Jake asks me to tell him about treeplanting. I tell him about the first time. It is a safe story. I was twenty, visiting a friend one morning, when his overnight guest came down the stairs, saying, Hello, goodbye. He stood there momentarily in the diffused light of early May. The gleam softened the military appearance of his khaki army pants, the olive drab, many-pocketed surplus jacket. From his massive backpack hung a dibble shovel, but I didn’t know the name for it yet. Planting sacks, along with other necessities of wilderness living, were strapped on with a crisscross of colourful bungee cords. I wanted him. No. I wanted to be him. Whatever it was he was, I wanted that.
What are you? I said.
Where am I going, you mean?
No, what are you? A soldier?
No. I’m a treeplanter. He shifted his pack and his chest puffed out.
A what?
Johnny Appleseed, he said. Only with trees.
I scoured the want ads, and when I saw, some days later, a small, semi-literate advertisement for treeplanters, no exp. nec., will train, I called and enthusiastically declared my adeptness at gardening, thrilling to my own air-brushed rendering of a weekend I’d spent years before hauling gravel and stone screenings around the family home with my mother and father and laying an appalling interlock patio. I proclaimed myself to be a hard worker, and the man at the other end seemed to believe me. I found out later that the only reason he hired me was to keep Esther, his underfed girlfriend, company. Together, over a platter of fries and ketchup at a little diner called Mars, he and Esther interviewed me. Could they not hear from the shrill falseness in my eager voice that I had no idea?
Here’s a list of things, they said.
Things?
Yes, you’ll need them.
With three college boys and a collie-shepherd-spaniel dog and all the gear, I piled into the back of a double-cab panel truck which, it turned out, was borrowed from an uncle for the season, with admonishments that it not be scratched. We drove and drove, deep into Canada. I acted natural, while Esther, in the front passenger seat, turned around to tell us of her various allergic sensitivities, including milk, eggs and nuts, sunshine, dust, wheat and possibly corn, and that there better be a health food store where we were going. Otherwise, she didn’t know what she was going to do.
Oh and bee sting, she said. But I keep a kit, so don’t you worry.
We drove and drove. Day gave way to night, the sky was blue then black. The forest was a jagged blackness against the black. We followed the road’s sway, the inertial pull of curving highway pressing us into one another. I fell in and out of droning sleep and half-caught conversation, excited and exhausted in the getting-to-know-you-all phase of the thing, gauging my ability to live in close quarters with these people. By journey’s end, I hated Esther and also one of the college boys, who played a great deal of tennis and studied Russian and filled the truck cab with a brooding Bolshevik atmosphere. He may have been mad.
We are going to Siberia, you know? he kept saying. It will be cold; it will be deathly miserable. Do you know what they think of women in Siberia? He stared at me with a darkened look, which I mistook for humour. I burst out laughing.
They kill the women like that when they discover them. First they rape, he said, moving his hands up and down some imaginary body. Then they kill, he continued. You’re a fool to come here.
The fourteen-hour drive had given me a jarring, hallucinatory inner hum. I hummed. Early morning mist rose in wisps from the earth. The truck pulled into a small clearing, into the landscape of deforestation. We were on a logging road an hour’s drive deep in the backwoods, the dust just settling. A Ministry of Natural Resources truck was waiting for us. The forester got out and pointed into the bush with his shovel. He handed us each a treebag, a slung-over-the-shoulder affair, not unlike an old postal sack, along with a heavy utility shovel. It was the antithesis of the gear I witnessed on my iconic treeplanter, that stranger at my friend’s house, the vision I had maintained of tree-planterness.
I geared up as best I could and began to walk. I walked as if in a dream that was all too real. The mud stuck to my boots and pulled me down into the earth. We walked for an hour through quagmires, bramble and nettle over ungraded pathways deeper and deeper into the bush; we followed the squelch of tire tracks, the stink of upturned earth for kilometres, forest on either side, the birds within crying out their worry and dismay. They had seen figures like us before. I tried to keep up with the others, to remain cool, to relax into the desperation I felt.
