The Artist Goes Tree Planting

Some years ago I found myself planting trees in Northern British Columbia.  It was a lark, really – a spur-of-the-moment decision I made in the cafeteria at Langara College in Vancouver.  A fellow student was putting a crew together and without much debate or consideration I decided that I would go with him.  Over two long summers I found myself in places with names like Ingenika, Seh Keh Dene, the Mugaha Valley, The Parsnip Mountains, MacKenzie, the Russell Service Road, Finlay River, Lake Williston,  Green Lake, 70 Mile House and a lot of places in between.  I was fresh out of art college and wanted to make some landscape paintings that were more interesting than the ones we had made on the golf course next to the school.  Of course I still needed to make some money, so planting seemed like a good way to get paid to observe nature.  In truth, I didn’t get paid very much – I’m not that good of a planter – but the whole two years’ experience was a real feast for the eyes.  We camped in lush, thick forest a lot, but we saw our share of ugly, torn-up places too.  It didn’t really matter, though – there was always something to look at, even if it was just a little stream or dry, distant ridge.  Even the clearcuts impressed me visually.  Living in the city I had been taught that a clearcut is a massive dead zone, a hole in the ecosystem.  This latter point is undoubtably true, and I’ve seen the mudslides that prove it, but a clearcut is also an incredibly vibrant place, filled with plants and animals that thrive on ecological collapse and do their best to bring renewal.  As a planter, I got right into the soil of the mountainside.  I learned about how trees lean.  I saw what water does with itself and the things it encounters.  Through the entire experience I could almost always look outward and see something macroscopically amazing in the landscape and then look closer to see smaller beauties in the sometimes tortured terrain around me.

At first, I had thought about making a few sketches while making a little money.  Soon, though, I decided that the experience wanted some sort of documentation, a record of events, in a way.  So I made these paintings and every once in awhile I sit down and add one more to the series, based now on memory and my original drawings.

In the Fireweed

A Field of Fireweed, Ingenica, 1997  Watercolour, 2000

This image is of an old cutblock that was originally logged in the 1970s and lies in the Ingenika Valley north of Lake Williston, BC.  It didn’t take long for this place to gain the name “The Vietnam Block” – the overgrowth was unbelievable and everyone was joking about how jungle-like it was.  My planting partner Nadeau and I found ourselves in this wide hollow filled with balsam trees and more fireweed than any planter ever wants to see.  With the fireweed reaching past our heads in some cases, the job soon became ridiculous.  We were losing sight of each other, though we were often not more than a few meters apart.  By mid-day we were howling with laughter at the absurdity of planting in this jungle while still trying to maintain some sort of logical planting plan.  Good thing the quality checkers were too afraid to ascend the mountain of doom.

I recall the day with crystal clarity.  The day was warm and the sky wide open and summer blue, a breeze blew through the balsams and filled the air with a sweet scent.  I can still smell it.  All around us, life was thriving.  It seemed like we were lost for the entire day, and it was tough work sometimes to clear a space in the fireweed but I can recall few times in my life when I have had so much pure fun.

The Flip Out

Blair Flips Out on the Rookies, Vanderhoof, 1996,  Watercolour, 2001

Here is a scene that can only be played out by treeplanters : absolute blind rage met with fear masked by apparent indifference.

We were on loan to another camp, working out of a logging show near Vanderhoof and trucking daily to the slimiest, most bug-infested place I have ever been.  Most of us were rookies and we were from another camp so naturally we were given the task of planting out this pestilent environmental nightmare.

It went like this: the loggers had destroyed a riparian zone (fancy term for a creek) and sent the water spilling out down this section of the mountain.  This had the effect of creating an instant swamp as the water now fanned out and trickled over the slope, turning everything into mush.  Not afraid to fight stupidity with stupidity, the logging company decided to fix the problem by digging  meter-deep holes all over the cutblock, spaced about 3-4 meters apart.  Beside each hole was the soil removed from the hole, lying in a mound.  It was on the mounds that we were instructed to put our trees.   The idea, I was told, was that the hole fills up with rainwater and acts as a reservoir for the tree planted into the mound.  Over time the mound settles back down into the hole and the tree takes hold there.  In practice, however, I’ve heard that the mound’s movement back into the hole tips the planted sapling sideways and as it grows it eventually falls over and dies.  I can only think they were trying to grow a crop of retaining walls to stop the swampy mess from sliding too far down the block.

