{7}
THE MONTH OF May, in the coastal rainforest, is a time of lushness and warmth before the heat of summer sets in. I trade my synthetic thermals for men’s cotton business shirts. K.T. breaks out his wide-brim hat. The clear-cuts are sultry with humidity. The afternoons are mad with robins and chickadee song and woodpeckers hammering the hell out of snags. The conifers let go their pollen, and it drifts above the treetops in clouds of Martian green. In the evenings we hear the haunting call of the Swainson’s thrush—an upward spiral of beckoning notes that echo out in an old forest like the sound of a sad flute in a cathedral.
We leave Port McNeill behind. We travel south, across the Strait of Georgia to the mainland. Three road trips and two ferries later we arrive at the Sunshine Coast, though “sunshine” is a relative term in the rainforest. This is a peninsula of voluptuous land, separated from the rest of British Columbia by a pocket of ocean called Sechelt Inlet. We must take a boat to get here, though it lies on the mainland, since mountains divide it from the province’s highway system. Some of us recall the scenery from The Beachcombers, a show about log salvage operators, which was filmed here in the seventies and eighties and still holds the record for the longest-lived drama on Canadian TV.
We roll aboard our new home, a ninety-eight-foot offshore landing craft called the Lasqueti Daughters, a barge with a hull the shade of carbon paper. Its three white decks stack upon one another at the stern in diminishing layers, like the tiers of a wedding cake. The foredeck is an open cargo area surfaced with rough planking, a prow that ratchets down onto the shore like a jaw. We walk aboard, shouldering a month’s worth of luggage, and let the boat swallow us.
We’re yapped at by a little snaggle-toothed dog who looks like he’s wearing a sable coat with a copious ruff. The Daughters is loaded with people and duffel bags and plastic tubs. Then three battered, mud-smeared trucks wedge in, as if with a shoehorn, leaving just enough room between their side mirrors to fit a folded newspaper. With so little space to spare, if we want to walk from bow to stern we’ve got to climb over the trucks: up bumpers, boxes, and cabs and down over hoods. But mostly we are crammed with white tree boxes, piled everywhere, ten feet high. We have to shimmy sideways between the waxy, white rows as if pushing ourselves through a tight maze carved out of snow.
It is a miracle the boat floats. Overstuffed hockey bags. Cartons of cigarettes. Ziploc bags full of B.C.’s other cash crop—fuzzy buds, crystallized with resin. Digital music collections. Laptops. DVDs. Flats of beer. Spare shovels. Books. Magazines. Musical instruments. New spring wardrobes of quick-dry pants and pastel cotton shirts plucked indiscriminately from thrift store racks. We have this feeling, upon leaving the shore, that we should pad ourselves for some unknown adventure, whatever the voyage has in store.
Sly and K.T. play chess on a table of tree boxes, on chairs fashioned from tree boxes. Melissa and Oakley recline across cardboard corners in the sun, beeping out photos with their cameras. Others take naps on the truck hoods, sacked out against the windshields or on the roofs of the upper decks. We relax as tree planters do—horizontally, wholly. The ocean is the sharp indigo of new denim. A floatplane comes whining and wavering out of the ether. We’re overcome with foolish, vernal optimism. There’s new money in the air.
We’re fresh from the rare glory of three days off in a row. Most of us burned a straight line home and fell into bed. We blinked our eyes, and now we’re back again. Our citified smells drift in the breeze. Bounce sheets, cosmetic potions, the perfumed emollients in the shower racks of home. Our men have shaved and gotten haircuts. They flash untanned strips of skin at the neck and ear. We’re lingeringly happy, for the most part. A little frazzled, too. Especially those of us who’ve spent the weekend with children hanging around our necks.
Those of us who look the most relaxed are the ones who don’t ever go home. Melissa’s family owns an inn in Tasmania. Doug spends his winters in India. They’re always crossing oceans, but when they plant trees, home is wherever they happen to be. Doug wears sunglasses and his beret, like someone embarked on a luxury cruise. Melissa still scuffs around in her winter boots. When your true belongings live on the other side of the world you’ve got to make do with one wardrobe. Carmen has put in an offer on a house. She chews her fingernails and bobs her foot, fretting about the mortgage paperwork, which will now be left unattended. Adam’s mood has also changed during his time off. Home tires him out and ramps him up in equal measure. Now he runs around shirtless, heaving spare tires and fuel drums, though the weather is just a few degrees too cold.
Logging operations now reach far beyond the limits of any village. The harvesting was done, sometimes years ago, from logging camps that have long since pulled their nails and folded down their walls. Or from floating barge camps that featured vending machines and wall-to-wall carpeting and even helipads. They’ve been tugged away to other locales. Or the cutting was done in inaccessible mountain nooks, the logs slung out by air cranes. And so, all up and down the coast, tree planters live on boats, since there are no motels and no campsites, sometimes scarcely a landing on which to park a truck.
There are no telephones or mail of either the electronic or the enveloped variety. Only the boat’s VHF radio and the boss’s satellite phone, which costs a buck a minute, whether the call is urgent or frivolous. We’re less than one hundred miles north of Vancouver, but it might as well be light-years. We’re incommunicado, which is as much an anxiety as it is a great relief.
THE LASQUETI DAUGHTERS pushes away from the shore like an ark in reverse, a boat built for the export of all the weird, misfit specimens. Land and sea peel apart. We bob in a gentle swell, cracking beer tabs though it is barely noon. At the peninsula’s northern edge, we pass the small hamlet of Egmont. We cruise by the waterfront real estate, modest cottages perched above lumps of purple rock. Marinas full of green-bearded watercraft. Many of Egmont’s residents live on the east-facing slope, with a view of the inlet’s far shore. Some years ago this panorama sold to a consortium of NHL players, a logging contractor, and a California tycoon in the biggest land deal the area has ever seen. An eight-square-mile block—most of a mountain. The world would want to know, said the hockey players, about the incredible wildlife, about the secret, rugged beauty. All this place needed, they promised, was a time-share resort with a pool, spa, and five-star hotel. It never happened. They logged it instead, from the top all the way down to the bottom.
We steam past this clear-cut now, marveling at the thoroughness.
Looks creamy, we all agree.
Who planted it?
Not us, we lament.
Next, the conquest for bunk space. We’re greeted in our expeditions by our skipper, Peter, who has tufted white hair, a stubbled face, and moist blue eyes. He speaks with a rusty English accent. He wears an untucked flannel shirt with the cuffs undone, corduroy trousers, and oxfords with professorial soles.
If I were you, he says to me, I’d take that one right there. He points to a window on the upper decks.
