I’m not sure who the “John” is who wrote this statement ahead of a Western Silvicultural Contractors’ Association strategy meeting, but he thinks the planting industry is in for some crazy times in the next few years.

“Let’s not forget that these mills had far larger margins to buffer the commodity market cycles than many on the silviculture service side do. And we are looking ahead at two of the worst years for growing and planting seedlings in two decades. With this in mind anyone who intends to stay in business through the next few years has a stake in how all of us collectively behave. It seems logical and necessary then for the industry to try and make sense of the future and seek some strategies to mitigate what looks like a potentially ruinous run. Broadly stated that is the purpose of this year’s summit and I would think figuring out how to stay in business over the next few years should be a strong enough incentive for most of us to attend this meeting.

Interestingly, not all the news is bad. Looking ahead three to five years it is possible to see a dramatic shift back towards a robust silviculture sector. It won’t be the same sector. In fact it might even be better, if not just more interesting. The province’s green house gas initiative, the potential funding streams through carbon credits, the possible redistribution of tenure, new emerging industries based on bio energy and the startling possibility that properly stewarding forests might be seen as an inherently valuable if not profitable enterprise on its own all present a sunny horizon for those of us prepared and preserved to appreciate it.”

40% decline in trees in the next 2 years!

I’m in Hamilton, crashing at the house of a planter who spent the summer working at a traditional BC plateau bush-camp operation. The stories she’s telling are, of course, great. My recent eccentric tangents in the industry aside, treeplanting really still is the same coming-of-age, challenge and perseverance experience it has been for so many cohorts of young planters. But maybe that is finally set to change up in the near future.

Playlist

Swing-season radio, principally masterminded by un-dj janeboles. Good stuff, I promise.

“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

The first 20 minutes didn’t get recorded. To duplicate the original experience, play The Israelites by Desmond Dekker, talk a bit, then play Reasons to Be Cheerful, Pt 3 by Ian Dury, talk some more, then Lay It in the Cut by Sharon Jones and Whole Lot of Walking to Do by Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. Then play the recording. Should be good.

The radio podcast has been updated with a couple of week’s worth of music from the clearcuts. And I’ve confirmed with the goods folks at CIDO that I’ll be doing a fresh show this Thursday. So they should let me in the studio this time. I’m planning an 1 1/2 hour Quitting for the Season, Possibly Forever Special.

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.

OK, so I haven’t been podcasting the radio episodes. I have been broadcasting! But CIDO is a home-grown affair, and arranging the recording and distribution of the show has turned out to be trickier than I had thought.

Eventually all the episodes may yet be podcast. Except today’s, which isn’t happening because of an inconveniently locked door. If I was a real rock and roll dj I would smash a window. I’ll think about it.

update: thanks to Emery (?), CIDO’s senior youth computer tech, I’ve got podcasts up now.

OK, so I haven’t been posting the radio episodes. I have been broadcasting! But CIDO is a home-grown affair, and arranging the recording and distribution of the show has turned out to be trickier than I had thought.

Eventually all the episodes may yet be podcast. Except today’s, which isn’t happening because of an inconveniently locked door. If I was a real rock and roll dj I would smash a window. I’ll think about it.

update: thanks to Emory (?), CIDO’s senior youth computer tech, I’ve got podcasts up now.

If are in a Creston bar, talking to an old logger, and you mention the Buckworth logging road, he will tell you (I am told) about the kangaroo. The kangaroo is a painted stencil, about yay high, on the uphill side of the road. In pink, or yellow, or one of those goddamn colours. And somebody painted it there once, and nobody knows who. And it’s somewhere up that road. Or at least it was the last time somebody looked, arrr.

Well, I went up Buckworth, almost the whole length. And I looked. And I am here to tell you, there is no such kangaroo painted on the side of the Buckworth.

Today Toby forgot his shovel. Luckily, nowadays he’s a crewboss, so he could just drive his truck all the way from the block back to the motel room to get it.

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.

Some bad musical puns inspired by the land we’ve been working, a set of tunes from the parties we’ve been holding, and some other stuff. Mostly upbeat. Go figure.

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.

I’ve long thought that the on-block work of treeplanting could be better organized if each planter had their own radio. I think I’ve heard this idea arise convergently from other planters as well. Before this year’s season started I speculatively shopped around and discovered that radio technology has finally reached levels of cheapness to allow an experiment. With the approval of my crewboss, I sank 80 bones into a mail-order set of frs/grms-band basic hand held 2 way radios. At about $10 per planter, this is a genuinely affordable experiment. Thank you Chinese manufacturing and cheap global shipping.