The actual planting was excellent; the mounds were so soft that we almost didn’t need our shovels.  The real trouble was with the clouds of bugs that swarmed the entire mountainside. The holes had indeed filled up with water and each mini-marsh soon became crowded with wriggling mosquito larvae and other fun things.  Black flies flew up in clouds from the slime and the muck. Merciless mosquitoes gathered around anyone who stood still and enveloped them in a cloud.  Deer flies followed us in gangs and ravaged our necks and hands.  The only sounds that rose above the incessant buzzing were the screams.  Moreover, great ferns grew up past our heads, confusing our sense of direction and put us off our plan as we stumbled blindly upwards to clearer ground.  The temperature each day went over 30 degrees and our drinking water tasted like dirt.  It was horrible.  Leslie tipped over one day and fell bottom-first into one of the wriggling holes; if I think about it right and place myself in the moment, I can still hear her shrieks.  Graham spent an hour rigging up a type of helmet using a t-shirt, ski goggle and some duct tape.  It covered his whole head but it still wasn’t enough.  Paulie grew ever despondent and eventually quit rather than continue.

But hell always gets worse, doesn’t it?  As an added bonus, we did a lousy job of planting this wretched place and on the day we thought we were finally free to return to our own people we were instead ordered to replant.  This meant long hours with light bags, pushing through walls of ferns, looking for mounds that we had missed.  When news got around, Blair, the guy freaking out in the painting above, became irate and launched his nearly-new super speedy shovel into the swamp where it vanished forever.  Not to worry, he borrowed another one from Jonny. We radioed to Rambo, supervisor of the camp, that we were going to finish the replant that evening, but he said no;  he wanted to make an example of us and said as much.  So when we refused to wait until the next day he told us that there would be no supper waiting for us when we got back to camp.  Okay, so he was a jerk.  We were used to that.  But this was our last day on the contract and we all just wanted to get away, back to our own, friendlier show.  So we resolved to ignore the boss, get ‘er done and light out before we could get an earful.

At this point, however, Blair really lost it.  he had been going hard all day and perhaps he was having a few blood sugar issues.  He hopped up onto a stump and called us every dirty name in the book, threatened us with all kinds of violence, broke into a long string of broken profanity, insulted us some more, then launched his borrowed shovel into the swamp, where it too vanished forever.  Then he stomped off to sulk in the van.  We all laughed later, but at the time, I’m sure most of us thought he might well tear us all apart.  Blair sulked all evening, but we got the job done.  Arriving back at the logging camp, we begged the cook for a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter – a poor dinner after 14 hours of work!  The next day, Paulie, seen in the foreground of the painting, quit and went back to T.O.  We piled in the van and said goodbye to the swamp.

On the Shores of  Lake Williston

Changing weather over Lake Williston, watercolour, 2012

A long, long trek through a muddy mess and an eternity of waterlogged planting brought us to this place one day in early May.  Breakfast was the usual travesty but worse than a belly full of greasy, coagulating bulk was the hour-long ride up the Russell Road, bouncing over potholes and skidding through the mud.  Eventually the road began to present us with washouts and puddles we were afraid to cross and we had to pull off a few tricky manoeuvres just to gain a few more kilometres. Eventually we arrived at our first destination, a long, oozing, muddy stretch of road with a big rolagon waiting for us. Rolagons are enormous tractor-type engines used to haul all sorts of things to all sorts of inaccessible places. They plow through wide streams and mud morasses and can climb just about anything.  Heck, they can drive over trees if they have to.  Ours had a big white box fixed to the back and rested on four knobby tires, each with about a five foot span.  Inside the box, two benches were fixed to the sides and so in we went and sat down for our long, slow, topsy-turvy ride.

Rolagons are great for gaining tough ground, but they are painfully slow.  10km/hr slow.  And they are loud – enormous  diesel engine loud. So loud as to make conversation or even meaningful screaming impossible.  And so we trudged on, driven by a man with a nicotine stripe through his hair and poor hearing, peeking at each other from our places on the bench and wishing the belching, noisy smokestack would go away.  It was the full-on poor peasant worker experience.

Forty-five minutes later we arrived at our destination, a muddy crossroads in the middle of a dense forest of deciduous trees.  We wondered where the block was and the foreman pointed to the trees.  I wondered how I was ever going to keep track of my planting in a forest filled with standing trees and covered in brush.  I was a rookie and I was used to clear cuts that had been nicely swept of slash. This was going to be different.

