancholy no-return, since planting trees is an industry of perpetual, forward motion. I know I’ll never have cause to come back here again, no matter how breathtaking it is.
Adam and Brian hustle around on the foredeck folding tarps, picking up spare tires, and lobbing them into teetering piles.
Those guys work really hard, says Peter. From the moment they get up in the morning until the middle of the night. And, he adds, they lie all the time.
At dusk we celebrate with Molotov cocktails contrived from Darren and Carol’s homemade vodka. We mix it with the remains of the galley rations, powdered lemonade and coconut milk. We drink it from a mishmash of coffee mugs. We toast as the sun melts in a brilliant orange crush. The boat is alive with boisterous revelry. People laugh in the kitchen. Brad DJs at the CD player. There’s another gathering almost directly beneath us in the smoking pit. Still another crowd on the poop deck murmuring and celebrating and getting slowly drunk, or trying to anyway. The big diesel engine hums. Later, when the sun goes down, Oakley will give Jake a mohawk with his clippers by the light of a Petzl headlamp. Pierre will make a video, and we will watch it even though no time at all has passed.
Soon we’ll stop in Lund, a tiny coastal town, the northernmost on the Sunshine Coast. We’ll get off at the government docks and find that summer has begun in our absence. We’ll see townspeople walking dogs, tourists with sweaters tied around their shoulders. Citizens will stare at us as if we are a waterfront sideshow. Rose will leap from the boat and kiss the pavement. She wears her rabbit-fur vest, her cheek-covering sunglasses, and a cigarette pinched jauntily between her fingers. We’ll crash into the bar for a single, pit-stop round. Bar hag cocktails—rye and ginger ales, whisky sours stuck with maraschino cherries. And then we’ll scramble aboard again and head farther south to Powell River. Closer still to the rest of the world, like reentry into orbit.
Tomorrow we’ll reach Egmont, and the same old thing will happen to us. Already it feels as if our minds have begun to shift. We’ll tumble out onto dry land. There won’t be time. We’ll feel the pull of the highway, the deep need to arrive home, to arrive at some kind of destination before nightfall. We’ll feel that same old desire to fall away from one another, as quickly as we can, after all that involuntary intimacy we grew.
Never again, we’ll swear to each other.
See you in the fall, we’ll sing.
Maybe we’ll reunite. Maybe not. Planting life is only as sure as the strength of the wrist or the knee. For some of us there will never be a next time, even if we don’t know it yet.
In Egmont we reacquaint ourselves with our cars. They’re humid with must and condensation, the smell of our crumpled snacks on the day we left dry land. We find our vehicles right where we left them, parked in a patch of muddy grass near the wharf for commercial vessels. A yard full of scrap metal and concrete chunks, stray bits of steel scaffolding and rusty iron ship guts. Bales of pink fiberglass insulation wrapped in plastic. A gate will roll open, a strip of rusty corrugated metal on wheels. We’ll gun our engines, ready for the open road.
Beyond the barge terminal there’s a lineup of cars awaiting the ferry. Glossy sedans and leviathan white RVs glide down the lanes like pinballs in a rack. Normal folks in their minivans, talking on cell phones, standing around in windbreakers holding dog leashes or cardboard coffee cups. Small children dangle from their hands. We’ll have to find a way to rejoin them. We’ll zoom out onto tracts of open highway, the pavement a smooth, rediscovered luxury.
But after the initial burst of excitement, a wave of fatigue will creep over us. Later in the night we’ll drop into beds like stones into water. When we wake up tomorrow we’ll be different somehow, just a little bit. A change that yawns into the next day and the next. And soon enough, when we talk about tree planting, it will be in the past tense.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cannings, Richard and Sydney Cannings. British Columbia: A Natural
History. Vancouver/Toronto: Greystone, 2009.
Cohen, Shaul Ephraim. Planting Nature: Trees and the Manipulation of Environmental Stewardship in America. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004.
Drushka, Ken. In the Bight: The B.C. Forest Industry Today. Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 1999.
Harrison, Robert Pogue. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Kimmins, J.P. Forest Ecology: A Foundation for Sustainable Management. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997.