Some results:

Benefits: Plenty and strong. Being in constant contact with your crewboss saves both of you a lot of time. Being in contact with fellow planters turns out to be a big advantage as well. I guess these results shouldn’t be surprising. But any new complication added to block workflow needs to justify itself relative to additional complications. I would say (with the caveats mentioned below) that crew radios overwhelmingly do so. On our last planting day we didn’t have a functioning radio network, and it was seriously frustrating to go through the traditional exchange:

person standing on the road: TOOOOOBYYYYY
toby (crewboss, planting in land): WHHHHAAAAAT?
person standing on the road: TOOOOBYYYY
toby (crewboss, planting in land): WHHHAAAAT?
person standing on the road: (walks away to try and figure out whatever it was on their own)

The radios are useful for all the things you would assume they would be: “I’ll be out of land in 20 minutes, where should I go?”; “should I be spacing off cedar naturals, or can I ignore them?”; “I’m low on pine, can somebody bring me a few boxes?”; “um, was I supposed to work right or left from the treeline?”; “when are we quitting?”; “hey my piece is finished and there’s no open land, do you mind if I plant in on your land until quitting time?”. Etc.

Battery protocol: The single biggest issue we’ve run in to. The units we’re using run on 3 AAAs, and aren’t rechargeable unless you’re using rechargeable batteries. We first handed them out to any planters who wanted one, thinking that they would be personally owned and maintained. They were inevitably left powered up in bags over night, and were mostly dead within days. Using cheap batteries they start to drain down to poor functioning within a day. Using brand-name batteries they seem to get something like 20+ hours of use before they start to go flaky. Less for the crewboss radio which is regularly transmitting. The protocol we’re using now is that one of a few people try to remember to collect them every evening and make sure they’re turned off and check the battery status. This is an obvious inconvenience at a time when people mostly want to zone out and sometimes doesn’t happen. AAA batteries aren’t cheap either, and require a trip to the store. It’s certainly worth the cost, but some one person has to actually buy the batteries and put them in the radio, and treeplanters are notoriously lazy off the block. The best option would probably be to have a crewboss with an expense account take care of collecting and battery-ing the radios, but unless the planting company could be convinced of the production benefits of supplying batteries to planters, that won’t happen. Based on the experience so far, I figure planting companies should be buying these things and issuing them as standard to their planters, and supplying batteries for them too, but that isn’t likely to happen any time soon.

Critical mass: Of our 8 radios, we’ve only managed to keep 4 or 5 in operation due to battery issues and the general inconvenience of distributing and carrying them. One goes to the crewboss, one to the supervisor (who on our contract in commonly on the block, doing supplementary crewbossing), and the others split between planters. That seems to be a sufficient network, but any less than 4 and it wouldn’t really work. The more people with powered up radios, the more worthwhile the system. The better distributed the radios across the block, the better as well.

Loss: The flagging tape pouches on the front of standard planting bags seems to be a convenient and loss-proof place to store them. Don’t clip them to your straps, trust me (at least not the model we’re using, which seems specifically designed to not be firmly secured to anything). One even managed to pop out of a back bag, which it was rattling around in. Both lost radios were found within 10 minutes of searching. The built-in clip is at least useful for wrapping some flagging tape around, to make them more obvious on the ground. And hey, the one time I lost mine it occured to me that if it took more than about 15 minutes of searching, it was so damn cheap to buy that it would be financially smarter just to leave it lost. A big difference from the $700 dollar business-band company-issued handhelds.

Safety: We haven’t had any debilitating accidents, but if we did a radio could be a different kind of whistle. Less reliable, but also much higher bandwidth. When you hear 3 blasts of a whistle, does that mean drop your bags and run to help a fallen planter, or does it mean there’s an angry bear on the block, and everybody should evacuate? On the other hand, if you’ve fallen off slash onto a stick and punctured yourself, did you remember to put fresh batteries in your radio last night? I figure radios could make a good safety supplement to whistles, but whistles are still where it’s at. And for what it’s worth, my preferred whistle protocol is: if you hear a whistle blast of any kind, go there. Somebody needs help wether it’s a cougar or a fracture. Not that either often happens. Treeplanting isn’t particularly acutely dangerous, whatever some people say. (Logging roads and chronic injuries are, but neither whistles nor crew radios will help you much there.)

