Karl was in the cookshack rubbing his hands together for warmth, the stink of filthy socks drying behind the woodstove. It was a cold wet evening proceeding from a cold rainy day. We smelled of chemicals and trees and mud. I was standing near him and he did not seem threatening to me. There were other people there. I don’t remember who. We did not speak to one another, but I felt him looking at me every now and again. I saw his eyes returning to his hands, the tail end of an assessment. I had been standing there a long time, unable to heat up. I was unprepared for the rain that day and consequently was soaked to the bone, to the marrow, to the soul. My god, I was cold. Slowly, though, the thaw began and I looked about. The evening was upon me, the people who earlier huddled for warmth around the stove had dispersed. The few remaining played cards, wrote letters, hunched over their work, chatted, passed a joint slowly from one to the next. I was so tired, it was as if I were in a dream. I heard Karl say, I believe in absolutes. I am pragmatic.
An idealistic pragmatic?
I felt suddenly very young in his presence. Not in awe of him at all but sympathetic. I was sorry for him because I was young and he was not. He showed me a photograph of himself as a boy in some sort of uniform, and I sneered. It was my impression that he was wearing a Hitler Youth uniform but he wasn’t. It was a Boy Scout uniform. He pointed out this fact. Then he said that it made no difference. He might just as well have been in the Hitler Youth.
He said, I was young and young people yearn to belong.
I can’t relate to that, I said. I never wanted to belong. That’s why you are so lovely, he said, and briefly I fell for this line. I considered that he really was fond of me. I considered that he might have some integrity.
I clasped his shoulder and laughed, said, Oh Karl. He laughed too. We were laughing about the same thing and I thought how seductive kindness could be.
The shovel went in, the earthen hole gaped, the tree root was buried. A careless operation. In some spots, in little valleys in the otherwise mundane flatness of the landscape, there were still patches of snow. The shovel tinged frozen earth and the reverberation sent painful shocks up my forearm. I hoped that the MNR forester, the tree checker, would come by within a day or two and that the weather would remain static and the frost intact. If not, the ice would melt and I’d be accused of missing plantable microsites and forced to replant.
Listen up!
Ortwin, crew boss extraordinaire, was digging at a low spot in the ground. We were gathered around him for our prescribed re-indoctrination, weeks late and more or less designed to please the ministry guy who was standing off to the side, trying to keep his khakis clean and dry. He resembled an advertisement for an upscale men’s clothier, right down to the vulnerable squint. Ortwin had his weekend clothes on for some reason — maybe to impress the ministry guy. His snug velour pantsuit showed swaths of wetness where he’d walked through dew-drenched grass. The ministry guy was definitely eyeing him. Ortwin became animated, demonstrating his planting skill as a dancer might a perfect plié.
The cardinal rules of treeplanting, Ortwin announced, Okay. He rubbed his palm slowly down and down the root ball of a spruce, twiddling the root tips along his thumb and fingers.
One, he said. Never plant in sphagnum moss. Two. Never plant in bare soil. Three. Never plant in clay. And four. Never plant in a depression.
Osho muttered, I’ve been in a depression these long years. And we laughed. Osho looked around and smiled as if he hadn’t meant the joke. He may not have. His black hair was tied back with a strip of cotton T-shirt, his eyes were glazed from the coffee beans and royal bee jelly he popped for focus and from the inner darkness that was his motivation. He nervously tapped the ground with his shovel. I heard him later that day, fuck you, fuck you. He couldn’t contain his nervous energy. Osho planted like the wind, his technique a psychotic hurling of his nightly honed shovel blade. Hurl. Plant. Fuck you. Hurl. Plant. Fuck. Hurl. Plant. You. I stayed the hell out of his way.
After the field class, we went out and planted the same as we always had, each to his own. Got the trees in the ground straight enough, deep enough, good enough. The shovel went in, the earth opened, the tree root was shoved in, the boot pressed, the hole closed — rudimentary surgery. I had my own secluded tit of land, surrounded on three sides by a low, bushy natural forest and on the other by a massive slash heap piled up by a bulldozer driver as some rampaging joke; the rest of the land had been fashioned into a labyrinthine corridor system, calculated to stymie any hope of strategy for the planter. It would be impossible, I realized early on, to plant my land, trees spaced as per instruction six feet apart, without resorting to a crapshoot bagup at the end. This would involve one or possibly two large, heavy bag-ups, and then a back-breaking climb with these trees over the mountainous slash heap. It was difficult to predict how many saplings would go into the final inner nib. It would be a lowballer day and a worrisome one too. The area reeked of bear, and the wind was blowing toward the forest. Only the raccoons would hear my screams.