MacKay, Donald. Empire of Wood: The MacMillan Bloedel Story. Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1982.
Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Knopf, 2005.
Marchak, Patricia. Falldown: Forest Policy in British Columbia. Vancouver: David Suzuki Foundation, 1999.
———. Green Gold: The Forest Industry in British Columbia. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983.
Maser, Chris. Forest Primeval: The Natural History of an Ancient Forest. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1989.
May, Elizabeth. At the Cutting Edge: The Crisis in Canada’s Forests. Toronto: Key Porter, 1998.
McDougall, Christopher. Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen. New York: Knopf, 2009.
Montgomery, David R. Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. Berkeley/ Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007.
Peattie, Donald Culross. A Natural History of Western Trees. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953.
Pojar, Jim and Andy MacKinnon. Plants of Coastal British Columbia. Vancouver: Lone Pine Publishing, 2005.
Power, Michael J. and Jay Schulkin. The Evolution of Obesity. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Puettmann, Klaus J., K. David Coates, and Christian C. Messier. A Critique of Silviculture: Managing for Complexity. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2009.
Rajala, Richard. Clearcutting the Pacific Rainforest: Production, Science, and Regulation. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1998.
Sands, Roger. Forestry in a Global Context. Cambridge, MA: CABI Publishing, 2005.
Schwantes, Carlos Arnaldo. The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.
Stewart, Hilary. Cedar: Tree of Life to the Northwest Coast Indians. Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1984.
Suzuki, David and Wayne Grady. Tree: A Life Story. Vancouver/ Toronto: Greystone, 2004.
Taylor, G.W. Timber: History of the Forest Industry in B.C. Vancouver: J.J. Douglas, 1975.
Thomas, Peter. Trees: Their Natural History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Vancouver, George. A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World, 1791–1795. Ed. W. Kaye Lamb. London: Hakluyt Society, 1984.
Van Pelt, Robert. Forest Giants of the Pacific Coast. Seattle/London: University of Washington Press, 2001.
Williams, Claire G. Conifer Reproductive Biology. Dordrecht: Springer, 2009.
Williams, Michael. Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANKS ARE OWED to Marni Jackson, Ian Pearson, and Moira Farr, mentors in the Literary Journalism program at the Banff Centre. I’m grateful for support from the Canada Council for the Arts. Allan Markin and Jackie Flanagan, benefactors of the Markin-Flanagan writer-in-residence program at the University of Calgary. Gudrun Will at the Vancouver Review, who published part of this book in earlier form. Juliet Gill, my mother, a proofer of the highest order. Scott and Shana at Wagner Reforestation, who kept me employed during much of the writing. Peter Lironi, who welcomed us aboard. John Vigna, author, planter, ideal reader. Zsuzsi Gartner, dear friend and test kitchen guru. Rob Sanders at Greystone. Nancy Flight, for her wisdom and guidance, and Lara Kordic, for her sharp-eyed copyedit. Kevin Turpin, physiology advisor and exemplary tree-planting man. Not one word would exist without my extended silvicultural family. Roland and crew, especially.