The Daughters is a woodwork maze of varnished passage-ways, nooks, and compartments. In the central part of the main deck is the galley, the kind of kitchen you might find at the back of a vegetarian café. Shelves and compartments full of coffee mugs, serving platters, and ecstatically painted bowls. A collection of high-end commercial appliances. Utensils hang from the walls and the ceiling. In the middle of it all, Keira, the cook, wears a pair of industrial ear muffs against the noise of the diesel engine, its cylinders hammering beneath our feet. She’s processing cheese with one of those deli appliances that could slice your entire palm in a moment’s inattention.
On the upper decks we invade the sleeping berths. There are four doubles and one dormitory we’ve already started calling the bachelor suite. We have coupled remarkably well, despite all our differences. Brad and Melissa have fallen in together and claim one of the doubles. Carmen and Neil share a berth as well. Rose has made a boyfriend out of Fin. He wanders the decks shouting her name, like Stanley from A Streetcar Named Desire. K.T. and I haul our belongings to the cabin Peter recommended. He’s right. It’s nice. It won’t be long before Adam and Brian sniff out our find and try to wrest it from our grip. We sit down on our backpacks to wait.
Peter sleeps in the wheelhouse on a king-sized mattress. Keira has a cabin so small it seems to exist only between the walls. To reach it, she climbs a companionway from the kitchen up into the ceiling. Later, I learn that Keira is the daughter of tree planters. She has taped to one of the cupboards a yellowing photo of her and Carmen playing as little girls in a muddy camp amid a jumble of spare tires. We talk about this photo and then catch sight, through the galley windows, of a yellow stream of urine released from the upper decks. Keira sighs and shakes her head. The bathroom is just aft of the galley. Its door yawns open and shut with the bobbing of the boat. It will swing on its hinges a thousand times before this job is done. Two showers, a sink, and a single toilet that for the next month all twenty of us will share.
AS WE round the point, Egmont slips from view. We pass through a spot where the waters of the open strait commingle with outflows of Sechelt and Jervis Inlets, like three open mouths breathing into one another.
Jervis Inlet lies before us like a backdrop from Lord of the Rings, one of those ominous entrances with forested mountains and granite cliffs rising abruptly from each shore. It looks more like a wide river than the ocean. Snow-dusted peaks with trees sprouting up from rocky perches. Green streaks of meadow where avalanches have mown down the woodsy growth, year after year. It’s the kind of place where no people live, not really. Where, if you glance in the right direction, you could fool yourself into thinking nothing has changed in a thousand years.
Jervis runs fifty-five miles from head to mouth, a zigzag of water with three elbows and three deep, narrow reaches dredged by prehistoric glaciers. Like many coastal fjords, its stone walls rise vertically from the water, obliterating the notion of a shore. The water is so deep that boats often do not have enough anchor chain to secure them to the sea bottom. Instead of anchoring their ships, European explorers tethered them to the enormous tree trunks that once lined the shore. The inlet gives no hint of tapering until an abrupt kink at the very end reveals no treasures, no paradise, no elusive trade route, just a cul-de-sac of sedgy mudflats. Here George Vancouver arrived with high hopes of discovering the Northwest Passage only to turn back in dismay. All our hopes vanished, he wrote.
It was once a busy territory, home to the people of the Sechelt Nation before disease cut the population down to a smattering. There is still a camp located at the old Deserted Bay village site, owned by the band. They rent it to people like us. There’s also a religious summer retreat perched on rocks deeper down the inlet, where it’s possible to be waved at by Christian girls in bikinis if you pass by in a boat at the right time of year. Situated at the lip of Princess Louisa Inlet, it was once an upscale resort, the Malibu Club, visited by Hollywood royalty not long after World War II. Otherwise, Jervis is a wild place, awesome in its ragged beauty to the point of feeling hostile. No one goes unless they have something specific to accomplish.
A place of secrets.
Last year, our forester pointed at some cliffs at the far end of the reach.
I don’t want anybody to go past that point, he said.
Why not? we asked.
He spat a stream of tobacco-brown juice at the ground and ignored the question. Just don’t go past those bluffs, he repeated.
The wildest part is deep down at the back of the inlet. That’s where all the rain comes from, where all the fog seems to settle. A corner of the world so wild and huge, so hauntingly bereft of human presence, that to go there is to feel unwelcome. Just a few years ago, this boat took another crew down Jervis Inlet. At the farthest reach, while they were at anchor, a tree planter hijacked a skiff in the middle of the night, made his way to dry land, and hanged himself on the shore. There are few tree planters on the coast who haven’t heard this story or some version of it. Who haven’t heard the Lasqueti Daughters talked about as if it were a ferry plying the waters of the River Styx.
THE JOURNEY continues through the night. It’s tough to sleep with the engine groaning away. We pretend to ourselves in our bunks that we’re just about to drift off. And then, finally, we’re startled awake from thin dreams with the night at its predawn darkest. We hear the grinding clank of the anchor and then silence. We wake again inside our mummy bags—it feels like minutes later—to the smell of wet bacon.
The early risers hoist themselves up, slide into sea-damp clothes, and descend the companionway to the galley, where Peter has assembled our breakfast. It’s 5:45 AM. He has the rumpled look of a man who’s been standing up all night, squinting into black sheets of ocean. Arrayed on the counter is a heartening spread, glistening with grease. Scrambled eggs and sausage in quantities sufficient to feed our small army. This man has seen how tree planters eat and has dealt with crews who burn fat as well as fossil fuels. Hot lipids look good to us. Calories smoked in our metabolic furnaces like rice paper in a flame.
I am not a morning person. Yet I’ve learned it’s better to get up early to avoid the pandemonium of reaching hands, the urgent press as the clock ticks us toward departure. Outside on the deck I find a lunch table laden with fresh bread, platters of cold cuts, cheese and tomato slices arrayed in fans. It’s a foggy morning. A sunrise chews at the sky’s murk. Doug, in his beret, sits at a galley table with an old National Geographic spread before him, one with a feature on seahorses. Tomorrow it will be an issue about timber wolves, and the day after that, back to the seahorses. Nick hovers at the coffee urns with a mug hooked on his thumb. Steam dribbles from the coffee maker. Peter saws bread with a large serrated knife. The sound is woolly and comforting. We don’t talk. It’s the last quiet we’ll hear until we are alone with our work, which has its own intolerable roar.
WE ARE to begin at the inlet’s middle reach and work our way deeper into the land as the days progress. First stop, a long jetty built from crushed, gray boulders, a road surface cobbled on top of this, smoothed with the finer granulations. An empty log boom attached to its flanks like a huge wooden hoop. Peter steers the boat to the end of this jetty and drops the lip of the barge down on the edge. The trucks groan to life and roll off. We follow on foot with our baggage slung over our shoulders. We look like a troupe of ragtag mercenaries tumbling onto a beach in search of a war.
