The last day of the last shift at the Sparwood camp, Jazzy is driving to Nelson in the evening and has extra seats in the car. She can drop me off in Crawford Bay, which is on the way, then take the ferry over into Nelson. Chad is getting a ride with us to a hostel in Fernie, which is also on the way (there are literally like 2 main roads around here that connect every single town ever).
While she is lovely company, the first thing I notice is how much time Jazzy spends on her phone. She calls her friends, texts, and controls the music from her phone. Neither Chad nor I say anything though, so we keep going until we reach Fernie.
We stay in Fernie for around twenty minutes because we run into sone of Jazzy’s friends. She is a fellow tree planter as well, but with the company Evergreen, which is also planting in the Flathead. Rather than staying in a camp with a cook, these planters rent out a large section of he hostel and commute up to the Flathead every morning.
“Hi,” she says, “I’m Maia.”
“I’m ” says Chad, then rolls his eyes toward me, “or Chad.”
“You make a good Chad,” I chuckle.
“It’s just such a greaseball name,” he responds with a laugh.
“True,” I say, “but it really has nothing to do with you. Just your appearance. You look like a Chad.”
“So I’m a greaseball.”
“I’m sorry, man.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he laughs, “I actually find it really funny.”
When we get back on the road, Jazzy and I are ready for the looooong road ahead of us. Well, four hours or so worth. There’s something really satisfying about driving through long, winding mountain roads in a tiny little car packed with belongings with super-confident Jazzy jamming along to the different varieties of electronic music on her phone, one hand on the wheel and the other either on her phone or holding a cigarette out the window. We talk about her time in Costa Rica and my time in Thailand; the strange position of being a constant foreigner regardless of how much time you spend there.
“Do you feel that?” she says suddenly.
“What?” I ask.
“Every time I turn, the car jerks in the direction,” she says as we hit another turn. This time, I do notice the sudden swerve in the middle of the turn. “I don’t like that,” she says. She instead takes the turns on the other side of the road to avoid turning the wheels as much.
There are two ways to get to Nelson and the point of decision on which way to go is Creston. Creston, at the foot of Kootenay Lake, provides the option of either driving around the lake to reach Nelson or drive to Crawford Bay on the other side of the lake, then take a free ferry over into Nelson. As the centre point, Creston has a large sign with all the ferry times. When we arrive, Jazzy and I realize that we are too late for Jazzy to make the last ferry if we go the Crawford Bay way. Eager to get home, Jazzy offers me a place to stay for the night and she’ll take me to the first ferry from Nelson to Crawford Bay in the morning. I agree, then doze off.
Jazzy and I arrive at her boyfriend’s house around 12:30. I go to sleep on the couch while Jazzy and her boyfriend head out to a costume party. That girl has boundless energy. The next morning, Jazzy and her boyfriend get up at like 5:30 to get me to the 6am ferry. Bless them, the sweethearts.
A wave of nostalgia hits me as I walk down James’ driveway at 7. It looks and smells just like last summer and all the times I’ve been there since then. Ellie, his 5-yr-old daughter, is there as well. She gives me a big hug when I arrive.
As his day off, he is heading to Creston with one of his other planters to pick up more trees and groceries for the next shift. As they get the truck ready, Ellie rips out a piece in her colouring book for me and we spend the next half hour drawing. When we’re finished, I’m not sure what to do with the drawing, so Ellie takes it as I’m cleaning up the pencil crayons and markers.
“I take it. I take it,” she says, then begins looking for tape. After I help her get it, she takes my picture up to her bedroom and sticks it on the wall above her bed. My heart warms as she says, “that’s where all the important things go.”
While picking up the trees, there is not much for Ellie and I to do, so she sits on my shoulders and we go for a short walk, looking at bushes and trees and flowers. Another planting truck shows up, so we go and explore it as well. Ellie is convinced it is not a real planting truck because it doesn’t look like James’ truck.
Afterward, we spend several hours at the aquatic centre. We swim through the current stream, sit in the hot tub, splash in pool with giant spouts of water shooting out, and toss Ellie between James and I. Ellie and I pull each other around the current stream as the boys sit in the sauna. I’ve never been able to appreciate saunas; they just seem to me near-suffocation anxiety without any sense of relaxation or relief whatsoever.
Dropping Ellie off at her mother’s house, we continue on back to James’ house. We eat a late supper and head to bed. Despite knowing James and how he is, it still hurts to be laying in the throws of love in each others' arms and suddenly he decides to say: “don’t get attached, Anneke.” We both know perfectly well it’s too late for that. Part of me is okay with this: as long as both Ellie and James are happy, healthy, and safe, then everything’s okay. Whatever else I feel is my deal and I can find some way to deal with it. Another part of me feels incredibly betrayed and wants to scream at him.
