by
A decade ago, I joined droves of Canadian 20-40 something year-olds who descend upon clear-cuts, planting trees for logging companies. My first season, there were 50 people in our camp off a dirt road in Northern Ontario.
Our tents sat in a patch of forest. We slept on the edge of a clear-cut so vast it stretched into the horizon. At 6 am every morning we clambered into vans and were dropped off, one by one, to begin planting a section of clear-cut. I strapped my planting belt around my waist and fill its large pouches with pine seedlings. Each young tree was about a foot and a half long, made heavy from the block of earth that cushioned its roots. By the time I filled my bags, it felt like I was heaving a small body on my hips.
Every day, I set out with the same goal: plant as many trees as I could. I got 7 cents for every seedling. So to make a couple hundred dollars, I had to plant between 2000 and 3000 trees a day, come rain, scorching sun, or even the random blizzard.
I'll never forget the motions of planting: Left hand grabs tree from hip bag, right hand swings shovel through air, right foot forward, shovel hits the ground, body thrusts forward, CRACKS open hole, left hand drops seedling in, right foot kicks hole closed, tree planted!
Repetition, I discovered, was beautiful. With time, the mechanical steps of planting became one fluid series of movements.
After a while, I started to pay attention to the little green seedlings I had planted peering above the mounds of dirt.
I was beginning to find hope in a sheet of land stripped of life. It teemed with possibility now - the possibility that I could make a forest out of a clear-cut.
It made my arduous job easier.
And on good days, there was nowhere I'd rather be.
Those were the days when my bones felt as strong as the trees that I hoped one day would grow here.
But in the evenings, the drive to plant another 7 cents vanished and our tired bodies collapsed. The hordes of black flies and mosquitos drove us into each others' tents to chat the evenings away, letting our weary bones sink into the forest floor.
It gave way to lovers.
I had one for a while. His name was Gabe. He was a good planter, and fast. In those early days of spring, a steel sky hovered over the barren land. The only spot of colour was Gabe's red jacket, darting up and down among the troughs of dirt.
The clear-cut was an unlikely place to spawn a romance. Holding hands didn't have the same intimacy, because our fingers were wrapped up in duct tape to protect our skin from brush and needles. I'd run my hands through his hair only to get stuck on globs of dried blood encrusted on his scalp, courtesy of a gluttunous blackfly.
The wind splattered snot across our faces and the stench of body odour trailed us.
But there was nothing we could do about it. So we gave up caring. And under the layers of sweat, sunblock and bug-spray, I felt beautiful. I felt just… me. Treeplanting made me lay myself bare to the world and it made me feel alive.
Today, I feel nostalgic for the simplicity of that life.
I'm about to be armed with a graduate degree. I have life and professional experience. So now, instead of battling mosquitoes and back aches, I suffer from the privilege of having options.
As these doors open before me now, I fear I might begin to shut out other dreams. Like my desire to ride horse-back across Patagonia. Or my penchant to hide away for a winter in a Canadian farmhouse and apprentice with the carpenter down the road.
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These days, I long for the time when all I had to do was plant one tree after the other, when it was enough to make a clear-cut into a forest.
BACK ANNOUNCE:
Nadja Drost notices any trees fighting their way through the concrete in her Manhattan neighborhood.