Crummies and Eulogies
More music from the clearcuts, and a goodbye to Utah Phillips
- MountainPineBeats5june2008.mp3
showing posts in treeplanting
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.
