Tree planting is not a job; it’s a way of life. And by way of life, I mean way of death.
It’s a brutal lifestyle that deeply impacts every aspect of your being and brings you closer to the end of your being every day. Living in the vast Canadian wilderness all summer, pushing the limits of your physical strength and emotional sanity, no part of you goes unaffected as you fight off harsh weather conditions, wild animals, and your own failing lucidity while the perils of the great outdoors slowly kill you.
Or quickly kill you. There were plenty of times this summer when I nearly got eaten by a bear, dropped dead of exhaustion, lost an eye to a sharp stick, or smashed in my own skull with my shovel.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
You’ve probably heard of this pitiless Canadian rite of passage; you may even know people who have done it. But everyone’s tree planting experience is different. Only one thing is agreed upon across the board: it really sucks.
Giving birth in the wilderness
I like to compare tree planting to giving birth. It’s the most physically painful thing you’ve ever done, it scars your body permanently, and doesn’t pay off for at least 18 years. But somehow you loved it, you’re stronger because of it, and you want to do it again in another nine months.
When you’re a tree planter, the entire purpose of your existence is reduced to frantically digging in the dirt to secure 11-cent seedlings in the ground as fast as you can among a crew of a dozen people. I’m aware of how easy that sounds. I’m also aware of how much it hurts to bend over thousands upon thousands of times a day, scaling vertical hills in sweltering heat, covered in mud, slamming your shovel into rocks while carrying over 50 pounds of baby trees on your hips.
It’s very hard work, but as with families, weather, and bad tattoos, what you can’t change you learn to love, so many planters return each year to the woods to go through it all again. But, let me assure you, it’s not what you’re picturing. Unless you’re picturing a bunch of dirty hippies in their twenties, ubiquitous dirt, dogs, and drugs, trying to make enough money to avoid work for the rest of the year. Then it’s exactly what you’re picturing. But tree planting is more than a group of shovel-wielding alcoholics living in the forest; it’s the best worst job ever.
If you like getting up at 5 am every day, and suffering alone for nine to 14 hours under the scorching sun in your own sweat and blood, being bitten within an inch of your sanity by mosquitoes, black flies, horseflies, and wasps, then tree planting is for you! If you like sloshing through swamps in the pouring rain, climbing over piles of sharp logs in a driving hailstorm, and clambering through thick, claustrophobic brambles slicing your legs to shreds like you’re walking through a patch of cheese graters, then you will love this job!
Suffice it to say, many people quit within the first week.
Truly, the intensity of tree planting cannot be exaggerated. There are tree planters who have been struck by lightning and continue planting. You are warned not to have children two to five years after tree planting, presumably due to all the pesticides you’ve ingested, but I think it’s because you’ve gone so bush-crazy that you can no longer function in civilized society.
It’s not just a job, it’s your life for the summer, and the faint memory of civilization seems foreign and irrelevant when you’re choking back your own puke all day. You feel no need to conform to the accepted patterns of a normal, professional environment that requires you to shower, keep your clothes on throughout the work day, refrain from crying, swearing, smoking, drinking, setting things on fire, and peeing wherever you please.
Tree planting affects all aspects of your consciousness; you can say goodbye to regular sleep patterns and eating habits. Table manners and polite deportment are the first to go; then begins the confused tree-planting nightmares, bear-attack dreams, and other daily manifestations of mild PTSD. Remember shaving and similar forms of personal hygiene? I don’t.
Tree planting isn’t for everyone, but if you can efficiently plant a tree in six seconds, then you could make a lot of money. If you can’t, then you’ll get a lot of exercise, injuries, and friends, and you might just leave with financial debt.
Expectations and reality
Although I had a 34-hour bus ride home to mine the depths of my adjectival vocabulary to describe the experience, it’s still hard to explain in mere words what tree planting is like.
For instance, just because you think that you like hard work doesn’t mean you enjoy determining the success of your day based on how much blood comes out your nose, or how many times you vomit into your mouth. Or, furthermore, that you appreciate spending your day off in the hospital for second-degree sunburns, infected slash wounds, and 47 swollen bites on your face.
Just because you think camping in the woods is real cute doesn’t mean you’d jump for joy at the chance to sleep in a leaky tent for months on end surrounded by your rank, festering laundry and the snoring (and other bodily emissions) of your crew.
Just because you’re comfortable wiping your squatted ass with a leaf does not mean you like changing your tampon precariously balanced in the middle of unconcealed, open wasteland coated in more grime and pesticides than you’d prefer to contaminate yourself with.
Just because you don’t mind going a week without a shower doesn’t mean you’d rather abide in your own stench such that the holy sanctuary of your tent becomes a cesspool of your own filth and your hair couldn’t be called a rat’s nest without offending the rodent order. And just because you think you’re above make-up and such cosmetic drivel doesn’t mean you’re elated to catch a glimpse of yourself in a reflective surface and hardly recognize the dirty, sunburned, duct-taped, swollen, calloused, freckled face grinning wildly back at you.
One of the misconceptions people have about tree planting is that after spending months in intense physical labour, you will look fantastic by the end of the summer. False. Unless you like the look of permanent nerve damage, chronic back and knee pain, tendonitis, and the bizarre tan lines of a sociopath. You may even gain weight, as some of us did, since camp grub is food for fuel, not renewal.
