So long, Mum. I watched the unfolding landscape from the window of my Via Rail car, the train reined in as we trundled out of the city over the oil-infused railway ties, past the old roundhouse. I saw GO trains filled with concerned white collars (managing all that had been made, all that irrevocable construct) from Whitby and Pickering, hurtling in beside us. I looked over, as we passed them, at the still-standing but decrepit red CNR cars, fading to orange, bleeding rust. Quickly the urbanscape gave way to an array of carefully positioned housing subdivisions, mile upon mile, a conundrum of suburbia, a landscape in which the forests had been hastily removed to make way for a progression of hideous and ever more hideous “homes,” sod laid and then cut into natural-appearing curves, to make way for new, improved forests — the tidy, preconceived gardens of our civilized imaginations. And then these communities ended, and a new view unfurled — the scattered plywood, Ty-Veked, do-it-yourself cabins of the impoverished hopeful or the once-flush-but-now-worried unemployed. The Ty-Vek, or sometimes tarpaper, had begun to pull off, three or four surly hounds were chained to a single peeling particleboard kennel. These gardens had no sod, just trampled, self-sown clumps of crabgrass that may or may not hide slightly decayed dog shit. And then these hopeless abodes gave way to the odd trailer park, and then nothing, or rather nothing and then clusters of pink and white aluminum-sided Victorians minus the charm of stained glass and fancy brick, and amidst these, a little converted bungalow barely edible edibles — chips, candy bars, sticky artificially reddened cherries covered in chocolate and possibly housing, like the one I once to my fascination and dismay purchased, a small colony of fervent caffeinated ants hauling wads of goop out though a small chewed tear in the corner of the box.
Powassan, Matachewan, Manatouwadge, Kirkland Lake, Cochrane, Moonbeam, Kapuskasing, Hawk Junction, Hornepayne, Timmins, South Porcupine, Swastika, Hearst. I knew something intimate about the water table, the density of the soil, the back ways of all these places now. I knew the particulars of four-square-inch land parcels, each on each, severed worms, the propensity for the propagation of insect life, the likelihood of a moose sighting and further not much. There were little stores (Jack and Jills), Husquavarna outlets selling chainsaws and snowmobiles and motor oil, subsistence craft stores filled with ingenious banana holders and corner-dadoed shelves jigsawed into familiar patterns. There were used-book stores filled with cheap Harlequins and even cheaper stray copies of Omar Khayyam, Salinger, and once a well-thumbed Johnny Got His Gun, which I bought for ten cents. I knew the awe-filled, beautiful sensation of looking at the skies up there, the cumulus packed flat and tight — imagined clouds, close, so close overhead.
I knew a little about the Indians, their wily tricks on us foolish colonials. Getting on the bus in North Bay, exhausted, I watched a family, an extended family, maybe twenty Cree board the bus — the Naugahyde sweat, the white plastic upholstery piping, the invigorating diesel fumes. They sat down chatting, then rose in pairs to move bags into the upper storage, shifting these same and then retrieving them. They hugged and patted heads in farewell. This whole operation extended well into the departure time, while the white driver waited patiently, nodding with some nostalgic recognition of familial love, the spirit of Indian-ness or what-have-you, and this smile twisted as he tried to comprehendthe situation, as the family hugged again and went about their so-longs, climbing out of the bus and then back on with more parcels to stow and then, in turn, to unstow on the chrome shelf. Elders and children sat and then switched to perhaps more comfortable seats in a never-ending reconfiguration of replacement until all at once, the bus now twenty minutes off schedule, the entire lot disembarked, chattering, laughing, waving cans of just-cracked-open Coca-Cola, brown liquid spilling, laughter, as the bus steamed into gear, diesel spurt, and tooted a tired goodbye to all, to every single last one. I sank into my seat and watched the tree size dwindle incrementally as we drove north. The majestic acacia, oak, beech and maple forests around Toronto gave way to forests of dead coniferous stems standing in swampy lowlands and row-on-row plantations of spindly spruce. Ontario. It was familiar, a known place, unsurprising in its beauty and its squalor. It was, it had always been, and after a time I did not really mark it as important. It just was.
What woke me was the hiss of air brakes and the still, open air — that simultaneous smell of decay and milled wood permeating everything. I rubbed my eyes, ran my fingers through my hair by way of waking up. I was to meet the crew at the Hearst Motor Inn, but I was hours too early. I took a taxi from the station to town, hauled my gear into the motel, argued for ten minutes with the surly, obese, stringy-haired woman at the desk until she agreed to keep my gear until the crew arrived.