A chill blows down from the high, snowy slopes. We can see our breath, though we’re deep into spring, as if we’ve slipped backwards into winter. We arrive at a heart-shaped landing fringed with alders and maples, shaded with unfurling greenery. From here we rattle out to the cut blocks, three trucks in a line down a lumpy road, like a procession of slow-moving elephants. The woods are smeared with dew.
Our land for the day unfolds as we round the corners—a long, steep swathe banked against a mountainside. It’s a big cut, a fresh one. The land is the color of toast. Half of us are destined for the gentle lowlands. The other half for the rough end higher up, where white rocks sit like huge knobs of salt, the boulders of a talus slide where the mountain crumbled out from underneath itself many centuries ago.
Might as well bust out the shin pads, says Neil. I already know where I’m going.
Got that right, says Brian at the wheel with an over-the-shoulder smirk.
We roll down our windows to get a better look, and the cab fills with the smell of resin. Orange stumps dot the field. At the edges of the cut stands a wall of Douglas-fir trees, each as uniformly aged and shaped as the next. Their trunks look like telephone poles, some collapsed against the neighboring forest, blown back in winter storms. Tree flesh, cracked and mashed, lies splintered as far as the eye can see. A second-growth forest, or at least it used to be.
What’s the price? we ask.
The price is the price, says Brian.
We blame it on Roland, as usual.
Trucks grind up the hill. At the top, we alight. We find the evidence of the original harvest, the old stumps rotting down into chunky mounds. Old cedar stumps, it doesn’t escape us, surrounded by the fresh remains of a different kind of forest—an arid, new plantation.
ADAM GIVES us our plan for the day. K.T. and I will share our land. It’s a rare thing, and a little bit melancholy, since we work at separate speeds, never crossing paths all day. The most I’ll see of him, besides his lines of trees, is the dirty shirt he shucks off at lunchtime and leaves hung on a branch to dry.
Split it down the middle, Adam tells us now.
K.T. doesn’t waste a moment shoving his feet into his boots. He sets out in just a thin thermal shirt, despite the cool of the morning, a sign he plans to fire up the jets. I try to keep up with him—there’ll be no way to catch him later—but my laces won’t feed fast enough into the grommets. My hands have lost all their finesse. He loads his bags and clips in. He slips over the brown slough of the road. I hear the clink of his shovel as he sets himself to work. He makes the task of planting trees look effortless, like bending to tie a shoe. I slide down the road slough after him and cut my shovel into a clutter of rock. In time, the orange square of K.T.’s shirt slips off into the distance and finally out of sight.
Halfway into my morning, a sneaky rain floats down in a mist so fine it feels dry, like snow. It begins so airily I don’t even notice until my hair is dripping. It soaks me through to my innermost layers, as if the weather had picked my pockets.
Adam pit-stops to dump off more trees. He calls down from the road. How is it down there?
Bony, I shout.
You don’t need a PhD to note the difference between a virgin forest and a recycled one. The ground here is stones embedded in sand, covered over with crusts of sun-dried moss. Digging into it with my shovel is like working a spoon down into a jarful of teeth. I scrape handfuls of dirt together and shove them around the stems. Deep rainforest replaced with low-fat soil, a trompe l’oeil. A forest-looking forest.
FOURTEEN THOUSAND years ago, this land was buried in Pleistocene ice. The ecosystems underneath flattened, scree-strewn, beaten down under the weight of glaciers. A few millennia later the ice receded, and life crept back in from the fringes. Lodge-pole pine edged north from California. A few thousand years after that, as the climate cooled and moistened, Douglas-fir and Sitka spruce took over. And then, about the time humans took up agriculture, the monsoons came to visit the Pacific Northwest.
The rainforest titans began their creeping ascendancy, hemlock and cedar sprouting up in the mist, a patient, prodigious succession. The forest floor thickened into a living, breathing sponge, endometrial in its plush complexity. A broad quilt webbed with fungi and bacteria, fed by the composting tissues of plants and animals. Even now, old-growth soil is ancient and alchemical. A world beneath our feet that’s oceanic in its unknown fecundity. Crustaceans live in it. Out of this dark fundament, life is born of inert matter, from rocks and clay and sand. Trees germinate here: light-drinking organisms that suck molecules from the air and transform them into a wondrous polymer, which is both strong and flexible. And when they are done living they disassemble and return to the earth. Dust to dust. We’ve touched this stuff, dug it up, rubbed it between our fingers. A cabernet-toned humus so plentiful you could dig for an hour without seeing anything that resembles a mineral, no trace of gravel or grit.
Dirt. At home we try to scrub it and bleach it and vacuum it up. We try to deny it with our various under-sink surfactants. But in a place such as this, dirt is a precious, underrated thing. A tree planter’s bread and butter crumbs. It’s also nourishment, substrate, and habitat. Just one layer of biologically active soil, as thin as a sheet of newsprint or as deep as a few feet thick, on which all living things, sooner or later, depend. Plants sprout from this dirt and are eaten in turn by all the other creatures of the food web. This soil relies on its own living architecture to hold it in place, just as mammals need their bones. Around here it blankets steep ground and is lashed by winter rains. It has been subject to the punishments of heavy machinery—scraping and compaction and erosion.
After a cutover, all the layers of the forest are hacked away: the canopy, the understory trees, the woody shrubs and the soft-stemmed weeds and ferns. The sky comes crashing down to the ground. This is an incredible amount of material—for every square foot of forest floor, many times that in leaf cover. The web of branches that once caught fog and rain is bucked up into brittle flotsam. The soil, once bathed in understory gloom, is undressed, blasted by the sudden, brash light of the sun. All the dusky, micro-tilling fauna are exposed to baking heat and plunging frosts, where once they were protected by the canopy.
Earthworms swim around underground passing grit through their inner tracts, breaking down pebbles into loamy castings. Worms and mites, ants and springtails and nematodes and microbes. They do the work of chewing and churning, bringing minerals to the surface and moving organics downwards. Their secretions dissolve rock. Over time these tiny beings make the dirt. Without the miniature life of the forest floor, the living matrix begins to unravel. Water must find new ways to flow through the ground, since there are no roots to drink it up and slow its progress downhill. Occasionally the running rain will sweep everything along in its path, all the way down to bedrock. Sometimes we plant these mudslides, too, nailing them with fast-growing alder.