Range: The packaging claims about a 5 mile range under “optimal conditions”. Depending on the topography, hill-side clear cuts could constitute optimal conditions (concave blocks, blocks on opposite sides of valleys) or sub-optimal (gullys, convex blocks, blocks on opposite sides of ridges). In practice range has been fine for what we do, spanning individual clearcuts without strain and even once between clearcuts which weren’t within inter-valley sight of each other. The one time we had them on 2 clearcuts separated by about 15 minutes of bad-road driving they had no connectivity, but that isn’t surprising.

Doubling up: I had assumed it would be a significant annoyance to our crewboss to have to carry and monitor both a company-issued hand-held and a crew radio. Turns out the company we’re planting for doesn’t really issue hand-held to it’s crewbosses anyway, so that obviously hasn’t been an issue.

Chatter: There’s been less inane chatter than I had assumed. Most of what there is is at the beginning and end of the day. Which is fine. If larger crews all had them, it might be more of an issue, but turning your radio off is, as a planter anyway, always an option.

Cross-talk: Working in relatively urban area as we are, there is occasional cross-talk from people like surveyors who are also using FRS-band radios. Switching to a more random channel than “1″ (say, “2″) solves that.

Conclusions: If we can get the battery and issuance protocol figured out, these babies are golden. We’ve only kept a few working every day, but I figured they’ve already payed for themselves several times over in terms of total planter productivity increase.

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.)

It’s now 17 planting days into my short season, about half way. I’m still in Creston, planting for Caliburn. Our semi-shotgun crew has been paired down, both from people moving on to better things and the general attrition of treeplanting, but we should still be able to field a creditable squad of hardcores. The Kootenay valley weather remains variable, but has gotten less gentle in its extremes, which is a little worrying. Sleet and hail and snow and actually cold rain have started showing up daily on the block, although we’ve had no day that didn’t also feature some sunshine or the medium no-weather that is ideal for all-day labour. It looks like Caliburn is never going to adopt the strictly production-oriented style of organization we would prefer. The company is more about getting people home in time to have dinner with their kids or to the bank before it closes, and towards daily opening and closing up the small hillside blocks we work. We would rather see blocks left open for a few days so a single crew could carve big individual pieces worked over time, and long days to do it. But I respect that this just isn’t that kind of company. Caliburn has also picked up a secondary contract that was abandoned by another company that folded this season, planting for Wyndell Box and Lumber.

So we’re now working blocks for both Wyndell and Huscroft. I prefer working for small local mills on general principle, and around here that’s all there is. Between the two mills, Huscroft currently has the easier land. But I seem to be making enough money even on the steeper, slashier Wyndell blocks such that I can’t bring myself to really complain. For the first time I feel like I’m getting a taste of what coastal planting might be like. “There’s no such thing as bad land, just bad prices” is an old chestnut, and I guess we’re demonstrating the corollary. “The better the view, the worse the land” is another, and man do we have phenomenal views. For the first time ever I may make a lower day-average wage than my previous season, but I think I’m willing to take the hit to be living the semi-retirement Creston lifestyle. Kootenay Coastal is what I’m calling the planting here. A lot less trees, less stress, a little less money, and a real bed and kitchen waiting for me back home, and extra hours to enjoy it.

More music from the clearcuts, and a goodbye to Utah Phillips

CIDO steamrolled my show application through an emergency meeting of the programming committee. Their words. So Mountain Pine Beats went on the air. Yes, it’s music from the clearcuts, produced during the treeplanting season. If anyone else has done a (loosely) treeplanting-themed radio show, I’m not aware of it, and if anyone has done it while actually on a treeplanting contract, I’m especially not aware of it. What it lacks in soul it makes up for in novelty.

The first 20 minutes or so were a complete technical disaster. But hey. The last part was mostly audible. I’ve cut out the meltdown at the start, so the podcast starts midshow. I’ve left in a few of the later glitches for authenticity. Minor variations in the colour of your garment are natural and add to it’s character. Do not use your Mountain Pine Beats to break rocks or pry roots. Do not overuse your Mountain Pine Beats. Your Mountain Pine Beats is a specialized tool and if treated with care will function well for you.