Paul swore and waddled about on the other side of the heap. Clara was next over from him, and he was rightly concerned about that. Further off, I could hear Van Halen harmonies on the swift, warm wind, so I knew Joe and Ed were close. The blackflies had just come out. I wiped a rivulet of blood off my forehead and another from behind my ear. The bear stink made me adrenal. There would be rain today. I was bagging out faster than normal but it didn’t much matter. I was losing so much time scaling that slash heap, the Christly jumble of thrown-away hardwood, fast-growing shrubbery, bramble and topsoil. Branches and heaved root systems shifted under me. I’d been wasting even more precious time listening to Paul as he slapped the trees against his rubber boots in an attempt to lighten the saturated roots. We met at the tree cache and he moaned about how Clara has been planting in his corridor, how he’d seen her wandering about, and how deserving he was of my sympathy since he was colour-blind and couldn’t see the damn tickertape he’d tied to every freaking marker tree along the way and still he couldn’t distinguish hers from his own and . . .
Why am I here anyway? he wailed. Why am I here? I might as well kill myself.
You can’t earn as much money in Hell, I muttered.
Money? I’m earning $53.27 a day before camp costs. I earn about three hundred dollars a day back home. That’s after taxes.
But it isn’t about the money, is it?
Paul grabbed his midriff and jiggled it lovingly. He said, I could have had liposuction for less.
Isn’t it about the planet, though?
The planet? The planet, he shouted. Two little scars, that’s all it would have taken, two little tiny scars. One here. One here. I could be home convalescing, keeping an eye on the wife. Instead I feel as if I’m the main character in an effing Kafka novel.
The wife?
Aw, feminist? Right, he said. Sure thing. Feck off. And then he wandered away, the trees in his bags shifting around his waist like a weird and ancient hula skirt.
So the bears were awake and groggy; there’d been a few sightings already. A native girl brought up in Ottawa by Chilean anthropologist watercolourists had a male black bear shadowing her for two days. She kept rushing out of her corridors, screaming. The bear was seen lumbering about along the scrub forest left by the feller-buncher, pacing back and forth, his nose high in the air, crinkled in a hyper-sniff. He couldn’t get enough of her. She became convinced it was an ancient aboriginal myth come to life, some sort of spirit show. Ortwin calmed her down, got one of the other girls to suggest she use tampons instead of pads.
She was bitter. She said, Vagina dentata. Tell him that for me. Tell him I know my fucking mythology. But she went over to tampons, mumbling about flow, and the bear eventually laid off.
Patches of grass in my area were flattened by bears. As I bent to plant, my nose caught the lingering rank stink of bear fur. I sensed them watching me, noses high, scenting me out. I sang loud songs of shifting pitch, out of tune, in the hope of discouraging any interest in me. I knew it was unusual for a black bear to attack a human. They preferred berries and small insects found beneath logs and stones, the occasional river fish. But still. The new landscape must have been troubling — trees gone, swamps rising where the ground was previously dry, lakes forming where new plants failed to thrive, and these strange bipedal animals moving about putting little trees in the ground, marking the land with their own new stinks — what could it mean? I saw blurs of motion in the forest. These may have been in my imagination, but nevertheless, to scare predation away, I belted out an old Joplin tune about acquisition. I sang at the top of my lungs in a false Texan accent and it came out better than I anticipated.
The index and third fingers of my right hand were bound together with duct tape. This was to protect them from the gnarl of root one finds as one tucks a sapling into the soil — the enduring roots of felled trees, the part the lumber companies don’t remove, for it is valueless. These roots had formed dense masses. They scraped at the hands that entered and exited the earth. The duct tape served, too, to strengthen my fingers into a little robotic dibble, very useful for the thrusting of baby trees into awaiting microsites. The rest of my hand was red, it’d sucked up the cold the earth offered this time of the year. My skin was creased with brown stains, which marked me long afterwards as some sort of gardener. Brown calluses ran along the joints of my fingers and through the top of my left palm, shovel hand. The blisters that rose there no longer caused me any grief, so far from the nerves were they. My shovel was worn down to the form of that hand, beautiful. It was noon and I had only six hundred trees in.
And Oh Lord won’t ya buy me . . . I squeezed some water down my throat, pulled my pants down for a piss, swiped at the blackflies to keep them off me, then threw my bags over my shoulder and headed back for the tree cache. There was Paul sitting on a blanched, debarked log, eating.