It takes at least four hundred years to regrow an old forest naturally, but the kind of time required to make soil is millennial and geologic. You can’t build a forest floor in a nursery or manufacture topsoil in a mill. The dirt is the dirt, and that’s all there will ever be for as long as it takes for the woods to grow it back. The forests of the world may sequester carbon—1,146 billion tons of it—but two-thirds of this is stored not in the trees but underground, in soil and peat.
If soil has a fate, it is to travel to the sea, where it will sediment and harden and rise up in some distant future with the force of tectonic buckling. Perhaps millions of years after mountains are made, these rocks will grind down again. From stone to sand, from river to sea. In a treeless place, with the rain and the slopes, this process is quick-cycled, the dirt slipped down the creeks like a disintegrating sweater put through the wash. The third-hand forest, when it grows, will be leaner than the one it replaces. And the next one more brittle still. Logging even has a name for these diminishing returns. Falldown.
Our workplace is a crash site. Two forces in juxtaposition. One is old and slow, accumulating biomass. It wants nothing more than to build. The other is fast and rapacious—our appetites, seemingly without end. Most days we’re too busy making money to see it this way, but sometimes we look up from the rubble and the wood chips. We feel the breeze cool the sweat in our eyebrows. We gaze down at the ocean, where this same earthly breath ripples the water. Tide running one direction, wind running the other, like the quivering fur of an animal rubbed the wrong way. We feel a mild ache in our chests. A brush with a thing that’s been lost forever. Or maybe we feel nothing at all.
WE’RE NOT puffing along like a steam train anymore but conserving fuel until the end. We’ve still got weeks to go. Our feet and hands are swollen. We have been this tired before, though we scarcely remember when. It must have been last year. We look out through a haze of fatigue. It tinges each breath, flattens the taste of food. Even our hair is limp. But our tiredness is the chronic kind, the sort that makes us jittery and hyper. At night we suffer from a strange insomnia. We drank all our beer within our first week, and now we’ve run short on ways to anesthetize ourselves. We stay up past bedtime in the galley, playing cards and listening to satellite radio. Or we lie in our sleeping bags eavesdropping on laughter, the clinking of mugs—the sound of clandestine stashes, of port and St. Remy. The talk, the jokes, the gossip sizzles in our ears. Sleep, by comparison so brief and monotonous, whisks the day away as if it never happened.
We may be sick of looking at the same old faces and forgetting what week it is and grinding through our daily prostrations. Despite all of this we bask in a peculiar contentment—for no reason we can think of except that we’re warm, fed, and dry. Stripped of choices, we’re ship-bound, with nowhere to be but snugged in among our occupational siblings. It’s the annoyed delight of people marooned in a snowstorm or a power outage. Nothing to do but light candles, play crib, eat chocolate chips and drink wine for dinner.
In the little cabin I share with K.T., the floor is the size of a queen bed. The ceiling is constructed of beautiful varnished wood. Each panel is a solid sheet nearly five feet wide, without a single knot or flaw. It’s not the kind of wood you see very often anymore. When I lie in bed I consider the size of the trees and also the men who felled them. Luxury wood. The wood of the rich and famous.
K.T. and I have a square window, a ceiling sloped down toward the decks and the bow. All the lines encourage our gaze out to the gray sweep of the ocean. We’ve spent two weeks aboard the Daughters, the tree boxes dwindled down on the decks like melting snowdrifts. Mess moves in to replace them: a couple of forty-five-gallon fuel drums. Blown-out tires. Strewn articles of clothing. A blue windbreaker. Tree-planting bags clipped through the handles of shovels. A fluorescent prawn trap buoy, a coil of green hose. The sun dips, and we’re plunged into a lavender dusk feathered with cirrus clouds.
K.T. says, I’ll give you ten bucks if you massage my forearm.
Your money, I remind him, is worthless here.
K.T. and I have two narrow bunks built into our walls, one stacked atop the other like bookshelves. We lie in our separate berths, talking to each other from above and below like Akbar & Jeff, those cartoon twins in fezzes. We smell the dishwater in the sink downstairs. A mouse has been scrabbling. It chews and scrapes in the deepest part of the night. We hear it but never catch it. In our cabin there are signs of leakage from above, brownish streams down the walls.
The bachelor suite is separated from us by a Plexiglas porthole, a square of cardboard for a curtain. We eavesdrop on the inmates, a phalanx of single men who sleep cheek by jowl. Pierre, Sly, Oakley, Jake, Doug, Nick. So used to being around each other they fall asleep farting and talking about girls. Tonight Jake shows around a photo of his mother.
Your mom is hot, says Pierre.
There is a brief discussion about who has dibs on this romantic pursuit, once the contract is through and we return to civilization. This is not a rational conversation. It belongs to the wild, jungly, right-now—to an outdoors without an indoors, to life smeared around, mashing one discrete thing into another. To cabin fever, which is really just claustrophobia pushed out into a vast, wide open.
We listen to Jake talk about the fictional vicissitudes of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. We never pegged Elfie for the bookish type, mostly because his every second word is either loud or profane or both. Such are the surprises of working life, where our talents are mostly hidden. We listen to the rustling nylon of sleeping bags. The scrape of pages turning.
Is Pierre fucking ready to roll the fuck over and turn off the light?
I don’t know, dude. Fucking ask him yourself.
Fuck, sighs Pierre, clicking them into darkness.
There is no privacy. No unshared indulgence. No TV or Internet. No traffic or sirens or take-out food. No anonymous comfort of strangers. No silence. And yet we’ve never felt less alone.
Keira finishes her prep for tomorrow and then climbs up into the ceiling to bed. The sun descends and the fog slinks down the mountains until just a wafer of clear air hovers on the still and mercurial water. Gulls mope on the old log booms. We hear snoring through the walls. Keira rubs her feet together in her tiny sleeping berth. K.T. dangles his hand over the side of his bunk. We touch fingertips for goodnight. I hear dripping and then the flap of unseen wings. And then finally the day lies down.
WE MOTOR deeper down the inlet. The Daughters moors at a shambling dock made of tilting floats nailed with roof shingles. As we pull up Keira checks out the window, all the while slicing and chopping. At the very last second she dashes out onto the deck and climbs the gunnels with a fat, blue mooring line in her fist.
On shore, we find a cluster of rambling structures. An old camp situated on a gravelly landing amid tangles of salmonberry bush, alder, and cottonwood switches pushing in at the edges of a disused gravel parking lot. A cabin painted the governmental peanut brown used on buildings throughout national parks of Canada. A few dented Atco trailers parked behind.