The first episode of Mountain Pine Beats should be broadcasting from CIDO Creston tomorrow (Thursday) evening at 9pm (Mountain Time). CIDO streams live on the web, and I’ll probably have it up on the podcast by friday night. Maybe. I’m not sure what I’ll play, but I’ve got a few ideas.

This morning, as our little convoy of grumbling fists rolled north up the east side of Kootenay lake, I pointed through the windshield at a flash of clearcut that stood out brown right at the top of a local peak. “That’s my piece”. A standard planting joke. An hour later, there we all were, looking across Kootenay Lake at the snowy peaks on the other side of the valley. I don’t know if it was exactly the same patch of clearcut, but it was mighty close. This is planting in the Creston region: scenic.

Despite leaving Michigan a month ago, the “late thaw in the mountains” and a litany of more minor hitches have kept us out of the clearcuts for more than a double handful of days, and few of those long. That’s the bad news, and that’s bad news for any ragged treeplanter, including me. I shouldn’t be going broke to go treeplanting. The good news can’t really replace the money, but it’s a longer and more interesting litany. the Creston valley is beautiful even at town-level, the company I work for (”Caliburn”, it turns out) is as laid back a bunch of locals as you could ever want, and planting a tree in the ground (when you get around to it) gets you 20 honest to god cents. We stage out of a ghost yard of half-abandoned vehicles next to a cavernous and dodgy looking mechanic’s shop called “Wayne’s”. All of which is just a 5 minute stroll up from our Motel, the Valley View, which is a collection of little cabin-esque units and comes with genuinley friendly proprietors, BBQ facilities, a little unhealthy dog and porches pointed at the view across the valley I am looking at now.

Some days, when Caliburn can’t materialize trees, land, or the will to put one in the other, we stroll a full 10 minutes in the opposite direction, where we join the other local treeplanting company, also called Caliburn. Which stages out of a back yard of a friendly gentleman called Kent, whose pre-work process includes him announcing that he hates supervising and is going to spend his day treeplanting, and he assumes everybody knows how to do it too. Everybody knows everybody around town, and no one is inclined to work past 4, except us, which is another problem. But only a problem if you value money over gazing down into the valley from your porch to watch the low-angle mountain sun do interesting things on the flocks of little toy cows and horses which wander the ultra-green agricultural fields. (We do, however, value money above these things.) We’ve had multiple visitors from Victoria, and our many days off have been full of lassitude and sun glazed domestic tranquility and mixed drinks. And good cooking. The weather has only a few tricks, and they mostly involve gentle rain squalls, bright but gentle high-altitude sun, and gentle breezes. Somebody saw a mosquito, and I’m afraid I had a sun burn for a while. It did rain once, and I was cold for a while. Creston has regaled us with community festivals, vintage car shows, parades, music festivals (which members of our crew have performed in) museums, asparagus, pow wows, and possibly the best used book store/coffee shop I’ve known.

So what about the, you know, treeplanting? Well, 20 cent trees cures all ills, and sometimes there aren’t any ills. As expected, there is a lot more incline then I’ve experienced and that can be a factor, but as long as the stock isn’t too heavy or the pieces too deep or too narrow, it’s not overwhelming. We’ve been working all kinds of land, including semi-slashy fresh cut, residual-heavy fill, burn blocks, shelterwood (another first for me) and types in between. I’ve heard rumour from other crews of genuinely bad land, but even the worst we’ve seen has workable. The problem remains actually getting time to plant in all this. When we’re rolling and the trees are showing up at the caches I’ve peaked out at the $60/hour mark. How can you not make money at these prices? If you don’t get to plant the trees. Too many evenings we’ve found out there aren’t trees ready for tomorrow, or the blocks are frozen, or the access is snowed out, or the road is washed out, or or. Too many afternoons we’ve opened up the fist to find the cupboard bare and contemplated with stormy brows another forced march back to our cabins for pre-dinner relaxing and maybe some music. The early-contract wrinkles don’t seem to be ironing themselves out, and it doesn’t help that we started 2 weeks late because of the thaw. So here we are, in the vital heart of the spring planting season, waiting for our show to get some momentum. But it might yet. And as long as we can keep scraping together motel money, we’ll survive the wait.