It proved not to be so difficult but being new at the game, it took me a lot longer to find my last row of trees and space the new trees against it.  I got lost a lot.  Worse, the sky darkened and the air grew cold and humid in a hurry. Half an hour later the rain began and continued through most of the day, soaking everything and everyone in the forest.

Then the learning really began.  To plant in a forested block, you really have to develop a keen eye for the trees you’ve planted.  You spot signs of your last row and follow it as you make a new one, you mark bushes and logs with flagging tape to let you know you’ve already planted the other side.  But I learned about other things too like the uselessness of rain gear. A good raincoat is fine if you’re just standing around, but once you begin crashing around through the bush, your rain protector turns into a perspiration trapper and soon enough you’re wetter than you would be without it.  One fleece on your body and another in your bag turns out to be adequate for most rainy situations.  I also learned that my $60 pair of spiky-soled caulk boots were far too clunky and not at all good for the things I thought they would be. Picture felt-lined rubber boots with golf cleats on the soles.  I thought they would carry me easily over any sort of terrain but they came off in the mud or became coated in heavy cakes, caught roots and twigs more than shoes and though they had good traction on firm ground, the cleats slipped on wet logs with leg twisting, groin-thumping results.  I couldn’t wait to throw them away.

The rain lasted most of the day, drizzling down in a steady tumble that was easily matched by the cold drips from the canopy above. Even when the rain stopped, every branch and bush lay loaded with cold water, waiting to be disturbed and fling a cold spray over us.  It was muddy, confusing, thankless work and to stop meant becoming miserably cold within minutes.  But it looked incredible; the thick tangle of the trees, the hiss/drip of rain on leaves and the strange light changing constantly as clouds rolled across the sky made the experience almost mysterious.

This went on for a week or more – rain and a rolagon ride in the morning, turbulent clearing skies, soaking wet clothes and a rolagon ride in the afternoon. At last we planted our way across the forest and ended up overlooking the lake.  Here, I suppose, was the payoff, as the lake looked great under afternoon rays of sunlight cast across a turbulent sky.  We spent some time taking in the view and then walked the low lakeside road back to the main cache at the fork in the road.

Rolagon, from the sketchbook.

On the Russell Road

Morning at Km72, Russell Road Near McKenzie, BC.  Watercolour, 2008

This is a portion of  the first camp in my treeplanting career.  It was not too far from MacKenzie, off the Russell Road, near a stream that was swollen with spring melt.  The first camp was the hardest for me; people were still a little guarded and the weather was terrible and I had no idea what I was doing or what was going to be expected of me.  The first night my tent flooded.  The second night the rain turned our camp to pure mud.  Still, it didn’t take long before we were all making friends and I was learning how to plant.

It was at this camp that I first met Mekonen. He was hunched over a travel mug full of dirtwater coffee with his hoodie up, waiting for someone to start a fire.  I sized him up and guessed that he might be as old as fifty, which is a rare thing among planting camps.  he was also the only black person in camp and he had a strong African accent, so I introduced myself and asked him where he was from.  “Eritrea,” he said.

I had never heard of Eritrea before and he went on to explain that his country used to be the northern part of Ethiopia until their separation in 1991.  over the next few months he would enlighten me as to the horrors of the ruinous civil war that Eritrea had fought against Ethiopia to gain its independence.  Poor Mekonen was drummed into the service of a warlord as a child and used as a spy and a provocateur, though at the age of ten or twelve he wasn’t up to any James Bond capers.  But he told me about smuggling piles of leaflets into the university and throwing them down the highest staircase he could get to before making good his escape.  He also told me about causing commotions and distractions outside stores and hospitals while the elder rebels robbed the place in question via the back door.  When he was old enough they gave him a rifle and he became a soldier.  He had a lot of stories like this but he didn’t tell them in a bragging or jocular way; more like he was trying to keep hold of his composure.  Some of his stories were much worse, but I won’t put them on display here; suffice it to say that the man’s personality and his body bore the scars of a life of hardship.

I liked Mekonen a lot – we all did.  Probably because he was such a solid planter and was basically unstoppable on the block. Whether it was zero degrees and snowing or 40 degrees and absolutely roasting, Mekonen was out there with his black track pants and his black hoodie up pounding the trees into the ground.  He had one speed and was by no means the fastest but you always knew where he was and you always knew how many trees he would plant ( the same amount as yesterday).