Two men live here, engineers who drill and feed explosives down into rock. They blow up the land’s inconveniences so that the roads can go in. They come out to greet us wearing down vests and Stanfield sweaters with holey elbows and the nutty, jubilant look of people who’ve spent too long alone in each other’s company. Their boat bobs at the dock, a small white motorboat, its freeboard hairy with algae. Behind this outpost there is a notch in the land, a drainage along which the logging road runs. Behind that lies a high slab of snow-covered rock, like a mauve-toned cake domed with white frosting. Inexplicably, we find a weather-beaten stuffed animal tied to the branches of a bush. A teddy bear strangled with flagging tape. A sign or a warning—there’s no way to tell.
In a few days civilian interlopers arrive in the camp. A group of five men, dressed in camo, jetted down the inlet in an aluminum boat with a roll bar and twin turbo engines. The following morning they rise at the same time we do and zoom off down the inlet, their vessel laden with Pelican cases and coolers and an ATV. Toward whatever kind of guerrilla mission they’ve come to accomplish.
Even at sea we must have days of rest, a pause for our tattered bodies. On the night off, Adam and I wander up to the ramshackle trailers with the hope of scoring time with a washing machine. We find three of these visitors on the dusty landing, standing around in a circle with beer cans in their fists. We introduce ourselves to a guy named Dale, who says he’s come all the way from Michigan. He’s a retirement-aged man wearing aviator glasses and dentures a shade too white. Dale waves toward his friend, who lifts his chin to us. The friend stands at a propane stove on a tripod, attending to some meat sizzling dryly in a lidless pressure cooker. He stirs with a fork. The tines scratch the bottom.
Dale has soft, white hands. Like his buddy, he’s still wearing a camouflage turtleneck, matching pants, and an anorak printed with foliage. The pattern reminds me of seventies upholstery. He tells us he shot a bear yesterday, and he can’t stop smiling.
A guy in a ball cap, logger sweater, and jeans materializes between our elbows. His name is Brent, and he’s a hunting guide, hired by these men to lead them to quarry. He is tall and trim with a neat goatee. He has clear blue eyes that are at the same time deeply bloodshot.
Brent shows me the dead bear—a slab of purple meat covered with a bearskin—bungeed to the rack of their ATV. The guts they left on site. The head looks like something half-alive, something between a rug and a sleeping creature. I look into its open eyes. It’s got a battle scar that gives the lower lid a sad, drooping look. The meat, Brent says, is going to be sausage. I run my hands through the fur.
Brent tells us that bears around here have pelts softer than anywhere else he’s seen. He wonders aloud if it’s because of their rich diet. As my fingers comb the bearskin, he probes me carefully in the eyes.
It was an old bear, he murmurs.
To prove this he opens the bear’s jaw and flashes some ground-down bicuspids. The bear’s mouth is bloody. He steps away and comes back with a roll of paper towels.
It’s good to cull the old ones, he assures me, wiping his fingers one by one. They kill a few cubs every spring.
The hunters discuss their quotas—one bear per person. They talk about technique and ammunition. One member of their team, their younger companion, hasn’t managed to bag anything yet.
He’s still out there, they laugh, tossing glances toward the ocean and the sunset. Trying to score.
Don’t go anywhere, Dale urges. He disappears behind the trailers and returns with a shingle-sized scrap of steel. There is a divot in it. The steel is at least an inch thick. Yesterday he took a shot at it from twenty paces, and the bullet almost penetrated. Dale begins to tell us about his gun, which, from the complexity of his description, sounds like an assassin’s instrument. It is constructed of titanium with a custom scope. Crossing the border, he tells us, he opened the hard case, and half the station’s agents came around the desk to ogle it. He shows us one of his spent shells. It’s as long as a middle finger. Adam’s eyebrows rise. Knowing Adam I’m sure he’s estimating the price tag on this trophy hunt. Yet these hunters are drinking the worst beer in the whole country, Molson Canadian, and perhaps this, too, is meant to be part of the rustic adventure experience. I wonder if we can wrest some of it from their clutches. As soon as I’ve glanced at their beverages, they shove two ice-cold cans into our hands. It’s the first beer we’ve tasted in at least a few weeks that hasn’t been lukewarm. It goes down quick and frosty.
Brent hosts high-ticket hunting treks all year round. Bears in the Canadian summer. Cougars in the Russian winter. You track them up the trails through the snow, he says. And then they set the dogs loose.
Brent, I guess, is as shrewd a businessman as he is a bushman. This place is for him, as it is for us, a living. At the moment he’s primed to catch the truth before it slips from our mouths: it’s not really hunting. We see scat heaped in disconcertingly large piles. We spot ursine shapes from the rails of the Daughters, grazing the shores at low tide. We see them from the truck windows. When they run from our bumpers their fur quivers, rippling with blubber and muscle underneath. We bumble into bears when we’re wearing neon orange vests and singing at the top our lungs. We run into bears, and we don’t even want to. We’re practically tripping over them.
Have you guys seen any bears up there? Dale asks, opening his palm to the deep end of the inlet.
No, Adam says without hesitation. Not a single one.
Our beers are empty. My arms are filled with clothes hot from the dryer. It’s time to go.
Come back, they beckon. Bring all your girlfriends. We’ll build a big old fire.
ONCE UPON a time, our primate forebears lived not only among the trees but in them. Eventually they swung down from the boughs and became ground dwellers, living in the treed fringes for shelter and protection. Back then we were hunter-gatherers, a sustenance phase that dominated our prehistory for more than a million years. Hominids didn’t need to disturb the forests to forage, though sometimes they burned clearings to encourage the flourishing of favored foods. Mostly they kept on the move, exhausting local stores of game before picking up their walking sticks. About 250,000 years ago, we were only one million humans living in roving clusters. Our footprints were not great, and nature absorbed our traces.
A mere eight thousand years ago, we discovered gardening. We settled down and became home-dwelling denizens of villages and city-states, passionate about our homelands and territorial about our terroirs. With the shift from hunting to agriculture, people moved away from the forest, since crops require sunlight, irrigation, and the borrowed fertility of alluvial plains. With husbandry came pastures. And then came the cutting of forests, since both crops and trees demanded dirt so wholly there was little room for sharing. Our minds began to change about the woodlands.
Beyond the protection of city walls, the forest concealed dangers—wild animals, darkness, and disorientation. In our fables and folktales the wilderness is an unfriendly realm, a place of deep, existential terrors. It’s where crazy people go to wander alone. Where the guilty end up when they’ve been cast away from the tribe. In Greek and Roman myth it is the site of dissolution and metamorphosis, where humans transform into hybrid abominations—the human horse, the pungent goat-man. In the mythic wilds we encounter chaos and decay. And lust. There isn’t a vestal virgin who enters the woods alone and comes out with her white robes clean. The wilderness is where you sleepwalk, where you stray, where you lose yourself in unconscious Neanderthal taboo.