So, he began, all cheery. It’s hopeless, isn’t it? This Clara. She wanders right into my path and, as sweet as pie, says, What are you doing in my corridor, Paul? So I say, Look, this is my area, I’ve tickertaped the whole piece in blue. She says, That’s red, Paul, it’s my red tape. What could I say? I knew what I wanted to say. But instead, well, I’m a nice guy, right? We decide to retape the plot right along, you know, right along her last line of trees, then she’s supposed to plant in, fill up the back, and I’ll do the front. Off we go, no troubles. Next thing, there she is wafting about at this tree cache. Clara, I say, what are you doing here? She admits it then. She says, It’s possible I’m lost. I bagged out right over here. And guess what, Alma? You got it. I’m fucked, the MNR is going to make me replant. Again.
You look as if you’ve lost a bit of weight, Paul.
Thank you for mentioning it, he said. I’m much obliged.
When you get your figure back, you can always just quit.
A smile broke out along his face, making him younger, more compelling.
Quit? he said. I’m not a quitter.
No?
Oh no. I’m a complainer. Hey, by the way, Alma, how many trees have you planted so far?
Paul, I’m sure yours are planted better than mine.
I doubt that very much. I’ve been crewcutting the roots. They will die, you know.
I don’t need to hear that. Anyway, look on the bright side. We’ll all die sooner or later. Won’t we, now?
The wind had been slowly amassing clouds: wispy cirrus clouds built to ever denser cumulus clouds that darkened to create a roiling yellow-grey ceiling above us that finally began to spit and then pour rain down upon us. This suppressed the blackflies, which were hovering about my head, landing, crawling downward, trying to find an entry point into my boot, along the bottom of my pant leg. I had carefully tucked my trousers into my socks, but neither this nor the rain stopped the wily bastards from finding a crack and chewing at the skin on my ankles. I did not huddle away from the weather. I knew that would only exacerbate the cold chill. I slapped the moisture from twelve bundles of trees, three hundred in all, and shoved them into the two side bags. I sat on the bags to compress the trees and make enough room. I scarfed down a couple of cookies and picked my way over the slash. It’d be my last journey that day, although I did not know it at the time. I forgot to sing. I mulled over Paul and Clara, the idea of fairness, the idea of the body and its space, the diminishing return of weight loss. I meandered into concepts of morality and the planting of trees and wondered why wrong was so clearly defined but right so blurred. What was a crime? Why were certain behaviours wrong? Why did wrong linger and right evaporate? There was a connection between moral right and happiness that seemed superficial, as if good actions and joy were not as complex as bad actions and misery.
It was easy to look around at the heaps of ripped-up brush, at the forest floor trying to regenerate, at the lumber left behind and take the high ground. But that was crap and I knew it. I wasn’t there for the ecosystem; this wasn’t a system anymore. I was there for the money and the escape and they were what kept me. Sustainability, renewable resource, ecology were just words. They no longer had moral charge, meaning, hope, truth. It was a capitalistic merry-go-round, starting with my morning wipe and ending with this preposterous landscape. There was no high ground. We were all too smart for that.
The relentless repetition of the day made room in my mind for a reverie in which I experienced no conclusions but many forgettable epiphanies, and so, by the time I reached the centre of my land, my mind was truly lulled. I was contemplating the boxes on the front porches of all the houses in Toronto, the lines of blue plastic bins, on which was written Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and how wholesome they made one feel, and so I did not immediately see and then did not really believe that before me snuffled a large black bear, her snout pulled back in a toothy sneer as she sniffed me out. The rain frayed my odour, and it took some time, my heart nearly arrested in anticipation, for the bear to figure out what I was. I reminded myself not to run. The words, My friends all drive Porsches, sprang to my mind and became a frantic refrain.
I must make amends, I must make amends.
There was very little for the animals to eat this early in the spring. There were common rules for behaviour around bears and for bear behaviour. I knew what to do. Knew what they would likely do. Black bears rarely attacked humans unless they were separated from their cubs. Even then, a female black bear might opt for the path of least resistance. It was highly unusual for a black bear to injure a human. But they did sometimes, if they were sick or mad or habituated to human presence or feeling insecure about this or that. I could always try to fight her off. The image almost made me laugh. I had almost twenty pounds of wet trees in the bags harnessed to me, so running away was a dangerous strategy. I had no time to think about tactics. I acted. I made to pounce on her, made myself as large and menacing as possible, growled and barked for all I was worth. If she came toward me, I planned to crumble and pretend to die. Perhaps I really would die from fright or what might be described later as an anomalous black bear mauling, a first in Ontario history, probably victim-incited. The she-bear would be tracked and destroyed, not out of malice or retribution but as a precaution. Well, it would be too late for that. I pulled out a couple of tree bundles to hurl at her but I needn’t have. She turned and bounded away. I threw the trees anyway. There was no way I was going to plant in that area anymore. The MNR could fine me if they dared to pass the wall of bear stink and were lucky enough to find my throwaways and live to tell about it. I turned my bags over, dropped about two hundred saplings and walked out early.