I ain’t taking no responsibility fer lost er stolen items here, she called out as I walked away.
S’good.
I roamed along the highway and breathed in the resinous odour the sawmill gave off, marvelled at the sawdust mountains, which rose out of the earth like huge orange breasts, wondered at the orderliness of the stacks of two-by-fours and one-by-threes piled just so under corrugated rooftop shelters. Along the highway, out of the ditches, a few groggy blackflies were already emerging, and as I had not anointed myself with repellent, I was forced to keep walking, swinging my arms about me to spoil their feasting. I gave up wandering the streets of Hearst after a couple of rounds. It was a desolate place. I sat on a concrete curb in the paved, nearly bug-free parking lot of the motor inn to eat a soft ice cream cone (chocolate-vanilla twirl tasting of cold air and petroleum) purchased at the snack bar stationed at the lot’s edge — a trailer on concrete blocks — and I waited.
Indoor-outdoor carpeting makes a damn fine mulch.
I squinted into the sun. A small, elderly man, tanned a deep, dirty brown, balding in patches, wearing a green felt vest, leaning out the driver’s door, had backed his car into the lot and almost parked on my toes. I watched him go over to the trailer and buy a small fries that he doused with vinegar, salt and an ungodly quantity of ketchup. He called to me from across the lot, waving the box of fries about for emphasis.
You wouldn’t mind if I sat down with you? A couple of potato strips cascaded to the starlings ready for them. He nestled his narrow ass beside me on the concrete slab.
May I?
The smell of vinegar had the not unpleasant effect of pulling the gumflesh up away from my front teeth. I helped myself. We spoke of gardening, a topic he seemed to know a lot about. He gestured to his rusted Honda Civic and the roll of grassy wall-to-wall carpeting sticking through the open hatch.
Remnants, he said. You cut it in long strips and lay it nice between the rows of beans and what-have-you. It’s a beautiful thing. Nothing grows through that. Nothing at all. I get it for free from a place in the Kap. Installer name of Bruce. I can get you some if you like?
He had disappeared by the time Ortwin and the crew pulled up — three crummies and a white four-by-four truck filled with a dishevelled crew, the novices’ skin swollen with its first taste of blackfly coagulant, the others, some of whom I recognized — Karl, Joe and Ed, Clara — filthy, hair matted with sweat buildup, twigs, earth and bugs. They piled out, legs and legs and more legs, the endlessness of circus clowns. Some were quiet, some whooping for no clear reason, some stretching after the long ride to town. The horrendous sight gave me a sudden if fleeting sense of belonging.
Cliques did form in these large crews, gossip abounded, people came and went, friendship was transitory. This was the sort of job one was attracted to because it was not normal, did not presuppose social skills or the ability to function. It was a swirl of people, working apart together. There was no particular reason to make friends. It interfered with one’s focus on making money. But for that first hour, I acted as if I didn’t know this. I smiled, hugged. How are you? My God you look great! And I half meant it, not fully expecting the quick falling away of good temper in the field the next day, the facts returning as I slowly, bodily remembered them — the bugs, the cold, the rain, the heat, the bending, the money, the money, the money, the smell of mud, the crusting of clay beneath the fingernails. The memory of earlier times would seep back into me as the muscles in my body strained against that half-forgotten physicality, treeplanting.
Hey, freak show.
It was Joe and Ed in unison. They held my hair up on either side while Ortwin, the crew boss, took a Polaroid, his perfect biceps gleaming white from his cap-sleeve T-shirt. The picture came out swell. I was camouflaged, my hair just about the same chemical orange as the Chevy vans. A colour not found in nature.
The crew got rooms in the motor inn, raced to the laundromat with the week’s crusted work clothing. Everyone milled about town for a few hours and then converged at the Hearst discotheque; it was the only game in town. The locals wore bleached-white blouses to make themselves gleam fluorescent blue under the strobe light. We laughed at them flitting about in their convoluted mating dances as if they were an ethnological TV show, as if we were somehow above the same behaviour. I was anxious and bored. I wanted to get to work, to get out in the field again.
Karl sat down on the bar stool beside me and patted my hand, told me how much he missed me, how this year he would show me his true colours, that love was often slow burning, and didn’t I agree? I admit I may have led him on, that I smiled encouragingly, that I enjoyed watching him make a fool of himself. All actions have consequences. With the privilege of hindsight, I can now see that.
Your hair like spun straw, he whispered. Your skin the white of purity . . .