The forest breeds aggressive florae as well. In our fairy tales beanstalks rise monstrously from cursed seeds. Whole cities grow over with thorns and thickets. There is something malevolent in the vegetative entropy that lurks at our civic fringes, in the weeds that creep along the far side of the moat. It is as if the wilderness seeks to reclaim what we’ve hammered and carved from its heart. And so we must remain forever vigilant with our brooms, torches, and scythes. All over the world, animistic monsters of the wild symbolize the threat of this backslide. The yeti of the Himalaya, the Sasquatch, bigfoot, and the abominable snowman. The ignoble savage who’d once been human before being snatched back by the jaws of evolutionary time.
It’s a remarkable contrast, in our paved and climate-controlled world, that creatures can still be deadly. Great white sharks and komodo dragons, box jellyfish and saltwater crocodiles. Another beast that still lurks in this liminal twilight is Ursus arctos horribilis. The grizzly bear. Perhaps grizzlies still inspire fear because of the way we come across them in the wild—often enough, by accident. A twig snaps. Something ominously large crashes unseen through the underbrush. Or a grizzly appears in silence, a lumbering shadow in our peripheral vision. We glimpse a long sweep of brown fur. The silvery shoulders and wet lips. And if we are close enough, two beady, unfathomable eyes. The mind can’t quite believe what the senses register until all the parts coalesce into one creature: Bear.
Sometimes we arrive at work to find grizzly bears hanging out at our tree caches, snuffling among our boxes, occasionally thrashing the cardboard to bits. We catch them sauntering down the roads, since the flat gravel surface provides easy conveyance for them, too. We have seen some of the biggest bears of our lives at the back end of Jervis Inlet. We startle them with our engines, and they run ahead of our grilles. They are as wide as refrigerators and as tall as our truck hoods, all muscle and shuddering pelt. They run at a brisk lope but can easily keep up with a vehicle.
To see one from the cab of a moving truck is one thing. To encounter one when we are on foot and alone, without weapons or armor or even pepper spray—that’s quite another story. Whenever I wander into a bear’s company, I can’t help but stop breathing. It must be the paralysis of squirrels when they smell a wolf. A kick from the ancient brain.
North American bears come in a range of colors from black to brown to cinnamon to vanilla. The white-coated Kermode is a genetically recessive black bear that roams isolated parts of northern British Columbia. Grizzlies are bigger than black bears and less common. At birth a grizzly can weigh as little as a loaf of bread. Full grown, it can be as heavy as a Harley Davidson motorcycle and run at speeds approaching thirty-five miles per hour. These bears are the largest terrestrial carnivore on the continent. In the world, they are second only to the polar bear.
They may be legendarily toothy beasts, but grizzlies eat mostly plants. In the spring they consume leafy greens and skunk cabbage. In the fall they gorge on berries. In Western Canada they congregate to claw spawning salmon right out of streams. The fish carcasses they leave behind on the forest floor are a source of fertilizer, imported all the way from the sea. Occasionally a grizzly will take down an elk or a deer. They will eat carrion or steal another animal’s kill. They’re opportunistic feeders. Traditionally bears have found garbage dumps quite appealing.
Grizzlies are mostly solo animals, and their distribution on the ground is often thin. Males can occupy a territory of up to seven hundred square miles in order to fulfill their significant caloric requirements or to home in on females during mating season. Like many animals whose numbers are dwindling—martens, red squirrels, and caribou included—grizzlies are sensitive to wildfires and clear-cut logging, all those encroachments that shrink their habitat. Like so many reclusive creatures, they like deep wilderness, space, and quiet. They like an old, mature forest to stomp around in.
Grizzly bears may dabble with humans, but they prefer to live deep in the wild, far beyond highways and settled outskirts. When their travel corridors are cut or roaded or interrupted by cut blocks or golf courses, they retreat. Their numbers shrink whenever they are marooned in ecoreserves or in parks with impermeable boundaries. They need space the way birds need all of the air. Grizzlies move with the seasons, across big sweeps of land as well as up and down the mountainsides. Their territory once extended through the western American states into Mexico and spread as far east as the prairies. Now they are found only in pockets of the contiguous United States, in Alaska, and in Canada’s westernmost provinces.
Although it may seem as if grizzly attacks are on the rise, mostly it’s the headlines that grab our fascination. Grizzly bears seldom go looking for a fight. They don’t need to. They’re the kings of the forest. They will charge and maul if they are defending their food or young or if they are taken by surprise. They steer clear of any place that smells like humans, for pretty good reasons. In 1805 Lewis and Clark shot at grizzlies before they had even seen one up close—also, perhaps, for good reason—before western biologists even knew what grizzlies were. If a bear tussles with a person, its fate is sealed. It may win the battle, but tomorrow it will be hunted.
EVENTUALLY WE work our way to the back of the inlet, the mudflats where nobody likes to go. Back here, pregnant cumulus clouds dump rain as if it were Miracle-Gro. The valleys are always socked in with fog. Decadent vegetation gushes up from every available crevice. Club mosses that look like furry vines. Slimy liverworts. Ferns sprout from the smallest pockets of dirt, crooks high up in the trees and cracks in boulders. The ditch ponds are skimmed with rainbows of algae. Bear dung lies all over the roads, as if the bears were trying to tell us something.
We drive away from the beach, across a mucky landing. The trucks spin and fishtail just to escape it. We climb from sea level out onto the spidering roads. This place is a whispering remnant. The logging was done years ago, and the camp has now been dismantled. No skidders or yarders or barreling haul trucks, just the strange quiet of fallow land redoubling and gathering strength.
We park on a switchback. Our crew stands around in the fog, stomping our feet down into boots. We await the thump of blades, the helicopter from the base in Sechelt. Some big noise to scare the bears away on the ridges beyond the trees, to cut up the clammy roar of this place, which K.T. likes to say is the sound of getting lost.
Adam comes at me and K.T., his hands cluttered with objects.
You two, he says.
He gives me an ink-scratched map, a golf pencil, and a radio in a chest holster. Plus a plot cord, which means K.T. and I won’t see anyone until the helicopter swoops down to collect us at the end of the day.
This is your mission, Adam adds, should you choose to accept it.
We have a choice? K.T. asks.
Not really, says Adam.