Where you going? Paul yelled after me.
I’m a quitter, I said. I didn’t bother to tell him about the bear. The animal wouldn’t scale the slash pile. I kept walking. I walked out. The clouds had already begun to disperse and the sun shone still insipid rays upon us. The blackflies re-emerged in a frenzy of activity. The humidity incited them to procreate, turned them right on. I felt one crawling up my sleeve. What time was it? I looked down at my wrist to discover that I’d lost my watch. Fuck it. I passed Karl on my way out. He stopped planting and held his large fingers up in the air by way of waving.
He shouted, You should plant near me once, Alma.
I brushed against a shrub and the wound on my arm tore open. All of a sudden, I felt heartbreakingly lonely.
Desperation had set in. I was dying of loneliness in the cold, horrific north. Ortwin’s exquisite arms became a fixation. His tight, flamboyantly coloured second-hand-store pantsuits, sewn out of velour, of course, made him ridiculous. They had tiny little fashion pockets detailed onto the back cheeks, and I couldn’t fathom who might have worn them even when they were in style. The arms did not entirely compensate for such peculiarities. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t keen on him. I liked the disembodied fantasy, the beautiful arms floating in my lurid daydreams. I thought about them, the sinew of muscle sliding down the forearms, the tan youthful skin over the biceps, the curl of elbow that begged to be carved in marble by some talented long-dead sculptor. Evenings, I huddled in my sub-zero sleeping bag and pondered those arms, applying them to several scenarios the subject matter of which involved late-night affairs of unlikely acrobatics. Just the arms. I tried to diffuse the rising narrative of my imaginings, warning myself that I had other more important, more controlled aspirations and that the last thing I needed or wanted was a scenario that might involve another flesh and blood person; anyhow, my fantasies were unrealistic. Ortwin was gay, not that that always meant anything, especially in the closed, clamped down, slim-pickin’s treeplanting camp world, where musical tent was one of the favourite pastimes and pass the chlamydia another. But those arms were sweet; I imagined them wrapped around me. Not him, just them. My libido had completely gotten away from me.
And out there, the animals were ravenous. Moose had begun encroaching on the camp, looking for food to sustain milk for their newborns. They grazed the open camp field in small herds. Raccoons and groundhogs had dug holes beneath the larder of the cook tent, a large affair with prefabricated aluminum walls that hinged and fit together to form a stable structure made more stable by the circus-type roof — a grubby white PVC-coated canvas sheath that was pulled tightly over it and secured to the ground. The communal eating tent was attached to this, a half-cylinder lying on its side. We filled this tent at breakfast and dinner, our filthy bodies rising in a group stink — the smell of wet socks, Muskol, sweat, urine, trees and food rising to a pungent cacophony that we, after a time, did not notice. An ugly, dishevelled, odorific lot, we did not disturb the creatures under us. They came out at night and scraped holes in the plastic garbage cans when they couldn’t topple them over to feed out of them. Emboldened after several weeks, they began to come out during the day, when we were away working. They stood outside the cook tent, rose on their haunches and chattered to Marilene, the cook, bored housewives looking for gossip, their children safely napping in the burrow. She shook her broom at them and they stood very still, looking up, watching her.
The animals were hungry. A single male moose was spotted ripping bark and licking sap from a birch tree. Its head was too large for its body, it had a small hump at the base of its neck, was likely infested with deer ticks and other parasites satiating their own cravings. The moose’s coat was torn in patches from rubbing it against trees and from fights with other moose. And still it had a graceful ugliness, moving silently along its way like an ungainly dancer. I knew that the male moose, the bull, was relegated to one mating season — unlike me, who was frantic all the time. During the rut, it was advisable to avoid the spectacular view of a bull moose in open territory. The moose’s pent-up sexual energy could prove dangerous to the small, less sexually balanced human. An encounter could mean instant death. And not the coveted little death. My jealousy toward the male’s contained lust was unbounded. I was hungry and I was hungry.