I also quickly realized that there are 50 ways to plant a tree wrong, and only one way to do it right. Whether it’s too shallow, too deep, too bent, too close, or too far, the only thing worse than planting trees is replanting trees. For no money. All day.
The nature of nature
Depending on the diurnal sunlight or frost on the ground, planters begin the day as early as 3 am to avoid the most dangerous heat of the day and, believe me, hell hath no fury like the northern noonday sun. Next, we load the trucks, which have all seen better days, with equipment as hazardous as it is ancient. Then, as thunderclouds roll ominously overhead, you fight the wilderness while chlorophyll proliferates with patient aggression and wild animals roam, generously offering to put you out of your misery.
As a first-year rookie, you’re falling constantly. You load up your planting bags with 400 seedlings, chug a litre of water, and tramp back into the land where, inevitably, you plant about five trees before you slip on a wet log, narrowly avoid getting impaled on a stick, and land in a thistle bush. The struggle to get yourself back up with 50 pounds of unplanted trees crushing you like a whale causes you to question the investment of getting back up at all.
And, cue existential crisis: why do we plant trees? Why do we cut down trees? Why do we even use paper? If you’re not careful, your mind is your own worst enemy out there. You spend all day in solitude wondering how long a person can go without speaking, before losing the ability to communicate entirely. You’re plagued by the same song in your head over and over, a song that you did not choose; it chose you. You have sarcastic conversations with your trees as you plant them, and you realize you’ve truly lost it when you start to hear the trees talk back to you.
A day in the life of a rookie tree planter is an emotional rollercoaster. You begin planting each tree with such intentional care and lenity, that by contrast it’s as if you said a prayer over each one, tied a bow around it, and stood there singing “Kumbaya,” because by the end of the season you’re swearing at each tree and its family as if vengeance will soon be yours and stepping on its head as you run away. It may be the only job where I’ve been nearly suicidal after a coyote stole my lunch, but, on the plus side, it’s the only job I’ve ever had where you can fart constantly, or ride a helicopter to work when the land is too remote to access.
You’re sequestered with your crew 24/7, which has both blessings and curses. Overall, whether you’re picking thorns out of each other’s skin, setting the hotel room on fire (literally), dislodging vehicles from mud, or out for a night on the town, your crew is your family and you need them more than you need a shower. That’s why people say they love tree planting, but hate planting trees; as the song goes, you get by with a little help from your friends.
I told them that no matter how brutal things got, they’d have to fire me before I’d ever give up. So they did. And when they did, I missed it terribly. (But that’s a different story. A story that left me stranded in the middle of northern BC with nothing except a can of bear spray.)
Dumb ways to die
There are many unfortunate ways to die tree planting, but other than falling off a cliff, catching Beaver Fever, or what is fearfully known as “the dangue,” if you’re not eaten by bears or wolves, or trampled to death by a moose, fear not: you could still choke to death on poisonous gas. H2S gas is a naturally occurring vapour in planting areas that, in low doses, gives you a smelly headache and, in high doses or with long exposure, causes instant death.
The main concern is that working long hours without rest causes your body to deteriorate and you begin to be grateful anew for the simple things in life you used to be able to do, like touch your toes, clutch a pen, or use a fork. The problem with repetitious, asymmetrical motions is that nerve damage causes you to lose your fine motor skills. For a long time I couldn’t write, type, brush my teeth, or even wipe my own ass (had I actually remembered the toilet paper to do so). I still can’t feel some fingers or any of my toes. This common tree planter’s affliction is called “the claw,” and it’s like a serial killer. It makes you wake up in the night, writhing in agony; it turns against you with a will of its own, trying to strangle you in your sleep as your hand involuntarily clenches in a fist.
Your hardships are for a greater good; you get to tell all sorts of elaborate lies when strangers ask you about your trench foot or the eight-inch scars on your legs. Regrettably, these stories are often the only payoff for your infected wounds.
Toilet paper and environmental responsibility
Canada contains 10 percent of the world’s forests, and I am proud to say I planted a few thousand of those trees, but it disturbs me on a fundamental level that our agonizing labour is essentially in vain. Those same trees will be hacked down again in 80 years by the same unscrupulous logging companies, and all I’ve done is help make my grandchildren’s toilet paper.
You try to tell yourself that you’re saving the planet by replacing fire-damaged forests and bringing oxygen and green habitat back into the ecosystem, but by planting trees I was actually capitulating to a system that perpetuates an unsustainable cycle of pollution created by the forestation industry.
I struggled to reconcile these ideas as I contemplated the obscene amount of fuel it took to transport all the workers and goods involved in a tree-planting camp, the waste we produce, and even how many trees it takes to make the boxes we keep the trees in. The forestation industry is an empire in which tree planters reside uncomfortably on the bottom rung.
My advice to future rookies is, first, never drink the water. Seriously. And, second, create milestones for yourself, like the first day you’ve officially planted a tree for every day you’ve been alive, then the first day you plant 2,000 trees before 3 pm, then your first $300 day. Find what inspires you and fight for it!
In my first season as a tree planter I learned a lot about perseverance, teamwork, the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and the power of a happy song. It changed my perspective on life, made me hate the colour green, and perfected the long-lost art of relieving oneself in the wilderness. I’m grateful for the experience; it was an adventure I’ll never forget. At least my back won’t forget it anytime soon. Until next season!