K.T. and I have been to work in helicopters a hundred times, and it never loses its thrill. Sometimes we lift off and set down on helipads crafted by loggers, their stringers made from planed hemlock logs. Often there are no landing pads. Then the machines hover down onto big stumps or abandoned trunks. We push our gear out the open door, then step out gingerly onto the skids. We’re blasted by rotor wash. We throw ourselves down into the salal and the woody shrubs, hoping for something other than a hidden stump to cushion our landings. Sometimes our pickups are no less exciting. Our pilots can’t find us in the mist. Or they can’t find anywhere to set down that isn’t too steep or jumbled up with slash, no slope with enough clearance for their long rotor blades. JetRangers. A-Stars. Hughes 500s. For the most part we are assigned excellent pilots. Some are exmilitary. They’re undaunted by wind or fog or tight, obstructed openings in the trees. They have to be this way. The logging pushes higher toward the mountain peaks, deeper into the bush, beyond the reach of any road.
When the time comes, K.T. and I load our baggage into the helicopter’s cargo boot. We climb in. The chopper lifts off. Once we’re in the air we see nothing but the inside of a cloud, gauzy light beaming from all directions. Thin streams of water bead down the plastic dome of the canopy. It’s a short flip. We’re in the air less than five minutes before we begin to descend. The outlines of a cut block coalesce through the mist. We see a light green bowl of land, surrounded by spiky green treetops. An old cut, a plantation started years ago by another crew but never finished.
The helicopter sets its skids down on an old road. Adam has told me it washed out in a mudslide somewhere down the line. We get out and give our thumbs up, and the helicopter flies away. We breathe in jet fuel fumes. And when those drift off we can still see our breath, as if the machine’s blades thrashed all the warmth from the air.
Our supply of seedlings came in a netted sling earlier in the shift, the same way babies are delivered by storks. K.T. and I stand with our heads bent together peering at our map, the paper dotted with raindrops blown down from the trees. What appeared to be just a tiny creek on paper is actually a gushing waterfall. Its flow crashes down like a crowd stomping its feet. Low-lying clouds waft and curdle. We can throw a stick farther than we can see.
We make a plan to penetrate the outermost fingers of the clear-cut and work our way back to the center. First, we cut through a riparian strip, a margin of trees left behind along the creek. We wade through in our caulk boots, soaking ourselves to the knees before we’ve even begun. Our feet find purchase between the stones. The water flows a frothy white, at once heavy and effervescent. If we fall in so early in the day, we’ll have to work in a fury to stay warm.
On the other side we arrive in a tiny pocket of clear-cut, fringed with tall trees. The fog thickens. I get a feeling, a hunch at once familiar and peculiar. A prickling at the back of my neck. My ears are full with thundering water, and the air is like vaporized milk. We are two senses short. This land is what people like to call big country. So huge I wonder how two living creatures might ever cross paths. Still, a shiver passes over my scalp. I get the feeling we’re not alone.
So does K.T.
Let’s stick together, he says.
We go to work, down a steep neck of the cut. We plant trees in long lines, horizontally with the contours of the land. We work like knitters at the same sweater, bumping up to each other and then turning away. When we meet in the middle, we share flecks of conversation before drifting out of earshot.
There’s a cougar over there, says K.T. with suspicious nonchalance, nodding toward the trees.
Really? I gasp.
Yeah, he tells me, she had frosted hair and acid-wash jeans. She wouldn’t let me go until I gave her what she wanted.
Funny, I say. Really hilarious.
He likes to find ways to make people laugh, me especially. If I don’t crack easily, he’ll work relentlessly at splitting my sides. Does it not show mettle? A sense of humor in a place like this? Might it not be the measure of a cut-block companion, a lifelong partner in crime? We inch up the hillside together. We both wear Pioneer raincoats, exactly the same kind, like matching tourists. My radio, in its harness, crackles and burbles with the chatter of distant crewmates.
Once we’ve finished, we cross back over the creek to refill our bags. The mist blows through in patches, skimming our faces, as we march down the road, like millions of tiny cold bubbles. K.T. walks ahead of me with a purposeful stomp. When his heels lift, I see the caulks flash on his boot soles. They’re worn flat and polished, since he hasn’t gotten around to changing them. It can only mean he’s tired of planting trees.
We pass through a strange smell, a musky blend of wet dog and old garbage. We slow down. K.T. rounds the hillside. He freezes into a full-body flinch. He holds his hand out to stop me in my tracks.
Cubs, he says.
K.T. starts into a crouched, backwards walk. And because he retreats, I do, too, without asking questions. We reverse like two people trying hard not to break into a run. We return to the creek, scanning for signs of motion. K.T. reports what he witnessed. Three cubs, this year’s brood, no bigger than basketball sneakers. They have black-brown fur, so young they wobble more than walk. He admits he didn’t see the mother bear. Without a doubt, she’s close by. A black bear, he guesses, from the look of the cubs.
We wait for another few minutes for the mother to show her signs, but no one comes, not even the wandering babies. We decide she must be busy ripping into our packed lunches. We decide to climb down into the cut block, to put the log jumble at the roadside between us and trouble. We pick our way down through the slash and then into the standing timber that borders the stream. The ground is cleaner here, and if need be we’ll have a better chance at running, even though we know we’ll never outpace a bear. They’re old trees, massive trunks moaning and swaying above us in the wind—useless for climbing, since the nearest branches are a hundred feet up.
Bears can smell rotting meat from miles away. They can sniff a human’s footfalls hours after the trail has been hiked. There’s so much air churning around today, surely the mother bear has picked up our scent. Surely the waft of our lunches attracted her in the first place. We hunker down to wait. K.T. and I stare up at the road for so long I get a crick in my neck. In our idleness we glance around at the clear-cut that surrounds us.
Wow, says K.T. It’s really creamy down here.
A conundrum presents itself. We have more trees to plant, more household wage to collect, but we can’t do much with a bear in the way. But that doesn’t stop our daily itch, our possessiveness of the land. There’s opportunity in risk. It’s why fishermen head out into storms for one last turn with the nets. It’s why we’ll overstay our welcome in a bear’s backyard, after it’s warned and huffed and even charged us.
Do you think she’s gone now? I ask.
We could check, says K.T.
In the midst of our discussion, we catch sight of the sow, who has climbed a promontory of slash. A tall brown bear with shoulder humps and an enormous black snout. A grizzly.
Guess those weren’t black bear cubs, says K.T.
On regular days, not much of anything happens. But when the plot starts to move, it avalanches. Now my blood zings with adrenaline. A knob of fright pushes up in my throat. The sensation is not entirely unpleasant. In all my time planting trees, I’ve seen only one other grizzly, and it sprinted away as soon I came close. But never a family. I know I’ll be sorry if I don’t get to see the cubs. A part of me, anyhow.