Km72 was not as scenic a location as I had envisioned – it was muddy, scruffy and the  dense bush that surrounded our camp was ragged and not at all what I had pictured in my city artist’s dreams of rugged landscape.  But there I made the friends I would plant with for two years.  And it was there I learned just what this planting life was really all about.

Rookies

Rookies, watercolour, 2001

The best thing about being a second year planter is that you are no longer a rookie, which means you can now make fun of the newbies.

Our crew that year was made up of mostly new planters and they looked to Nadeau and I for a little guidance. I found the lot of them one day, standing around in a circle, poking listlessly at the dusty soil with their shovels and whining like children: “It’s too hot….!  My hands hurt…!  This is stupid…!” – that sort of thing. Okay, that’s fine, treeplanting is hard work.  But someone’s gonna get heatstroke just standing around here in the sun, I thought.  So I formed them into a line and got them planting side by side toward the road.  A couple of the rookies still had a lot of trees in their bags, so I began taking bundles from them, planting out their trees for them.  I mean, who cares, right?  Just planting a few friendly trees.  This was fine until the other shattered rookies saw me doing it, then whined again, insisting that I plant an equal amount of trees from everyone, as it was unfair of me to help some and not others.  At this point I suggested that it might be a good idea for them to shut up and deal with the reality of the job they’d chosen.  It didn’t make them happy, but we got to the road with a minimum of fuss. I decided to do a painting to commemorate these groaners, picking a few of the most noteworthy characters.  Here they are, at the end of the day.   The fellow on the left is the one who thought planting trees meant sitting under a tree reading Yeats and Shelley.  He found out that there is no romance on a clearcut, just toil, followed by a bulky meal and a little nosepicking.  Next to him is the fellow who, try as he might, couldn’t keep from falling over into ditches and streams.  Poor guy was always filthy.  Next to him is the girl who got heatstroke every single day, and would end up at the tree cache a little after mid-day to throw up and pass out under the tarp.  She learned that she could make as much money as a good planter by helping out in the cookbus.  The girls in the rear were two of many who came out looking for a boyfriend.  The last fellow, on the far right is the guy who spent each evening talking obsessively about how he wanted to be the first rookie to plant 2000 trees in a day, but spent each morning coming up with newer and lamer reasons why he couldn’t go to the block that day.  After three weeks, the company sent him and some others to the Yukon border for a three week show in which they were planting in close proximity to a dozen bears or more.  He went home after that.

It’s tough on rookies.  Planters are constantly challenging each other to up their production and at the end of the day, the final tally of trees is the only thing that really matters.  I’m not sure how it works in other regions, but in our camps, rookies were called upon to beat a thousand trees a day, then challenged to shoot for two thousand.  More experienced planters are free with advice and lessons, tips on how to plant faster and better; it can be a supportive community.  But often those same helpful individuals will be the ones to take advantage of the rookies in every possible way until they get their skills up to snuff.  This is because treeplanting is essentially a competition for trees and money and once planters gain a certain comfort level and status, newcomers are seen as a potential threat.  Highballing planters know they have it good – they get the best land and people respect them.  Human nature dictates that when we have status, we tend to defend it and I saw a lot of headgames and misdirection being employed to befuddle the newbies.  The novice planter’s only recourse is become a good planter and earn a little respect for him or herself.   For some the skills come quickly, others take longer to make the mental adjustment.

Planting fast is key – the faster you go, the more land you cover, the more money you make.  Moreover, the faster you are, the better quality is the the land you are given to plant.  Slower planters get relegated to slower terrain.  Quality and spacing are important too, but come naturally with practice.  The mechanics of planting are essentially simple.  Once you get the basics, speed comes as you find more efficient ways to do the job.  But there are other skills too that are invaluable, ones I’m happy to share with anyone who is going planting for the first time.

TIPS FOR FIRST TIME TREEPLANTERS:

1.  My foreman told me once that bugs can’t bite you if you move faster that them and it turns out that it’s pretty easy to outrun a mosquito.  Wasps, blackflies and deerflies are another story.  Generally, though, movement is the best way to keep from being swarmed by anything but wasps.

2.  No matter who he is or what he’s talking about, chances are that he’s lying to you – at least a little bit.  There’s a lot of hype and hyperbole out there and everyone’s in competition for that last box of trees and bragging rights by the fire.  Was the bear really right there ready to strike, or was it across the road eating berries?  Did you really see him plant those six thousand trees?  Don’t let it get you down.  They’re not really heroes. And you can probably spin a tale that’s just as good.

