stressful times for the crew. People would grow anxious in the final push. We always knew the number of trees that remained to be planted, and in the final few days, simple arithmetic revealed the exact number of trees each planter would be required to plant in order to draw the contract to a close. Often that number overwhelmed people. Adding to the stress of this particular contract, we were forced to abide by an inflexible barge schedule. Three days’ worth of trees would need to go into the ground in the space of two; otherwise we’d be forced to wait another five days for the next barge run.
A decision was made to start work an hour earlier the next morning, work a full day, drive back to camp for a one-hour supper break and then head back out to the block for an evening run. I was fine with the idea, but there was resistance among some of the more exhausted planters on the crew. When it came right down to it, we didn’t have a choice. Geographically isolated contracts often end in this manner. It seemed to be the rule, rather than the exception, as I would discover over time.
The second to last day of the contract was brutal. We needed to pound in an extraordinary number of trees that day, and we didn’t quite reach our goal. A decision was made to start even earlier the next day and work until the final tree went into the ground. We were encouraged to work together in small groups in order to play off one another’s energy. This made sense to me. Debbie and I decided to pair up, and we carefully scanned the crew for a third partner. Kevin!
Kevin was a bred and buttered Cortes Island boy. He was one of the more straightlaced and likable guys on the crew. He was clean-cut, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink and he was always polite, almost to a fault. He was also a fastidious man. He actually washed out his treeplanting bags at the end of each shift—no one on the crew had ever seen anything like it. And he planted with a mattock, an old-school pick-like tool that required an entirely different skill set to master. Kevin was the only treeplanter I have ever met who planted with such an archaic tool. Debbie and I both respected him for that.
Everyone retired to their tents shortly after finishing supper. Knowing that our time together was coming to an end, Debbie and I embraced each other longer than usual that evening. When she retreated to her tent, I found myself all alone in the Quonset hut. It was a strange feeling, being the only soul awake in camp while the sun was still visible on the horizon. I used the opportunity to fire up the generator and pump for a nice long shower. I had a lot to think about.
After ten minutes of squatting under the intense heat and spray generated by the two shower heads I had angled to form a single powerful stream, I barely noticed the sound of the shower door opening and closing. I expected Barrett, or one of the foremen, to barge in thinking someone had accidentally left the shower on, but the rap of the shower door was followed by silence. Then, softly, Debbie emerged from the layers of steam. She was wearing only a towel, which she allowed to drop to the ground the moment our eyes met. The image of her slowly advancing through the white vapor is one that is indelibly burned into my memory.
The final day of planting—the final day of my 1983 spring treeplanting season—was an emotionally charged experience. Barrett loaded Debbie, Kevin and me into his own personal truck and sped off ahead of the rest of the pack. A few minutes into the drive, Debbie leaned into my shoulder and fell fast asleep. We were both exhausted. We were too exhausted to show up for breakfast that morning. While attempting to choke down a few handfuls of granola for energy, I observed Barrett turning our truck onto a brand-new road system. We were to be “block-openers” on that final day of the season.
As we pulled into our new block, I nudged Debbie and directed her weary gaze toward the beautiful expanse of cream that was coming into view.3 With a grin on his mug, Barrett instructed us to plant down the slope against the forest line to our right, hook up with a riparian zone boundary half a kilometre below and plant single lines of trees through the cream until we were instructed to do otherwise. From a treeplanter’s perspective, it was a dream assignment. It was a massive area, encompassing at least one hundred acres. Normally it would take the three of us five or six days to plant an area that size. On that day, we would have company, eventually. Two or three other crews were expected to arrive by the end of the afternoon, promising to turn the area into an epic gang-plant.4
Debbie and I were operating on only three hours of sleep. It took an inordinate amount of effort just to put seedlings into our bags and strap them onto our hips. Looking down toward the bottom of our private cream-show, we observed a thin layer of fog hanging over the lower third of the block, obscuring our bottom boundary.
There might have been a half-dozen words spoken between us during that first hour. The only sounds produced by our little trio were those of our shovel and mattock blades stabbing the ground and the occasional involuntary grunt as we worked our roots into the soil. As we planted farther toward the bottom of the block, we were treated to the vibrations of rushing water. The source lay hidden, buried deep in the lush foliage of the riparian zone below.
This was not a day for individual achievement. When someone bagged-out early, they grabbed trees from the bags of the person planting beside them, repeating the gesture over and over until the entire group was completely bagged-out.
At the end of the first run, back at the treecache, Debbie glanced at her watch, sighed heavily and declared, “One run down…seven more to go.” This was going to be a long day, and emotionally, I was a wreck. The thought that I might not see Debbie again after this day was more than I could handle. I was gutted. But I managed to stay in character. Staying in motion helped conceal my anguish.
We worked at a steady pace all day long and by 3:00 p.m. there were ten additional planters in our area, turning our cream-show into a hub of activity. By 5:00 p.m. two more trucks loaded with planters had arrived and, as expected, the gang-plant was epic in scale. It’s an extraordinary sight watching two dozen planters lined up, side by side, three metres apart, taking out giant swaths of land in a single pass.
By 7:00 p.m., operating on only a few hours of sleep, a half-dozen pieces of fruit and a few handfuls of granola, our little trio was plucked off the gang-plant and put on yet another special mission. Barrett transported us to the other side of the riparian zone that served as our bottom boundary. There, a new cutblock opened up. Our instructions were simple: plant along the bottom of the cutblock, along the treeline, and continue planting until our roadside cache was exhausted. Though we couldn’t fully appreciate it at the time, this assignment was a gift. The perimeters of most Interior cutblocks were lined with a fire road or trail back then—a beautiful, dirty and yielding swath of ground that made planting nearly effortless. This cutblock had such a feature, but it was twice as wide as normal.
Barrett left us with eighteen hundred trees in our cache. We bagged-up with three hundred each and began pounding away. The ground was so clean and fast that we bagged-out in less than forty-five minutes. When we arrived back at our cache, Barrett had left us an additional 150 trees. Expecting that this would be our final run of the season, we bagged-up with 350 trees each. The weight on our poor hips and shoulders was brutal, but the weight comes off fast when you’re planting a tree every five or six seconds.
The sun was in full retreat when we bagged-out from our final run, and to our great relief, there were no more trees waiting for us at our cache. Our empty tree boxes had been broken down, flattened, and the tarp was folded—a clear indication that our day was done. The contract was over.
Tearing a page out of Karl Marx’s playbook, we decided to pool our trees together and split them evenly three ways. Our net result: 3,100 trees each. Not bad for a day when I was ready to quit before it even began.
There was no party or celebration back at camp that evening. People were struggling, even falling to the ground, as they attempted to extricate themselves from the back seats of their trucks when they arrived at camp. Some people didn’t even line up for supper—they simply staggered off in the direction of their tents. This crew was done.
I