This bear’s fur is the color of butterscotch. She breathes steam and shakes like a dog from head to rump. The droplets fly in a silvery corona. If it weren’t for the roar of the creek I’m sure we’d hear her sniffing. With her puffy face and low, pinched brow it seems as if she’s wearing a facial expression I can only describe as weary vigilance, the look of single motherhood in the animal kingdom.
She definitely knows we’re here, says K.T.
Bear alert, I say into my radio.
Adam comes on the radio. Can you work around it? he asks.
It’s a grizzly, I reply. Three little. One very big.
We’re coming, says Adam.
Our helicopter pilot drops into the conversation. Tell me what the fog is doing, he wants to know.
I’m unsure how to answer, because every few seconds it lifts and lowers, like diaphanous stage curtains.
It’s variable, I say.
K.T. and I devise a hasty contingency plan. If the helicopter can’t make it in we’ll walk down to the valley along the creek. We’ll hope we don’t run into geographic dead ends, cliffs, or raging river torrents.
The mother bear climbs down from her perch and disappears. After the radio chatter falls away all we can do is wait for the helicopter to arrive. We listen to the breeze comb what’s left of the trees. Canopy rain spatters down on our cheeks. We feel a little helpless.
The mother bear reappears at the edge of the road. This time, she’s closer. Her nose works the air. She’s “looking” for us. The breath falls to the pit of my lungs, and everything around us, all the wet branches and glossy leaves, recede into a grainy middle distance. They look both extra vivid and not quite real, as if we were watching a documentary film.
I hear the beating of distant helicopter blades and feel a wash of ambivalent relief, because now we have a new problem.
I hope the pilot sends her running in the right direction, says K.T.
We are in the trees at nine o’clock, I say into my radio.
The sound of the helicopter emerges from somewhere deep in the valley, echoing in the trees of the upper forest. The noise grows stronger until it pounds over our heads, whisking the air around. The machine descends through the clouds. I catch sight of the black registration letters on its underbelly. The pilot has removed the cockpit door, as they often do in the fog. He leans out into the open air to get a clearer view and hovers down over the middle of the cut block.
I see it, the pilot says through the radio.
After that, I lose the thin dribble of the pilot’s voice. There is simply too much thrashing, metal and echoes and slices of cutup atmosphere. We hear the engine come down a few notes and know it’s time to move. K.T. and I climb up to the road meet it.
A helicopter, with its turbo-powered strength and guillotine-sharp rotors can be an intimidating hunk of machinery, even for a human. In an attempt to frighten her away, the pilot buzzes the grizzly, lowering to just a few feet above her head. The cubs scuttle. Their mother rears on her hind legs and gives the air beneath the helicopter a swipe with her claws. Then she drops to the ground and heaves herself away.
Once she’s left the scene the pilot settles the helicopter onto the road. We jog to meet it. On our way we stop to snatch up our bags. They’ve been gashed open, ransacked, and left to fill up with drizzle. We duck into the helicopter and clip into our seatbelts. As we lift, we see this grizzly family in the midst of their escape. The cubs dart between their mother’s legs and hide beneath her torso. They run like this, sheltered by the bulk of her body. She’s a thin bear, we see from the air, her fat stores whittled down from hibernation, pregnancy, and lactation. She climbs up and away between the stumps, fleeing with her brood between the tender stems of a juvenile plantation.
The helicopter rises to altitude. It peels away from the mountainside in a stomach-tugging nosedive. K.T. and I huddle in the back seat. With the open door, we’re blasted by the wind, wet, and cold. The pilot makes chatter through the headphones, and I answer his questions in a post-adrenal daze. We pass through veils of rain. When we emerge on the other side I see nappy treetops. The clear-cuts like jigsaw puzzle pieces, the little green lakes in the distance. All of it so repetitiously tiny, so inconsequential from above.
In a few minutes, we set down on a road I’ve never visited before, a valley bottom with greened stump fields rising on either side. We alight with our tattered luggage, and then the helicopter swoops away to attend to other members of our crew. The air is warmer here. We catch sight of one of our trucks parked in the distance. We see the same old accoutrements of the job, stacked tree boxes, our crewmates working, oblivious to the events of our day. We kick around in the gravel, waiting for Adam to arrive. I feel odd, not quite inside myself, my brain not yet caught up with the sudden safety of this new locale. I’m really hungry.
We dig through our packs to assess the losses. The outer layers of scrim-reinforced vinyl have been shredded into strips. Each ribbon measures the width between the mother bear’s claws. The contents are rain soaked. From all our belongings, we salvage two dry shirts. Our lunches have been devoured, the containers cracked and crushed, the teeth marks still visible in the plastic. At the bottom of his bag K.T. finds one intact sandwich. He opens the box, and the air between us fills with the yeasty whiff of fresh bread. He ponders the sandwich momentarily and then tears it in half. He sizes up each of the pieces in his hands and takes the smaller one for himself. We push bread into our mouths. We stand like this on an open road, a hundred miles from our home in Vancouver, looking into each other’s face. We chew without talking.
Last year we read a story in the news about a bear attack on two hikers. They were a married couple. The bear lunged first for the wife, knocking her to the ground with a single blow of its paw. It chomped down on her shoulder and dragged her into the bush. The husband ran away. To find help, he claimed afterward. But we knew the truth of it. He ran in blind terror to save himself. It wasn’t his fault. Life and death and wild animals. You never know what kind of person you’ll be.
Would you have run? I asked.
Never, said K.T.
When else might we ask such strange and illuminating questions were it not for planting trees?
It’s just cheese and lettuce, says K.T. now.
It always is, I reply.
The sandwich. So bland and loathed every other day of the week. But today, because it’s all we have, it tastes like the best thing I have ever eaten. It tastes like the perfect food, comforting and substantial. It reminds me why the loaf is the most ceremonial of human staples, made to be broken and shared.
K.T. and I watch three of our crewmates toil away in the distance. They work abreast, tumbling over a rise, cascading down toward the road. They’re running out of land, shouting at each other while they battle it out for the narrowing remains. A diesel truck rumbles toward us. It’s the battered red truck, whose coils we’ve got to heat three times before it will start in the mornings. Soon we’ll be back out in the field.
The sun beams humidly behind a gruel of clouds. Blood beats in our ears. Our salivary glands gush. We hear our breath whistle through our inner passageways. My heart still gallops in my chest, pulsing blood up through my neck. I seldom pay attention to this tireless organ. But still, it will thump away without pause or fail—if I am lucky—for the better part of a century. Life rushes up in its mortal constituent parts. A he. A she. A sandwich torn in two.