I tried to lie completely still in my tent after dinner. I tried to contemplate the little Flemish cottage in the story, its adorable window boxes overflowing in my mind’s eye with impatiens and sweet pea. I tried to think about weaving its charm. But I was finding it very difficult to concentrate. My own horny smell kept wafting past and disturbing the train of thought. My mind seemed capable only of violent rapes, the torturing of helpless peasants, the whinging betrayal of one body to another. Concentrate. Concentrate. Ortwin’s arms glided along my ribs and over my stomach. Had Renelde somehow led Burchard on, flung her hair in a certain coquettish manner? Impossible. She was only twelve. This fairy tale, so obviously about control, was shifting out of mine. I tried to slow the thoughts down, but their silky, wet qualities created a reverse resistance. His hands, fingers slid into my crevice. They sank and prodded deeper, with perfect regularity. The story slipped away. The arms, the sleek, tanned, shapely skin of Ortwin’s elbow, which, from my viewpoint, arched slightly and beautifully above me, motivating me to acquiesce and forget about . . . his index finger met my cervix and was gently caressing it. My back was bending up toward him; I grunted softly. My mouth was dry, the fluid needed elsewhere. And through this, I heard the distinct rustle of approaching danger. The rustle. Rustle. I was not alone. Someone was coming.
Alma? Are you there? he said.
My God, it was Ortwin himself. Yep, I said. Yeah, uh, I’m right here. I placed my hand over my abdomen and tried by sheer force of will to slow the waves of orgasm that threatened to break at any second.
I want to talk to you, he said. Can you talk now?
Give me five. Um, I’ll, uh, meet you in the office. My voice was shrill. I stifled the telltale panting, clenched my abdomen and waited for the swish of footfall on grass to die away in the distance, and then I let go in a slow, soft moan.
Ortwin’s office was a smaller Quonset-style tent rigged with electricity so he could keep his laptop computer juiced up. The tent had a small heater that ran when the generator was on. This barely kept off the night chill. Most days began with rain or the occasional freak snow flurry, but generally the weather had begun to warm up. When the sun emerged, the struggling plants raced against time, seemed to grow in a frenetic stop-action. Blossoming flowers — wild orchids and trilliums — peeled open and died all of a breath. Still, the evenings shut the world down again and food was hard for the larger animals to come by. The bears were becoming bolder. One had wandered into camp and slashed open a tent to get at a candy bar left inside. The females were especially hungry, their pregnant bodies craving satisfaction. I waited for the jerk of my contracting muscles to subside to a hum of neural pleasure. And I lay very still for a while enjoying that before I got up to go. I pulled my clothes on, slipped into my steel-toed boots and crossed the field to the office. I walked through the cluster of illuminated domes, so many paper-thin igloos in which the rest of the crew read or chatted or tried to avail themselves of nature as I had been doing. Ortwin smiled at me over the computer screen, which gave a radiant glow to his skin. His arms were covered in a thick-sleeved burnt-umber sweater fabricated from artificial wool.
I have a favour to ask you, he said. Would you do me a favour?
I suppose that depends, I said. I felt his finger briefly pulsing at my clitoris in some guilt response. Ortwin smiled at me as if he knew how weak I was.
He said, Blood is thick.
I felt my face flush and my ears heat up.
He continued, My nephew is coming to work here. I want someone to look after him for the first bit.
I’m relieved to hear that, I said. I really was.
Well, I want you to train him, to take him under your wing. I’ll compensate you for your time.
Oh yeah? How much? I was back to earth.
For one week, a per diem of fifty dollars.
No matter what I plant, that’s extra, then? I said.
For one week, maybe two. Ortwin stood up, crossed his arms over himself and grabbed the hem of his sweater. I stared at him, tried not to stare at him. He said, I am doing this as a favour to my brother, you see. The boy arrives tomorrow; his English is rudimentary. He is a bit special. His name is Willem.
Special? I focused on a strand of hair askew on his forehead.
Unhappy, he said.
What’s so special about that?
It’s hard to explain. He just doesn’t fit in somehow. Ortwin pulled his sweater off over his head and rubbed his hands up and down his arms. They had a golden brilliance, shadows dancing along the sinews of his forearms. He smiled at me again and said, It’s nothing obvious.
Willem was delivered to my corridor late in the afternoon. He was a ridiculously tall, skinny, morose boy with a shock of black hair and the facial skin of a man twice his age. It sagged in pockets under his eyes and formed a leathery wallet across his cheekbones, which were jutting. The clothes he wore were ripped and mended with thick silk embroidery thread and ripped again here and there on the mends, the threads crazy Frankenstein seams. He spoke English with a particular almost melodious lilt and tossed the words out in a garble of syntax; his sentences came out not back to front but in a heap, a mixture, a compost of intention. He was, at times, impossible to understand.
Hello, I ventured.
I’m fine, he said. I don’t need helping.
Nothing obvious. Sure. I had hopelessly undervalued myself. I cursed my horny self for allowing me to consent to this.