I never quite got around to the traditional “I’m leaving for the bush” blog entry this summer, but I did leave for the bush and here I am now. Been here for a while actually. Planting trees. Yep. More to follow, perhaps. For now, here’s some haiku from my comrades-in-shovels.

Haiku for the Van

Dirty and smelly,
Bad sound and ten cylinders.
Tired, it takes me home.

– Sherwin with thanks to Hugh

& for the Block

Step, shovel, seed, stomp
Rolling like a mercury —
step, shovel, seed, stomp

– Bashto (DR) with thanks to Sherwin

Amidst qeues of seedlings
I here mull anomalous
in my bags, my boots

– Pound Issa (DR again) with thanks to Eric

Well shoot, it’s getting to be that time of year again. The long lead out from the last planting season is well over, the misleading period of tree-free normalacy has run it’s course, and the frighteningly quick ramp up to the next season is underway. I’ve signed up with my crewbosses. It’s to be Nechako for a francophone spring in the interior BC plateau area, probably based out of Vanderhouf, with Jean-Sebastian Marcil at the helm, followed by Another Summer with the Christian Thunder, namely Ryan Macleod running the best damn planting crew in existence for Little Smokey Forestry Services in the Grand Prairie area.

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.

But that’s a long way and a lot of tree seedlings away. In the meantime I’m staring down the double barrels of the longest and hence rainiest, buggiest, achingest, boringest, exhaustingest season of my life. I should be on the clearcuts from May 3 till August 20th. You do the math cause I don’t want to, that’s a lot of days.

I got email today from Jean “Jonny” Marcil. It’s the standard “hey crew, here’s the dates, see you in a parking lot on this day in this town”. I did a cameo plant briefly with Jonny last year but I think the crew may be changing up for this season, this will anyway be the first time I’ve pulled a full contract with Nechako. Looking over the email addresses in the “to” line, I’m struck that even this far into my career, I’m still going deep into places I don’t really know with people I don’t really know. It’s always kind of a dirty scary adventure. And who the hell is wastedyear666 anyway?

Guess I’ll find out.

Scott at tree-planter.com (the most popular of the treeplanting websites) has asked/offered to put a bunch of my planting photos up. He’s reworking the site and I guess it’s going to happen once that’s done. In the meantime, there’s a picture I took of Kieley in the news item announcing the new features. How cool.

Got the last of the pictures from treeplanting and motorbike riding this summer into the gallery. I think I’m caught up. I guess I should go take some more pictures.

Chi…

ps. somewhere in idaho the sun sets on a line of hydrotowers forever,
and I stand forever torn between riding and photography. life often
does seem quite good.

I got some of those treeplanting photos up. All that’s left to go up are some of the later ones from the summer in Alberta in Little Smokey. Anyone from the crews looking for prints/full sized versions let me know.

www.hughstimson.org/gallery/planting04

I recommend listening to Tom Petty while looking at these.

Colin James, whose daughter Julia died on her day off when a crummy sank into Tibbles Lake during the 2003 treeplanting season, gave a speech at the recent siliviculture conference in Victoria. It’s a lot of things: a tribute to his daughter and parenthood in general, an informed discussion of the anatomy of industrial accident preparedness, and a negative review of the maturity of the treeplanting culture. Mr. James has apparently spent time talking about the incident with some of the people involved, which must have been very hard, but clearly has kept his head and heart open through the experience. It’s well composed and careful, suprisingly so given the quantity of emotion and criticism it’s funnelling into a quick talk.

tree-planter.com has a transcript posted on their message boards.

http://www.plant-a-tree.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=204

“…Tragedy strikes when all the ducks are lined up.” There are those that might think that Julia died because one other person made a huge mistake, made a terrible and impaired choice. Trevor Wishart did all of that, and now he languishes, potentially for the next four years in a Federal penitentiary. But Trevor was only one of the ducks in a line that day.

It is not until tragedy strikes that we shine a spotlight on our culture. Well, tragedy has struck, and in the last 10 years it has struck 13 other times. This is unbelievable and unacceptable. Back in the late sixties your industry was born, those people that planted back in those early years, they are your elders: where are they today. They are not around anymore, in part because the job is being reduced to not much better than a paltry wage. It is also a brutal industry, it is incredibly hard work. I know what that is like, I work in an industry myself that is hard, it is physically hard and physically demanding. So that there is often an imbalance with more young people out there. The old people, some hang in there, some get jobs in hardware stores. So because tree planting is so brutally hard, and there are very few old timers left, you have to find other elders, you have to find elders who aren’t old. You have to find those qualities that an elder has, you have to recognize those qualities in the young people that return. They could be 30, 32, 34 or they could be 40. They don’t have to be old and grey and bespectacled, like me.

I just realized I never posted this MP3 rip of Nicki Mosely’s latest radio documentary from CBC’s always fabulous Outfront program. It’s about Mose’s experiences while doing AIDS education and development work in some remote corners of Guyana. It’s great of course.

I can’t remember how I made this, I think maybe I recorded the audio stream from CBC’s website and translated it into an MP3. If you prefer, it’s still available as a stream at: www.cbc.ca/outfront/listen/2003/dec0103.html.

Note that only maybe a quarter of the Outfront shows are available as streams, Mosley’s is one of them.

Otherwise, here’s the MP3 file: Guyana’s Waterworlds.

Mosely’s (yes, I can’t figure out how to spell it, even though I refer to her almost exclusivley as her last name) previous show about treeplanting was a a “best of outfront” pick. I don’t see it on the CBC website anymore – although it used to be part of CBC’s educational tools package. But you can get that here too, thanks to Owen Lyon’s nice MP3 rip of it. Here’s that older file: Poetry in the Trees.

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.

a few things I had forgotten about treeplanting which I have rediscovered

– planting the first bundle of the day hurts your shovel hand –> then it stops hurting
– spruce rash
– late afternoon stumble planting
– trying to bag out before closing time
– scrubbing your raw hands with a nail brush to get them clean for dinner
– to bring enough beer

I know I’ve got better things to be doing right now, but anyway. Here’s the text of a post I made to a discussion forum of unions in treeplanting, an ongoing and ever contentious issue. Even if it was mostly from a distance, observing the changes in the way peace activists in San Francisco organized and implemented their plans and themselves had a really impact on me. I wonder if there aren’t a lot of communication and organization options and models emerging that people can make use of. Treeplanters are largely a younger, tech-comfortable lot who are probably definable as a group only via their flexibility. So what can be done to overcome the age-old ‘unions don’t work in planting’ problem and combat the universally recognized decay in the treeplanting industry?

Anyway, the post follows, here’s a link to the original discussion forum.

Posted: Tue Apr 22, 2003 5:38 pm Post subject: alternatives to traditional unionism?