3.  If you have a tough piece, don’t complain too much.  Slash is a fact of life.

4.  If all you get are tough pieces – swamps, rocks and slashpiles – complain loudly until someone does something about it.  If you are too agreeable, they’ll walk all over you.

5.  If there are people planting on your piece and you didn’t invite them, chances are they’re creaming you out.  That is, they’ve snuck onto your piece to lose a few trees on your best land (the cream).  You’re in the back planting out the slashpiles, they’re up front stealing land that you had been saving for later – easy land where you can really make some money.  Essentially they have their hand in your pocket.  If you know any bad words, this is the time for them.  Also, consider throwing rocks at anyone who steals from you.

6.  They will all steal from you.  I was very friendly with everybody in our camp.  There is something about being isolated in the bush and working on a common mission that creates  a sense of community in people.   I had the sense that our community was tighter than most.  But in the end it’s a transient affair and with people coming and going from one camp to another, with frequent moving and rearranging, people lose all sorts of stuff and it usually gets picked up by someone else.  Don’t leave your duct tape lying around, don’t tell people where you stash your grass.  I lost one good shovel and another bad one by simply trusting other  planters.  Deep inside, we’re all amoral creatures – don’t let your brother fall into temptation!

7.  Don’t eat any meat for lunch.  Chances are it’s third rate bologna or gelatinous pressed ham anyway; you don’t need it and neither does your stomach.   I ate peanut butter sandwiches for lunch every day for three months.  Sounds gross, I know, but consider this: I got lots of carbs and protein all day, it was easy to digest and I avoided three rounds of food poisoning that swept through the camp owing to spoiled lunch meat. (They were keeping it in the back of an old U-haul parked in the shade! For crimeny’s sake!)  PBJ and fruit all day plus lots of water will keep you going.

8.  Stick with it and believe in the reasons that brought you to the bush.  After all, something is making you do this, right? People in your camp might try to bully you or play head games or keep you down, but only because they’re afraid of what you might become.  The best thing to do is rise above the pecking order and be the planter that you came out to be and accomplish the goals you’ve set for yourself.  In camp it’s pretty easy to get embroiled in petty politics, resentments, grudges, but these are a waste of time if they are not helping you plant better.  It’s easy to get distracted by drugs and partying too, but that can’t be why you came to the clearcut.  You could do that in the city. I learned quickly that the name of the game was TOIL, followed by a greasy meal and some good times before BED.  I met a few people who had envisioned planting as a type of magical, easy, back-to-nature experienced who were shocked to discover that it was all about work, competition and money.  But it’s also about accomplishment – I can pretty much guarantee that a city job will never seem difficult again.  And when the season’s over and you are back under electric light, it’s about knowing that you tackled something more monumental than most endeavours, and won.

Northern Lights

Northern Lights at Green Lake, neat 70 Mile House, BC, watercolour, 2008

One night in mid April we were at our camp at Green Lake, near 70 Mile House, when the Northern Lights came up and filled up the entire sky with brilliant red.  I’ve never seen it’s match since – truly a magic experience and completely surreal. It was one of only two times in my life that I’ve looked straight up and seen the Aurora directly overhead and the effect impressed everybody  At times the brilliant, shifting red and green filled the entire sky from horizon to horizon.  We all got drunk and made a little party in the sub-zero air of our rented campsite.

There was a small floating dock next to the lake and everyone from our camp stepped aboard to get a better look at the sky.  Of course with 60 people standing on it, the dock threatened to submerge.  There were no casualties, however, just an amazing show.

Full Metal Shovel

Jungle Trail, Ingenica, 1997.  Watercolour, 2001

Far up the west side of Lake Williston we came to a steep, nasty block that we called “the Vietnam”, owing to the thick, tangled growth, two bomb blast zones and the near-constant helicopter traffic.

Accessing this cutblock was a job unto itself.  Leaving camp, we’d drive about a kilometer to a landing where a helicopter took us, five at a time, across the valley and mid-way up the mountain.  From the helicopter we could see that the massive clearcut had been bombed at either end with a chemical defoliant that had killed all leafy things while leaving all needley things to grow. It wasn’t like a proper clear cut – more like a half-dead forest.  But they had left the centre of the block untouched and it was there, in a small clearing that the helicopter dropped us with our gear.  Later it would return to various cache sites across the block to deliver giant netfuls of boxed seedlings.

