grid pattern over my dreamscape.
The second night in my tent followed a similar pattern to the first. It became bitterly cold in the wee hours of the morning. Not only was I forced to pile every stitch of clothing I owned on top of my sleeping bag for additional insulation, I actually wore several pairs of underwear on my head in order to trap body heat. I remember waking up, wondering if I’d ever be able to restore my dignity.
I was determined to approach day two on the slopes with a new strategy and mindset. I was determined to stay in motion no matter what the circumstance. This is easier said than done, especially when one’s terrain is riddled with obstacles that hinder forward progress and limit one’s view of what’s ahead. But the strategy began to pay off. By midday, I astounded Jeremy with a total of 120 trees. By day’s end I managed to pound in 275 trees. Having shared some of my recently attained insights with Debbie, she too was able to plant over two hundred seedlings that day. The rest of our rookie crew were struggling to crack the one hundred level, and on the hike back to camp at day’s end, I revealed my secret. Sadly the bathing beauties we’d encountered near the entrance to camp on the previous day were not in evidence. Apparently they had discovered the showers.
The strut in my step, having bettered my previous day’s score by 200 per cent, was lost soon after returning to camp. The average number of trees planted across all three (experienced) crews that day was thirteen hundred trees, with some of the faster planters pounding in an astonishing sixteen hundred (I was told that those numbers were expected to rise as the people began hitting their stride). Still, my score was a vast improvement over the previous day, and for the first time since arriving in camp, Barrett acknowledged my presence with a mock tip of the hat.
After dinner that night, Debbie and I took a seat next to the wood stove. There, I found myself studying the behaviours of the crew as they mixed and mingled, paying special attention to the women I’d admired at the edge of the creek one day earlier. It appeared to be a very vibrant, animated and sexually charged atmosphere. It reminded me of some of the parties I attended back in high school. There seemed to be an inordinate amount of flirting and petting going on, and I couldn’t decide if it was merely an extremely friendly group of people or the prologue to an orgy. Debbie sensed the heightened state of arousal too, and found it as intriguing as I.
Understanding that Deb had a few years on me, I decided to probe her for details regarding her private life anyway. She explained that she had a boyfriend back in Vancouver and that it was fairly serious. She also said that he planned to drive up to meet her in Prince George during the break between contracts. I wasn’t surprised. I couldn’t imagine such an incredible woman being single.
By day three, with the moral support and wise counsel of several veteran highballers, I was halfway to my target of one thousand trees per day. By the end of day four I managed to plant four full runs of two hundred trees per run—a grand total of eight hundred trees.5 It was at that point that I came to the realization that planting large numbers of trees was as much a mental process, if not more so, as it was a physical one. There appeared to be a mysterious underlying dynamic at play, one that could be tapped and exploited with the right amount of focus, forward motion and conservation of movement. I also came to realize that things could become very interesting from a monetary perspective. The crew’s average at that point was fourteen hundred trees per day. If I succeeded in achieving that level, at 11¢ per tree, I would gross $154 (the equivalent of $350 in 2019 terms). Righteous bucks!
Day five was a day of rest. Barrett had established a schedule of “four and ones”—four days on, one day off. I used the opportunity to sleep in until 6:30 a.m., do my laundry in the creek and take my first shower in nearly a week. Stripped naked, it appeared as if I were wearing a dark brown belt and suspenders—it was the exact outline of the mud-caked support straps on my treeplanting bags. It wouldn’t wash off. The dirt and grime appeared to permeate my skin cells right down to the DNA. I then understood why some of the more fastidious planters on the crew showered daily and had long-handled brushes sticking out of their shower bags.
There was something very odd about the shower setup itself: there were no dividers, no stalls—only a single large enclosure with six shower heads spaced a metre apart. Oh, how the mind wanders when you’re all of nineteen years of age, in a remote wilderness setting, surrounded by women who appeared to be more comfortable with their clothes off than on. But I was determined to stay focused. At the beginning of the contract, Barrett seemed convinced that I was some kind of a flake. He even had the temerity to show me in the direction of the highway. Despite the adversity, the punishing pace on the slopes, the dirt, the extremely cold nights and the humiliation of waking up with underwear on my head, I was determined to carve out a niche on this crew.
1. “Highballers” are the highest-producing treeplanters on a crew and are generally held in the highest regard.
2. Treeplanting bags are used to carry seedlings. They consist of a series of large pouches crafted out of heavy canvas or nylon. The pouches are attached and arranged along a thick belt with connecting shoulder straps. Two pouches ride along each hip, and a third pouch rides along one’s butt. The three pouches, if fully loaded, can carry many hundreds of seedlings at a time.
3. “Slash” refers to piles, large and small, of wood debris and waste.
4. The terms “slopes,” “clearcut,” “cutblock,” “block,” “ground,” “planting area,” “area,” “piece,” “unit” and “land” are synonymous. They all refer to an area that has been harvested or cleared of trees—an area slated to be planted with seedlings in order to grow a new forest.
5. A “run” refers to the task of filling up one’s treeplanting bags with a specific number of seedlings and planting said seedlings until one’s treeplanting bags are empty.
Chapter Two
The Stalker
The massive clearcut that loomed over our camp was completely planted within five days. Our plantation of conifers stretched out across the landscape for nearly as far as the eye could see. I was told that it took four hundred thousand seedlings to cover the entire area. Our new ground—the next clearcut on our list—was several dozen kilometres away, and getting there required a fleet of trucks. As we got ready to depart, a half-dozen four-by-fours idled in the cold, early morning April air, and billows of steam and exhaust hung over our staging area in front of the Quonset hut.
As we suspected, our rookie crew was a farm team of sorts. We were about to be split up and divided among the three existing crews. Barrett’s foremen were about to duke it out over who would get whom. The previous evening I caught Kelly, Barrett’s highest-producing foreman, sneaking a peek at our individual tree scores1 in Jeremy’s ledger and entering figures into a little notebook that he liked to carry around in his tit pocket. When he noticed that I had noticed him, he gave me a wink, as if to say, Your ass is mine, pal.
The road that led to our new ground wound through a maze of interconnected clearcuts, several dense patches of mature forest and a canyon that Nature had crudely chiselled into her landscape.
After forty-five minutes of hard driving, we crested a ridge and began descending into a wide sweeping valley, the back end of which had been mowed down into a bowl-shaped clearcut. Our destination was obvious. The road leading in was lined with tree caches, their bright white reflective tarps lending the appearance of snowbanks from a distance.2 As we entered the
