After a very solid satisfying spring season with a mature well run treeplanting contractor, I jumped on for a couple of extra weeks with a gonger company. This is an excerpt from an email to my spring planting partner.

What follows is a lot of venting.

Well lloyds is an unfunny comedy of classic rookie management mistakes. I can’t help feeling like it has fallen on me to be the one to lead the poor ignorant rookies away from their well-meaning-but-stone-stupid overseers and into the promised land of mature treeplanting. It’s kind of an asshole thing to do of course, eat at the table and complain about the food, but really these people are so unclueful it’s painful. In fairness, many of them think they are doing good work and certainly want that to be true, but, they aren’t. 5 is the *latest* I’ve woken up and 8 is the *earliest* I’ve gotten back. We have to stay up till 10 for somebody to decide what the optimal time for us to get up tomorrow is (why can’t you just decide once and stick with it instead of pushing it up or down 15 minutes every day?), we hang out in the van for 45 minutes or so waiting for the block to be cleaned each evening (what were you doing all day??) and the crewbosses seem mildly put upon when you mention that their planters have had to hump boxes from adjacent caches for their last three bag ups while they themselves wander amiably around the land looking for “deep trees”, which means the pod isn’t exposed. Of course if you expose the pod it’s shallow. I solo replanted a piece that was cluster fucked by six people. What? What? Did you just really ask me to DO that? Of course I’m just not here long enough to be bothered to make a fuss, but apparently they make a habit of bringing planters back to closed blocks to replant. I almost want them to try to make me do that. As it is, I think my crewboss, who isn’t actually that bad a guy, has picked something up ESP styles and is becoming afraid of me. Yesterday, block wrap, he kept coming by trying to put planters in my piece and then veering off and throwing them next door. Eventually their were 6 people in the other half of my hill and just me in mine. Nyuk nyuk.

Anyway, I could go on (god, I haven’t even mentioned the bugs or the land or the prices have I?) but why do it by email when I can complain your ear off in person? The good side is I am now beginning to make a little money from them and it keeps me out of the stores.

Also on the good side, the contrast helped show up what a decent spring I had in the bush. Yes, of course I was miserable many times. But deep depressive gloom and abiding discomfort are relative things which come in degrees and the dose makes the poison and it’s good to be reminded of that.