Then the forest began to dwindle in the most horrific manner. Spruce and pine had been plowed over in heaps along the edge of the woods. Corridors became suddenly apparent, formed by the massacre of other trees now pushed aside in rows. I looked hard into these strange alleyways, trying to make sense of the destruction. Stumps had been brutally ripped from the earth and turned upside down into piles, no trees standing. The land rose and fell in sublime hills and valleys, its skin tortured, scarified, scarred by ridges of debris which had been cleared away to facilitate our work. A large bull moose abruptly turned and ran into the darkness of the far distant forest. The Russian student whispered under his breath.
We will overtake them by sundown, he said. Esther giggled nervously.
It was the silence that amazed me, the expansive quietness of it. The birds seemed to have evacuated this place. It was empty. I weighed the cost of my gear against turning back. Which way to go? I looked around and knew I could not leave. I was trapped, in debt for hundreds of dollars from the purchases I had made. A sensation of agoraphobia overcame me. I had never been so exposed before, so in the open, so impossibly imprisoned by the wide world. The Russian student stood slightly behind Esther and the crew boss. He was crying. The others milled about like a herd, kicking at clumps of earth, pressing their shovels into the frozen ground. I imagined a frisson to our collective fear and felt a sudden, unaccountable kinship with these people. We turned, as eager flowers to the sun, and stared at the man who had hired us. He wore a baseball cap that I suddenly recognized as silly, infantile, worrisome and worn backwards. What appealed to me about this man? Why had I trusted him? How did I know he had brought me here for the express purpose of planting trees? What sick plot might be in store for me? And then, why did I want this exactly? Why was I so persuasively intrigued by that stranger in a doorway, that sun-drenched unknown with his military demeanour and his claim to the legacy of some eccentric American orchardist?
We were taught the T cut and then the L cut, all with our ludicrous government-issue shovels, weighing a ton. I desperately tried to make these cuts swiftly while simultaneously finding room in the little hole I had made for the endless, overgrown sapling taproot. I wound the devilish appendage carefully around itself and tried to keep the ground open long enough to set it gently in, my coordination tried to the limits of Atlas, holding up not the sky but the earth, even this little speck of it, trying beyond its own willingness to nurture.
Why should I penetrate this body? Who asked me to interfere? And for all that, I persevered. Inside a week, I went from earning a dollar seventy-five a day to earning twenty-one dollars. I enjoyed an idealism that was unconvincing in light of the trouble to which I was being put. I knew nothing, understood nothing of what I was doing. I did not know, for instance, that these tree saplings were harvested from one mother tree, that they were über-trees. If one happened to carry disease, they would all die. I believed myself to be nature’s little helper. My naïveté was astounding. It slowed me down. I stopped and smiled at the pretty trail of trees and a feeling of quaint smugness washed over me. It was only halfway through the season, when I put that idealism away, that do-goodery, that saving Mother Earth, that I began to earn above my camp costs.
He left the contract early. The Russian student. He came out of the woods one day wearing a pith helmet covered in a faded, Muskol-doused red T-shirt. He held his shovel as if it was a rifle and fell to the ground like a young boy, making the sound of machine-gun fire somewhere in the space at the back of his throat, reeling back in fake agony as the enemy bullets hit him about the shoulders. He screamed in realistic mortal pain. And his tent and his gear were gone next day, and no one mentioned him much after that. He merely disappeared, leaving the good fight to us. It was just Esther and the others then, Esther and her lack of health food, her slowly thinning physique, her declared missed periods, her nervous high-pitched laugh, her standing around proffering macerated reconstituted ham out of a roll-top tin.
Eat, she said. Eat. No allergens!
There were two types of treeplanters. The ones who came for one season and never returned and the others, who were seduced by something in the air, some drive to be bushwhacked, something primal. I was the latter. In time, I learned to think only of myself. I learned to replace the righteousness of planet nurturing with a bleak Darwinism. I began to form a hierarchy in which I was at the top. I persevered. Esther, on the other hand, had more or less given up earning anything. She contented herself by doing odd jobs for her crew-boss lover, cutting slices of ham and preparing sandwiches for the rest of us. I stared rudely, defiantly at that Spam outstretched toward me in friendly supplication. It was human weakness, sloth, self-indulgence and small-mindedness. Eager for a tidbit, the yappy dog ran around and around Esther’s legs.