As the possibility of returning to a tree-planting camp become more and more feasible with every new e-mail exchanged, I've begun to feel suddenly apprehensive, even scared of what I'm getting myself back in to. I think I thought at the time and even afterwards that it was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing, something I could curiously bare and later testify to as another experience come and gone. I think I thought I'd find an outlet for some of the stories, the hours, the things I felt, but they've been kept remarkably sequestered in my memory bank. It's one thing to step out knowing nothing, and another to deliberately return to it. These scenes when I stepped off the greyhound bus in nowhere northern BC were taken in as if I had a notebook and camera rolling. I sat for 10 hours in the empty parking lot of the town's one grocery store on May 25th, a 90 pound backpack weighing me down, and the world unfolded before me: The drunken natives stumbled past; the shaggy Quebecer on a green children's bicycle kept circling around with a story about how he was trying to get on with a planting company to avenge his two-week dead, murdered girlfriend but was obviously collecting cans; the middle-aged woman I found working in a nearby discount store drove me to her house where her husband and sons slumped around in boxers smoking cigarettes while I hunted for the number of my foreman online; the fat retired truck-driver told me the difficulties of breaking semi-trucks on icy mountain roads in winter time- keeping me occupied as I hopefully waited for someone to show up, hour after hour, offering his cell phone, watching my things while I ran in to buy some fruit with my last .60 cents, and eventually rolling next to me down the highway in his wheelchair to show me to the motel. I'd say it was a lesson learned in not travelling penniless or without contacts, but I think the human openness proved the contrary.
Two phone calls (one to my foreman, the other to my mother) and a night's sleep later, I found myself in Tonya's live-in hippie van, bumping down gravel mountain roads as dust and regga filled the air. Freedom (her pampered pooch) took her normal seat in shut-gun while I reclined on the bed in the back surrounded by boxes of eggs and milk, taking in the array of books, bottled herbs, bright sweaters and scarves she'd crammed on to various wooden shelves. Upon arriving I was introduced to Andrew, the recovered-crack addict, dashing maintenance man, who I still recall fondly shooting at with a cap-gun as he lay in a drunken stupor with his feet hanging out the window of his truck. We unpacked and organized the truckloads of food that'd get us through the next three weeks, talked through basic meal planning, and I eventually stumbled off to the forest to set up my tent with a raging headache and a thought to how I hadn't had anything to eat or drink since the trailmix at breakfast. Up at 4 Am the next morning with night-sky faded to soft, sparkling blue, I emerged from the darkness of the trees and hiked to the cook shack where I'd spend countless hours with Tonya in the kitchen, mixing, talking and laughing with a loose joy that only the wilderness can render.
Some mornings I'd wake up shivering, cold to the bone, and after the hopping, uncoordinated scurry to layer myself in yesterday's filthy clothes in the limited space of my tent, I'd run to the cookshack, turn on the ovens and light the stove top flame as I held my hands over the fire's near heat and leaned in to the open oven door. I was embarrassed by my early arrivals, afraid that Tonya would notice my afternoon's waning if she knew I'd been up mornings over at 1 Am. The cold became my nemesis; rousing myself might have been harder if I did not feel chilled to the bone even in my sleeping bag. The prospect of an oven-heated cookshack after running between refrigerator and dining tent to set out the breakfast and lunch table was my unforgotten incentive as I talked myself through the cold. When Tonya learned of how the cold ceaselessly plagued me, we'd take time to wrap my chest and waist in a sheet, like the bodice of a geisha, that I wore under my many layers of clothes until it eventually trailed out behind me. Tonya once found me sitting on the log near the stove, the sheet wrapped around my head and shoulders, looking something between an alien and refugee. My fingers learned permanent chill, and my hands were so chapped that it's only in France that they've found full recovery. Eventual dishwashing once the planters had come and gone was an excuse to run warm water over my freezing hands and rejoice that the temperatures were warming with the day. I fear the cold beyond all else, the ceaseless inescapable cold that shivered beneath my skin even when every exterior warmth was on me.
As a child I use to slip out of bed at night and lie on the wooden floor to try and feel how many less fortunate people around the world daily suffered. I'd eventually squirm, turn over, and crawl back in to bed with the rational realization that any such potential suffering couldn't be prepared for as much as dealt with when the time came. I figured I might as well enjoy my bed in the meantime. I still think of this now, and thought of it often last summer, as I lay vertically on my mat, often waking to feel like someone had given me a good kicking during the night. Between lifting, standing, and lying, your body aches in a dull, throbbing sort of way like you've been twisted around and hung up. There is no romance in sleeping on the hard ground, but I'm grateful for what an accommodating sleeper it has made me.
If I go back to planting some of these known and unnamed fears will likely accompany me, but I think too of how the open air, the trees, the woods, let you shake off any pretension or pride, and let you quietly slip in to whoever you simply can be. I loved my world where my prize was their worship of my edible creations, where I could be quietly me and no-one gave a rat's ass about where I came from or what I knew. Everyone knew each other in this separate sphere, where the hours ticked slowly but you learned to happily exist in the company of the wilderness and the odd assortment of humanity who chose to inhabit it.