Once landed at the clearing, we then had to find our respective pieces and for some it was a long hike. From the forest landing we followed the overgrown trail shown in the painting, which was little more than a line of flagging tape leading upward through the thick trees and bush.  Dense alder thickets and tottering balsams hung over washouts and stream beds, fireweed and brush filled every sunny space.  Worse, this was a mountainside and a steep one too. The ‘path’ wound upward through this ridiculous terrain and as we marched we could see other planters working on their pieces, hung up in thickets and struggling through some truly terrible planting. A sense of foreboding grew.  Bad words rang through the trees.  But still we climbed, loaded down with gear, adventurers of the bush.

We followed the line uphill through the snarb for more than a kilometer until we reached a long ridge that traversed the entire block, a distance of perhaps six kilometres from end to end.  The trail came up through the middle of the block, so depending where one’s assigned piece was, there was up to another three kilometres hike along this ridge before one actually arrived at his work. The north trail led to one blast zone, half-reforested, dry and nearly devoid of leafy trees. Here fireweed stretched out for hectares between ragged slash piles and stands of twisted balsams.  Nadeau and I planted one piece here, but spent moth of our time in the jungle and on the south end of the block.

The south trail took us down into a deep, overgrown gulley and then back up again to a post-nuclear wasteland of dust and death.  The defoliant had really done its job here; dead trees lay fallen everywhere, pushed into slash piles and the dust came up in fine clouds out of bleached soil. Tall termite mounds and massive ant colonies sat everywhere and to linger too long in one place was to invite columns of stinging insects up one’s trousers. Add massive slash piles made of dead deciduous trees, swirling dust, baking heat and the effects of a 4km hike through the Vietnam and suddenly you’re wondering how life’s road could have the audacity to dump you in a place like this.  We did have a lot of fun here too – the situation and planting conditions were such that you just had to laugh.

At the end of each day we would fly back to the camp, then sit around looking at the block from across the valley.  Even from that distance, the block was huge and ominous. Nadeau said he could feel it calling to him like a dark spectre. I grew to dread the next day’s hike.

Block 15

Block 15, near 70 Mile House.  Watercolour, 2008

On the Finlay River

Morning on the Banks of the Finlay River, 1998.  Watercolour, 2001

In my second year, we camped on the banks of the Finlay River, a truly remarkable place.  Our camp was a few kilometers from Seh Keh Dene, a reserve village on the north shores of Lake Williston. The mosquitoes were particularly bad here, especially for their enormous size.   Still, we spent most of our evenings sitting on the 3 metre banks, swatting the little beggars, watching the glacial water speeding by and taking in the view.  The camp stretched out along the banks and so a path was made along the edge of the river.  As most people were camped along the banks and used the trail, sitting there meant you could usually visit with everyone in camp.  It was good for our sense of community.

It was HOT while we were there and the planting was grueling.  At the end of each day, the van would drop us at camp, then take anyone who cared to go upstream about a kilometer or so.  There, overheated and made torpid from the temperature, they jumped into the river which was absolutely freezing.  The Finlay is fed by glaciers, it runs fast and very very cold.  Personally I couldn’t bring myself to swim, though the painfully icy water was good for cooling the feet.  However, these deranged souls who had jumped in upriver rode the freezing currents back to camp, screaming at the top of their lungs all the way.  By the time they got to camp, they were well cooled, if not a little lightheaded and confused from the temperature shock. The fellow in the foreground of this painting was named Remy, my neighbour on the banks.  The guy with the green jacket is me and the fellow behind me is Alistair the All-Star, our camp medic.  We made a song one night about a guy who loses his girlfriend to the foreman while camping on the Finlay:

By the breezy banks of the old Finlay river,

I sat down and I started to quiver,

The girl I loved, hurt me deep in my liver,

By the easy, breezy banks of the old Finlay River!

Ok, so it won’t be topping the charts anytime soon, but we sure had fun singing it and making up new verses.

Graham Gets Busted.  Watercolour, 2002

Try as he might, Graham had to spend more time on his butt smoking joints than working on his piece.  one day the foreman tore a strip off him, to very little effect.

End of the Piece,  Watercolour 2001

What can I say?  It just… ended.  Watch your step.

