my two days of R and R.
When a treeplanting crew arrives in a community, it’s akin to a circus rolling into town. We attract attention. We stand out with our parade of bush vehicles, our trailers loaded down with ATVs and gear, our wild hair and free-hippy-love-shit attire. Our hacky sack circles and impromptu jam sessions.
The Nechako Inn in Prince George was where every treeplanting company in the region settled themselves when they had time off between contracts. If you can imagine an uproarious wall-to-wall house party, one that spills out onto the front lawn and into the street, that’s what the Nechako Inn was back in the day. It wasn’t unusual to have a group of complete strangers—planters from other companies—barge into your room in the middle of the night looking for a lost friend, a beer or a couch to crash on. Most of the rooms, which reeked of weed and tobacco smoke, were pockmarked with dozens of cigarette burns about the carpets and drapes. The mattresses on the beds were all well broken in—from what, I dared not imagine—and the fabric on the couches and chairs was tattered and threadbare. But strangely enough, there was an easy, comfortable feel to the place. We were at ground level. We were also all living on borrowed time with the next project looming over us like a menacing storm front on the horizon.
Prince George was a thriving resource town back then. There were a number of mills in the region that supported a significant percentage of the population, and they paid very decent wages. Judging by the quality of many of the stores, restaurants and watering holes in town, those wages were generously plowed back into the local economy. There was a small price to pay for all of this prosperity, though: the pulp and paper mills belched out so much sulphur in their emissions, it was nearly impossible to escape the stench of rotting eggs. The locals proudly referred to this as the “smell of money.” After a few hours in town, the olfactory senses somehow seemed to adapt.
While walking the streets of Prince George during my first real day off in four weeks, I marvelled at the number of treeplanters that had descended on the poor town. We were everywhere. We stood out, easily identified by our filthy work clothes and long hair; our backpacks and hacky sacks. It was a total invasion—I’m sure that was how the locals viewed it. We jaywalked along every street, forcing traffic to a standstill. We travelled in mobs. We monopolized public places. Worst of all, we formed drum circles in the middle of busy sidewalks, often near the entrances to health-food stores and all-you-can-eat buffet restaurants. It was a spectacle. If it wasn’t for the fact that we were all flush with cash, we likely would’ve been rounded up, issued one-way bus tickets and stuffed on the next coach headed back east.
Our second contract of the season was along Williston Lake. I had never even heard of Williston Lake, a 250-kilometre-long monstrosity created by the W.A.C. Bennett Dam. There were no roads leading into this project, so Barrett had arranged for two water taxis and a barge to transport our trucks, camp and crew to a point along the lake where a series of logging roads had been pushed in, approximately halfway up the extremely remote eastern shore.
After one night at the Nechako Inn, a night that resulted in precious little rest or relaxation, I drove to the town of Mackenzie, where our trucks were to be loaded onto a barge later that evening. After dropping off Barrett’s truck at the loading dock, I hooked up with the crew at a small motel at the edge of town where we all settled in for the night. It was a peaceful and uneventful night—until about two in the morning. That’s when James, the hardest core of all hardcore treeplanters, spotted a peeping Tom outside of Debbie’s bedroom window. A frantic chase over concrete, one that echoed across the motel compound and through our open windows, was followed by a cacophony of angry shouts and piercing screams. Too exhausted to investigate, and not entirely convinced that the commotion didn’t emanate deep from within my own dream world, I kept my head on the pillow. As the story was brought to light early the next morning, it appeared that James had caught the pervert peeping into Debbie’s bedroom window, chased him down and then proceeded to open up a can of whoop-ass. Barrett would later be heard to say, “You just had to know James was involved…”
The next morning, as we waited in the motel parking lot for a fleet of vans to transport us to our water taxis, I spotted Debbie moping around outside her motel room. I approached her cautiously and asked how she was coping after the peeping Tom incident. She blew it off, saying that she wasn’t even aware of the commotion, having slept right through it. She wasn’t functioning all that well. Her boyfriend had bailed on their planned two-day retreat, coming up with some lame excuse as to why he couldn’t make the trip up north from Vancouver. It was plain to me that she was hurting, but she wasn’t willing to admit it. Desperate to see her glow restored, I asked her, “What would Ethel say?” Without skipping a beat, she launched into an unbelievable rendition of Ethel’s “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” complete with flailing arms, gyrating hips and stomping feet. I lost it. Fits of laughter swept across half of the crew—the other half stood stunned, unable to calculate what the fuck was going on.
After packing ourselves into two big shiny aluminum water taxis, we began our long journey up Williston Lake. Cruising along the eastern edge of the reservoir, we spotted tree stumps dotting the shoreline and, occasionally, the black weathered tops of mature trees jutting straight out of the water, only metres from our boat. Apparently, when the construction of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam was given the green light back in the 1960s, a decision was made to leave much of this great northern forest standing. Vast expanses of conifer and deciduous trees were simply left to drown. It was a political decision—politicians needing to get things done fast in order to get re-elected and all. Even at my young, naive age, Williston Lake stood out to me as a monumental environmental disaster. With all of this devastation as our backdrop, a sombre mood hung over our crew that morning. The dark grey skies that challenged us in the distance offered little solace.
Our destination that morning turned out to be a narrow stretch of hard-packed sand, and what appeared to be a concrete ramp protruding from the water’s edge. This was the genesis of the road system that would lead us inland to our project area. Creating an insurmountable barrier just beyond the ramp, however, was a four-metre-high wall of beached logs, one that stretched hundreds of metres in both directions. Our trucks were nowhere in sight. Radioing the barge captain from the water taxi, we discovered that he had arrived earlier that morning, discovered the huge volume of wood onshore—a consequence of several violent spring storms—and was forced to head back down the lake in order to pick up a large backhoe. His plan was to use the backhoe to punch a hole through the wall of wood—one large enough for him to offload our vehicles and send us on our way. In the meantime, we were stuck without our trucks for at least three or four hours.
Visible through the trees on the other side of the giant pile of beached logs, about half a kilometre inland, were several long rows of red and white trailers. It was a logging camp. With nothing else to do, nowhere else to go and with the skies threatening to open up on us, we grabbed our packs, bid farewell to our boat captains, climbed the wall of wood and cautiously made our way toward the camp.
As we entered the compound it was immediately obvious that it was an inactive camp—a ghost camp. It was clear that it hadn’t been occupied for a good many years—perhaps decades—judging by the condition of the mattresses and furniture in the trailers. But it was shelter nonetheless, and the weather was unsettled and threatening.
Having scoped out several of the least offensive rooms, we packed ourselves in and tried to relax while we waited for the barge to return. Curt, veteran treeplanter and designated camp musician, pulled out his guitar and began grinding out a few Neil Young tunes while we settled in.
Curt was a gentle, wise and thoughtful man. He always paused to consider what you were saying before responding. I really liked that about him. He also had one eye that slightly crossed over toward the other. He wasn’t self-conscious about it, not in the least. I liked that about him too. His partner was a black lab named Jessy, who Curt liked to burden with a backpack, one designed to carry precisely one hundred seedlings. With his backpack loaded, Jessy would hang out in the shade until Curt needed trees.