OTHER TITLES from the DAVID SUZUKI FOUNDATION and GREYSTONE BOOKS
· · · · ·
Sacred Headwaters: The Fight to Save the Stikine, Skeena, and Nass
by Wade Davis, photography by Carr Clifton, Paul Colangelo and
members of the ILCP, foreword by David Suzuki, afterword by
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing
the Great Forests of the West by Andrew Nikiforuk
Beneath Cold Seas: The Underwater Wilderness
of the Pacific Northwest by David Hall,
introduction from Sarika Cullis-Suzuki
The Atlantic Coast: A Natural History by Harry Thurston
You Are the Earth: Know Your World So You Can Help
Make It Better by David Suzuki and Kathy Vanderlinden,
art by Wallace Edwards
Arctic Eden: Journeys through the Changing High Arctic
by Jerry Kobalenko
The Legacy: An Elder’s Vision for Our Sustainable Future
by David Suzuki
Dodging the Toxic Bullet: How to Protect Yourself from Everyday
Environmental Health Hazards by David R. Boyd
Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent,
revised and updated 2nd edition by Andrew Nikiforuk
The Declaration of Interdependence: A Pledge to Planet Earth
by Tara Cullis and David Suzuki with Wade Davis,
Guujaaw, and Raffi Cavoukian
More Good News: Real Solutions to the Global Eco-Crisis
by David Suzuki and Holly Dressel
Lakeland: Ballad of a Freshwater Country by Allan Casey
The Sea: A Literary Companion edited by Wayne Grady
Night: A Literary Companion edited by Merilyn Simonds
The Big Picture: Reflections on Science, Humanity,
and a Quickly Changing Planet by David Suzuki
and Dave Robert Taylor
A Good Catch: Sustainable Seafood Recipes
from Canada’s Top Chefs by Jill Lambert
David Suzuki’s Green Guide
by David Suzuki and David R. Boyd
Bees: Nature’s Little Wonders by Candace Savage
The Hot Topic: What We Can Do about Global Warming
by Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King
Gardens: A Literary Companion edited by Merilyn Simonds
Deserts: A Literary Companion edited by Wayne Grady
A Passion for This Earth: Writers, Scientists, and Activists Explore
Our Relationship with Nature and the Environment edited by
Michelle Benjamin
The Great Lakes: The Natural History of a Changing Region
by Wayne Grady
The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature
by David Suzuki, Amanda McConnell, and Adrienne Mason
An Enchantment of Birds: Memories from a Birder’s Life
by Richard Cannings
Where the Silence Rings: A Literary Companion to Mountains
edited by Wayne Grady
Dark Waters Dancing to a Breeze: A Literary Companion to Rivers
and Lakes edited by Wayne Grady
Wisdom of the Elders: Native and Scientific Ways of Knowing about
Nature by Peter Knudtson and David Suzuki
The Rockies: A Natural History by Richard Cannings
Wild Prairie: A Photographer’s Personal Journey
by James R. Page
Prairie: A Natural History by Candace Savage
Tree: A Life Story by David Suzuki and Wayne Grady
The Sacred Balance: A Visual Celebration of Our Place in Nature
by David Suzuki and Amanda McConnell with Maria DeCambra
From Naked Ape to Superspecies: Humanity and the
Global Eco-Crisis by David Suzuki and
Holly Dressel
The David Suzuki Reader by David Suzuki
When the Wild Comes Leaping Up: Personal Encounters
with Nature edited by David Suzuki
Good News for a Change: How Everyday People Are Helping
the Planet by David Suzuki and Holly Dressel
The Last Great Sea: A Voyage Through the Human and
Natural History of the North Pacific Ocean by Terry Glavin
Northern Wild: Best Contemporary Canadian Nature
Writing edited by David R. Boyd
Greenhouse: The 200-Year Story of Global Warming
by Gale E. Christianson
Vanishing Halo: Saving the Boreal Forest by Daniel Gawthrop
Dead Reckoning: Confirming the Crisis in Pacific Fisheries
by Terry Glavin
Delgamuukw: The Supreme Court of Canada Decision on
Aboriginal Title by Stan Persky
DAVID SUZUKI FOUNDATION CHILDREN’S TITLES
You Are the Earth by David Suzuki and Kathy Vanderlinden
There’s a Barnyard in My Bedroom by David Suzuki;
illustrated by Eugenie Fernandes
Salmon Forest by David Suzuki and Sarah Ellis;
illustrated by Sheena Lott
Eco-Fun by David Suzuki and Kathy Vanderlinden
THE DAVID SUZUKI FOUNDATION
The David Suzuki Foundation works through science and education to protect the diversity of nature and our quality of life, now and for the future.
With a goal of achieving sustainability within a generation, the Foundation collaborates with scientists, business and industry, academia, government and non-governmental organizations. We seek the best research to provide innovative solutions that will help build a clean, competitive economy that does not threaten the natural services that support all life.
The Foundation is a federally registered independent charity that is supported with the help of over 50,000 individual donors across Canada and around the world.
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