We pulled up to a little cache somewhere in the Mugaha Valley.  The cache sat on a high bank at the edge of the road, overlooking a wide flood plain which lay below us some dozen meters or more.  A few of our crewmates were already planting on the flood plain, digging at the ground and working near the river bank beyond.  I looked up the road and saw past a remnant copse of trees to an endless sea of jumbled slash that looked, well… like Hell, actually.  Now I had a choice to make.

The slash had been spread out all over the rising slope and was, for all purposes, a gigantic obstacle course made of snagging, unstable logs.  The planting would be slow there and painful.  Moreover, it looked pretty muddy under all those jumbled logs and where there is mud, there are often flies.  Down on the flood plain however, the people were fighting with the stickmat.  Stickmats are wide areas filled with broken sticks left behind when the machines remove slashpiles.  The logs go, but the little sticks, twigs, branches and splinters stay behind like a thick carpet over the soil.  Sometimes the stickmat can be two feet deep which can make for a lot of difficult, deep digging.  The rules state that all trees must be planted in soil, not sticks, and so one must undertake the proverbial quest for China to put the trees in.  With a heavy sigh I filled up my bags and headed for the slash.

The slash was difficult and I took a few nasty spills and the mud was indeed filled with flies which flew up annoyingly with each shovel strike in a massive attempt to eat my eyeballs.   Still, I made my way to the rear of my slashy piece, sweating and probably cursing in the 30 degree heat.  There were trees still standing there, which usually means you don’t plant there, but this day they wanted us to put a few plugs into the wooded area as there seemed to be room for them.  off I went, happy to be out of range of the flies and in the relative cool of the trees.

When one is planting, it’s easy to succumb to tunnel vision; indeed a planter spends most of his/her time scanning the ground looking for microsites.  It’s easy to lose track of the macrosite.  At one point I looked up and found myself standing on the edge of this 50 meter chasm with the river running below.  I guess if I had been looking behind me or shuffling backward, I might have gone over the edge, but it didn’t feel dangerous as I stood there gawking at the scene.  More, it was like a pleasantly awe-inspiring surprise and a reminder that just behind the devastation still lies great natural beauty.  I looked around and saw Lindsay Brown, doing more or less the same as me, staring out over the canyon, feeling the same feelings.  We had a good laugh and watched the river go for awhile.  In the end we planted out our pieces and took a cliffside path (of sorts) down to the flood plain below where we spent the rest of the afternoon hacking enormous holes in the stickmat with a dozen other sun-fried souls.

Bad Naturals, watercolour, 2009

This was an interesting block near Mackenzie, BC, though don’t ask me to find it on a map.  I don’t recall whether we were sent there or if we were diverted there, but it was essentially an overflow block that the Company had been trying to plant for more than fifteen years.  Someone said that the snowpack was too great and killed the seedlings over the winter, but if you ask me, it was the grassmat.  it was a no-screef job but I suspect that had we hacked back some of the grass, the trees would have done much better. The block was filled with “bad naturals” – trees that had come from wild seed instead of a greenhouse plug and had been twisted and warped by the wind and snow.  Apparently our trees were engineered to grow straight and fast, so they stood a better chance once the 9 months of snowpack decended and buried them.  The naturals, by contrast didn’t grow as fast and were thus more vulnerable to the weight of the snow, which caused them to grow sideways. It was easy to see how this came to be; this little block was insufferably hot in summer, bitterly cold all winter and was devoid of any cover, even slash, to block wind or hold heat.  Everything was being choked out by the grass and I can imagine the winter winds of Northern Canada lashing through this little opening in the forest. Our mission, then, was to plant one plug for every natural and fill in the spaces.  We did this at our leisure, enjoying a pleasant but breezy day.

The Bridge Over Russell Creek at the Confluence with Stelkuz Creek,  Ingenika, BC.  watercolour, 2009.

Russell Creek is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.  Really, it was little more than a simple bridge near the joining of two creeks, but there was something in the lushness of this place that has kept it firm in my memory for all this time.  It was a place of thick, mossy forest and stillness, despite the logging road and the camp of treeplanters.  It was home base for a good long time and the scene of a lot of fun and weird experiences. Russell Creek ran back to its source  somewhere on the mountain.  It was clear and cold and it sprawled and narrowed over a wide bed of white boulders.   Stelkuz Creek was thinner and deeper and it ran along the little valley bottom, draining Stelkuz Lake some two kilometers north of us.  It was muddier, silty.  For some reason we drew our cooking and drinking water from this one rather than Russell Creeks sparkling glacial water. (typical treeplanting snafu)   Above us was a series of rising bluffs that afforded a great view of the camp and the forest around it.  I recall climbing on these bluffs and being surprised at how fast we gained altitude.

