“All this shopping sucks,
All these sickly white shoppers.
All this easy space, time unused,
My parts are healing that once were bruised.”
— Love Song to Little Trees, Bill Crosson

Well, I’m home in Michigan. I would say it’s been a great summer’s travels, but I’ve got some travels still ahead. Ann Arbor is looking good. I’d best get out there.

I first brought a camera treeplanting with the goal of photographing people working, to round out the normal planting shots of hotel rooms and bars. But there’s nothing wrong with party photos.

Left to right: Toby, my crewboss; Louie, fellow treeplanter formerly of the Hungarian Olympic rowing team and despite any rumours you may have heard of him pulling knives in dicey moments at the bar, a really lovely gentleman; C.C., fellow treeplanter among many other things, who claims to have never logged any of the trees he’s planted but who knows people who have. Elk shot, boned, carried out of the bush and bbq’ed into burgers by Cassidy, fellow treeplanter, not in photo.

The sun has returned to Kootenay Valley, but for days we have been working above the clouds more often than below them. And often in them. Which looks just like clouds do from inside an airplane, except you’re outside walking around in them in a slash-filled clearcut instead of peering through a porthole. The blocks we work in have often been hidden from us until early afternoon, which can make flagging in pieces a bit of a mind game. The view from the clearcuts can likewise be obscure until mid afternoon, being slowly revealed in patches and pieces as the clouds rise and fall and tease apart.

Another novel planting condition: 2 shifts ago we worked on the Canada-US border. As in, right smack on it. It turns out the border is physically delineated by a cut-line running through the mountains, tracking the 49th parallel. If you’ve ever wondered what a line of latitude looks like in person, this is it. From our side of the valley, we could clearly see it running down the mountains on the other side, and across the valley, presumably through the Porthill border station. And, we eventually realized, up our side of the valley and right along the edge of the cut block.

I’ve been joking about how they probably don’t emphasize the “longest undefended border” factoid so much in elementary schools anymore, but this really drove it home. We worked on the physical border for 2 days without even realizing it.

The Creston weather report makes daily mention of the snow level. Today it’s reported as “1000 metres rising to 2000 metres this afternoon”. Working the high valleys and mountain tops around the valley proper, we’ve had first-hand experiences with the snow level. And today for the second time in my career as a planter, we were shut down before planting began because of weather. Halfway up the Dodge Creek Road the snow started drifting down around our crewcab, and we arrived on the block to find it was just too high above that 1000 meter snow level mark for safe and sane planting. So after the best snowball fight I’ve ever had on June 10th, we rolled back down the hill. We’ve put some wet work clothes into the laundry, made some tea, watched the end of Yellowbeard, and may go to the matinee or looking for Bountiful. Snow day.

Like most photographers I don’t have a lot of pictures of myself. For the first time I’m on a planting crew with another camera geek. Paul Kolinski takes a different technical approach, shooting with a classic manual Olympus from the age of steel on Ilford 400asa b&w film (which I didn’t even know you could still buy). It’s a reminder that film has it’s own thing going on, and that the mechanically simpler cameras necessary for film photography have been a mature technology for many decades longer than the finicky devices that are contemporary digital slrs. Also, Paul is a great portrait shooter. Consequently, for the first time I have actual pictures of me in harness.

(Paul has also been grabbing my camera occasionally.)