sweat my DEET off within minutes. People fashioned hijabs and other forms of headgear out of towels and shirts, soaking them in bug dope in an attempt to escape the torment.2 When an angry yell or scream was heard from across the block—and these were frequent occurrences—it was almost always bug related. Worst of all, no matter how vigilant you were in swatting insects away from your face, it was only a matter of time before a blackfly bit you on that special spot near your eye that caused your eyelid to swell shut, usually for the better part of a week, giving you the appearance of having just wandered off the set of a zombie flick.
People began to drop weight, often dramatically so. Even though I tried to make up for lost calories at dinner, I was shedding pounds faster than I could tack them back on. I began wearing a belt for the first time in years as my pants were falling off my hips.
By mid-contract, we had exhausted all of the ground within walking distance of camp. Sadly, my early morning escapades came to an end, but I kept working in the evenings. Barrett would leave a trike for me on the block—a trike that I had no trouble operating—allowing me to put an extra run in after everyone else called it a day. When I arrived back in camp later in the evening, I could always count on Debbie to greet me at the edge of camp, eager to get me caught up on all of the gossip she’d overheard at dinner. She’d sit with me in the Quonset hut while I devoured my dinner, picking away at her dessert and watching with incredulity as I inhaled one course after another.
One evening after I arrived back at camp a little later than usual, Debbie was nowhere to be found. Brushing aside vague feelings of abandonment, I used the opportunity to take a shower before dinner (the shower tent was nearly always empty in the evenings as people preferred to get clean immediately after work). Just as I was getting lathered up, I heard someone walk past outside and run a hand across the tarpaulin wall. Then the door opened and closed. I had company.
These showers were slightly more private than the setup in the previous camp. Rather than one large open space, there were three medium-sized compartments with two shower heads in each. A six-foot-high tarpaulin separated each compartment. Paying no attention to the person undressing in the next stall over, I gave myself a final rinse and reached for my towel. Then, suddenly, through the layers of mist and steam, a soft, sultry voice inquired, “How was your day, Non-Stop?” I remember wrestling with a temporary stammer as the honeyed tones of Debbie’s query pinged and echoed across every cell in my body. “Ah, ahhhh…good…great!” I finally managed.
Here was the one woman I adored more than any other on the entire planet, naked, showering a few feet away with only a thin sheet of plastic separating us. She asked if I wanted to try some of her shampoo, an intense mint-oil concoction that was popular among treeplanters back then. I accepted and stepped back under the generous spray. As she struggled to pass the heavy jug over our tarpaulin divider, I spotted beautiful chestnut brown freckles randomly and wonderfully distributed across her bicep and forearm. As I considered this exquisite little facet of her anatomy, I realized how much of a mystery she still was to me.
That may have been the longest shower of my young life, with Debbie occupying one side of the tarpaulin divide, me the other, each savouring the moist steamy environment, getting caught up on each other’s day. Of course, my mind raced, wondering if there was greater significance to the encounter—something more meaningful than merely washing away the day’s sweat and grime. One thing was for certain: if her intent was to drive me crazy, she had succeeded admirably. I hoped that this shower routine would become our “new thing.”
After our showers, as we were making our way to the Quonset hut, Debbie warned me that there was a scandal brewing in camp. Some of the treeplanters’ wives back on Cortes Island had been alerted that their men were sharing tents with some of the young ladies in camp (a number of people on the crew called Cortes home, including Barrett and my sister Lina). Apparently, one of the foremen who had been busted—a twitchy character named Ted—was livid, determined to find out who the whistleblower was. Rumour was, I was at the very top of his suspect list.
Halfway through my dinner that night, Ted marched in to the Quonset hut and interrupted my supper with a blunt and accusatory, “We need to talk.” I didn’t like Ted. I hadn’t liked him from the very beginning, especially after he labelled our rookie crew “The Lunch Bunch” after spotting us taking a break together on the side of the road on our first day of the season. He was, for lack of a better term, a major-league douchebag. He was a condescending prick who liked to peacock around camp as if he owned the place. With his chest pounding and the veins in his neck appallingly distended, he leaned across the table and with a hoarse whisper said, “Your sister informed my wife that I was sleeping with Jennifer.” I was in no mood for drama that evening and simply replied, “What the fuck do you want me to do about it, Ted?”
Before I could expand on that sentiment, Barrett, who had been listening in from the next table over, chimed in with, “Let the kid eat his dinner, Ted—can’t you see he’s on a date?” Debbie howled out loud with laughter at the suggestion, and Ted shrivelled to half his size and stormed out of the Quonset hut, tripping and nearly falling flat on his face in the process.
As the contract stretched out into June, Debbie and I grew even closer. We continued to spend our evenings together. I showed her how to play a few chords on my guitar. She even stayed late with me on the block a few times to tack a few hundred extra trees onto her score. Regrettably, intimate evening showers did not become our “new thing,” but I sensed that she was beginning to look at me in a different way. After everything I had experienced over the previous two months, I was also beginning to think differently about myself.
As we entered week five of the contract, and week nine of the season, I began to notice a change in the crew. Beaten down by the extreme heat, bugs, and general state of exhaustion, people began retiring to their tents earlier in the evening. There was less celebrating. There was less music. Even Curt, who was normally good for an hour or two of pickin’ and grinnin’, limited his sets to only twenty or thirty minutes per night. And there was something going on with the hardcore smokers on the crew. They were running out of tobacco. The ubiquitous pouches of loose tobacco that were generally left unattended on the dining tables in the Quonset hut were now being scooped up and pocketed when not in use. Tobacco had suddenly become a rare commodity, and a carefully guarded one at that.
In the trucks, on the way to work, we speculated on the desperate times that lay ahead for smokers unless Barrett was able to find a way to bring more in. We had a shipment of provisions barged in earlier that week, but tobacco wasn’t on the list. The smokers joked about how they would soon be forced to raid the dirty stinking ashtrays in the trucks. I thought they were jesting. They were not! There came an evening when they collectively raided the ashtrays in all of the trucks, sifting through nine weeks’ worth of discards, sorting and grading the used butts according to their level of raunchiness. Nothing was thrown out, though. Eventually, even the raunchiest of the lot were pulled apart, re-rolled and smoked. When the supply in the trucks was exhausted, the discarded butts that had been ground into the dirt outside the Quonset hut were next. Big Tobacco really had these poor folk by the short and curlies.
As our spring season entered its final shift, the black bears, which until then had kept a healthy distance from our camp, became bolder, attempting to break into the kitchen and Quonset hut late at night. One of the girls who was camped in proximity to the kitchen claimed that a black bear had actually poked its head in through the front door of her tent. That explained the blood-curdling screams I woke up to at 2:00 a.m. Curiously, these Williston Lake black bears all sported beautiful white patches on their chests, some larger than others, but always prominent. It gave them a cuddly-looking quality and we always stopped our trucks to admire them whenever they were spotted on the road. But beyond a few isolated incidents, they didn’t pose much of a threat, and they remain a fond memory—one of the few fond memories I have involving bears while camping in remote locales.
We were coming down to the final few days of the contract,