In all, we stayed here twice for a total of perhaps six or seven weeks – we got to explore the area well.  We saw massive mushroom growths and moss 8″ thick, huge trees that were hundreds of years old.  We drank from the Russell Creek.  We cooled ourselved in both creeks and I myself fell into each one a few times over.  Some guys even tethered a sheet of plywood to the bridge and surfed on the current  (they tried, anyway).  Summer solstice here saw grey light shining through the treetops at 2am.  Earlier, the nights of spring here had been cold and frosty, suddenly dark and kinda spooky.  We wandered down the road in the evenings, explored the creek and the forest on weekends.  Some young lovers even pitched their tents on the broad shoals in the middle of the stream.  We had a blast here and it ended up becoming one of those special places.

Sadly, the entire area, save the immediate riparian zones next to the creeks, was logged out the following year.

Le Connection Francais, watercolour, 2009

Our camp of seventy-odd treeplanters had definite and distinct neighbourhoods.  On the little tip of land where Russell Creek met Stelkuz Creek, all the college kids and teenagers had crammed their tents into an approximation of dense urban living.  These were mostly anglo kids from Toronto, Winnipeg and a few places in the Maritimes.  They called their end of the camp “The ‘Burbs” .  Out behind the cookbus was a conglomeration of wierdos and they didn’t call their neighbourhood anything; they just took a lot of drugs and spent their evenings batting rocks with their shovels.  For a time, much of the French side of the camp was centered around an old tent trailer that, owing to its relative comforts and its limited space might just as well have been a Versailles of the North.  Entry was by invitation only and one had to provide some sort of service or gift to get in.  There were other little neighbourhoods and for the most part, French and English didn’t mingle very much.  There was plenty of good will, but I think the language barrier was too difficult for most;  after a long day of planting and a heavy meal, trying to decipher another language can seem like a chore.

Our end of the camp was not like that, though; we rather liked fraternizing across cultures and we encouraged it as we were all keen to improve our language skills.  We set ourselves up across the bridge and on the far side of the creek and called ourselves the Connection Francais.  Nadeau and I were joined by Francois, who set up his miserable little pup tent in the bushes for extra protection.  Karin and her boyfriend Stephan rounded out the regulars, but there were others.  Like the two young guys who set their tents up too close to the water’s edge right in the middle of an obvious flood zone.  One night the banks spilled over and washed at least one of their tents down the creek.  Or the Motorcycle Hippie who rolled with a wooden case of wine strapped to the back of his bike.

We spent a lot of time exploring the area, crossing the creek for fun and occasionally falling in.  Francois climbed the mountain in the background of this painting – and lost his handset radio.  The next day they sent him back up with another one to retrace his steps and listen for the sound of his own voice. Here Jean Francois and Marie-Eve moved out together onto the rocky shoals in the middle of the stream – a lover’s isle, though it couldn’t have been too comfortable.  Here the Motorcycle Hippie nearly burned off all his hair by passing out at the fireside and rolling closer and closer to the fire as it died down.  Here we saw moss thicker than I’ve ever seen since and whole landscapes of mushrooms and bizarre fungi.  And here, fueled by alcohol and a powerful case of bush madness, Francois woke up the camp by assailing Nadeau’s tent by the light of the Solstice night.  He threw a number of rocks, filled the night with profanity, then passed out on top of his tent in the bushes.

This is my favorite of all the spots we camped.  The people were good, it was away from the generator, there was fresh water a few steps away and a great fire pit.  I think I liked it because it was the opposite of the cutblock where we spent our days.  The block was ruinous and dry, but our spot by the creeks was lush, cool and peaceful.

Sketch from a sketch, Russell Creek, watercolour 2008

Last Tree – At a Cache in the Slash.  Watercolour, 2009

I planted my last tree about 1/2 km from our Russell Creek camp, in an overflow block off the side of the Russell Road.  The entire place was filled with enormous slashpiles, piled up like haystacks.  Still we spent a leisurely hour putting away the last few boxes, then ambled back to the camp for baths all around and one heck of a year-end party.

More scenes to come – stay tuned!   I’ll likely add to this in the coming year.  If you’re interested, watch for the eventual repost.  if you would like to contact me about these or any other works, I’m at jmrode@gmail.com. Cheers!  Thanks for your interest! J.