“But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think of shipping ye.”
“Well sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world.”
–Herman Melville, Moby Dick

To review:

My first three seasons as a planter were pre-blog-era. In 2002 I finally broke away from planting, to have a serious job. Which I quit in 2003, in part to go planting. Which was a re-learning experience. I remember writing about that in the sandwich and milkshake and internet place in Burns Lake. That was a good season, which ended on a note of bathos. The 2004 season was announced here by way of some statistical calculation.

“This is probably the last hurrah for huge the planter. It should be worthy.”

Just a terse entry filed before I began many months of backpack wandering in 2005. 2006 got a detailed announcement.

“After that, I may actually be done. I’ve hinted at it in past seasons, but I say it a lot less than some planters, and when I do say it, I mean it. I think this really is it for me.”

So then I retired to become, finally, a graduate student (oxymoron). And dutifully did no planting in 2007. And felt very smug about it.

So this must be the inevitable announcement of my descent into the 2008 planting season.

“Come away, fellow sailors, your anchors be weighing,
Time and tide will admit no delaying
Take a bouzy short leave of your nymphs on the shore,
And silence their mourning with vows of returning,
but never intending to visit them more,
no never intending to visit them more.”
– First Sailor, Dido and Aenas

At least not for a couple of months.

The prospects are good. I’m getting weird-old-guy old to be a planter, but weird old guys have always been a reliable trope in planting camps. Especially around BC. And come to think of it, have often done well for themselves. Unlike last time out, it’s going to be truly short season, approximately 30 working days. The gag is: I don’t know who I’m going to be working for. Not the name of the company anyway. I’ve hired directly on with my crewboss, Tobias Meis, whose history as a treeplanter has paralled mine for many seasons. About a 100kms of which in fact ran almost exactly parallel and roughly 2.5 meters apart. This will be his first season crewbossing. I honestly know not what company he’s hired on for, but I gather he’s worked for them before with good results. I trust him, and I’m really enjoying this not-knowing gag. I do know we’ll be working out of Creston, in the pocket of the Kootenay Valley, and spending our working days in the foothills which surround that town. There are whispers of 17 cent straight plant, although I can only assume those last 7 cents have something to do with the vertical angle they pitch the clearcuts on around there. My thighs pre-ache in hysterical anticipation. We’ll be basing out of the Valley View Hotel, at least until they jack the rates for tourist season, if you’d like to come and visit our crew. I’m told it has a view of the mountains, as well as the valley. We’ll have kitchenettes. And a porch. Imagine that!

It really is a long way to come from tenting out in bush-plane isolation camps in the muskeg desolation of northern Alberta to kicking it on the foothill porches of southern BC.

I mentioned a while ago how I’ve been feeling robbed of my hard-earned memories of planting. That’s true. I’m looking to this season now like it’s something frighteningly novel. And it probably will be. It’s never like the first time, but it’s always the first time. There’s a warped piece of me that’s peremptorily disappointed to be doing only 30 days. I assume that piece of me thinks that, the treeplanting experience being accumulative, you don’t get the full character of the thing unless you stay on into the dog days of the summer. Perhaps that part of me forgets that the reason the planting experience grows in intensity is that misery is intense and additive, and treeplanting is fundamentally miserable. As more and more lines get penciled in to the planting record in the tent at night, the dread certainty grows stronger that nothing will change tomorrow but it will have to be suffered through anyway. Get over it, piece of myself. I’ll just have to milk out as much misery as I can before July.

So is this at least likely to be the last of my treeplanting starts? I’ll be graduating mid-winter with a terribly interesting but not exceptionally marketable degree. So no, no breezy claims about this being the last big push of my planter-centric identity. Who the hell knows?

I’ll be heading up to Ontario to visit hearth and kin for a few days, then flying into Victoria on the 30th. There’s a “late thaw in the mountains” (and apparently everywhere else) which is substantially delaying our original contract start date. I’ll wait for the clearcuts to de-ice in Victoria with my friends there, and maybe do a little side-tripping or side-jobs, if I can find either. Then it’s on to Creston and horrible horrible glory. Currently estimated day for putting shovel in earth: the 12th of May.

Playlist

This week I finally figure out what my dj name is, and dedicate the show mostly to treeplanting, which I will now leave to go do. So this is the last show of the term. I’ll be back in town later in summer, and I’m already looking forward to doing random time slots then.

Our music server has been acting up lately, and towards the end the left audio channel drops out. Sorry about that.

All of the explicitly planting-related songs can be had for free at the Peppermill Records website.

Hai look, they’re treeplanting.