The next day, James kisses me goodbye as they head out to work and I wait for Jazzy to get her car fixed so we can head out to the Flathead. It takes a while, so I arrange a place to live for Fall term, work on my PD2 course, write a little bit for my blog, and write a much-needed letter to James. When they still aren’t back by 5 and Jazzy’s car still isn’t fixed, I begin to clean the kitchen. They have a hell of a lotta dishes piled in the bathtub because three guys living and eating together aren’t the cleanest people and, with his house under construction, James has no sink. I wash them in the shower, but realize they’ll need it after they come back from planting. So I scrub all the grime out of the bathtub and put the dishes in there. After wiping down the counter and table, the boys still aren’t back and Jazzy won’t be able to come before the 7pm ferry. I debate making some sort of supper, but the boys generally have their meals super planned out and I don’t want to interfere with anything. So I blog until the boys come back, just publishing one more post as the truck rolls in.
When they get out, there is clearly something bitter going on.
“How was your day?” I ask timidly.
“We stayed late,” is James’ grumpy response, as though that wasn’t obvious, “what did you do all day?”
“I did a lot of writing,” I reply, “worked on my course a bit…”
“Yea, I get it,” James snaps, “you had a lazy day while we worked our asses off. And we still have trees left. You’re still here; you could’ve come plant with us.”
“I just cleaned your kitchen…” I begin to say, but James is already on his phone. They are heading out to James’ friend’s house for supper, so I make a sandwich for myself and sit on the couch outside.
A few minutes later, James joins me on the couch.
“They were all complaining about staying late,” he says. Here we go, I think, the real reason he’s all upset.
“They were surprised when I came out with full bags at 3:30 and asked if we were staying late,” he continued, “I’d told them so many times in the morning! They all acted as though they didn’t know, but I said it so many times ‘we’re staying until the trees are done’ and we didn’t even finish them!”
We talk about this a little more and about a few other things. This is probably one of my favourite parts about spending time with James. Just sitting next to each other talking about everything.
Jazzy finally arrives around 7:00 and we hit the road. The sun is just beginning to set behind the peaks of the Kootenays as we head toward Creston, setting off a glorious glow behind the mountains. Suddenly, the car swerves so far to the right that we just about hit the grass. I look over as Jazzy is lowering her phone.
“Whoops,” she says, “I just wanna get a photo of those mountains.”
“Here, I’ll get it,” I say quickly, taking the phone from her.
As we drive through Creston, we see a used car with a price tag on the side of the road, so Jazzy stops the car to take a few photos. It’s a brilliant viewpoint where she parks, so we spend a few moments taking photos. Of course, once we start driving again, Jazzy starts Instragraming the photos she took. While driving.
“Oh come on,” she says suddenly, “step on the gas, dude! Why are you moving so slow?” I look up and notice the car right in front of us, then laugh.
“Red license plate,” I point out.
“Of course,” she sighs, “friggin’ Albertans. Like, it’s all turns. You don’t have to drive so slow. You know what’s up ahead? A turn. And after that? Another turn. It’s not a surprise; you don’t have to drive 60.”
She’s tailgating, I suddenly realize. I’d thought tailgating was only something angry drivers did when they’d lost their cool, but Jazzy is definitely not about to loose her cool. She’s just doing it to tell them to go faster.
Eventually, the other car turns off the road and Jazzy is able to speed ahead and we carry on toward Fernie. It’s reaching 9:00, but there is a time change we passed through, so it’s actually 10. At some point, Jazzy and I begin a really deep conversation (which thankfully was deep and long enough to keep her off her phone). We talk about my cousin Anna, which Jazzy is extremely understanding about (she’d been one of the first people to offer kindness after finding out). Then we start talking about depression, how it can attack virtually anyone, and the social stigmas surrounding it.
We finally make it into the base of the Flathead at around 11, and into camp by 12:30. By this time, it’s so late that I don’t bother setting up my tent. I crawl into the back of Uncle Jim’s truck, unfold the mattress, unravel my sleeping bag, set my alarm for 6, and curl up right there in the back of the truck.
In the Flathead camp now, the crews have changed up a bit. Casper, Velma, and Kurt are no longer on Molly’s crew (Molly claims the other crew bosses came to the conclusion that she was “mothering” the greeners too much). Kendall and I are still here, and Chad appears to have gained a permanent seat on this crew. In addition, there are now Vincent (formerly a crew boss in the other camp) and Gwen (a sweet and free-spirited girl who has also crew-bossed before. She also reminds me a bit of my sister, although Gwen is much more clever). Also, Cathy often stays in Fernie when camp is out in the Flathead, and Rainer rarely changes up the crews, so this will likely be the crew arrangement for a while.
Our first block in the Flathead is a 16-cent block; our first 16 cent block all season. Uncle Jim’s crew and Jenna’s crew are also on this block. Driving in, I watch the land from the window: dirt, dirt, dirt everywhere! And not much slash! With a good eye, there shouldn’t be any need to screef. Also, it’s flat! Dirt, flat, and not much slash: this is a planter’s dream.
Getting out of the truck, we all fill up our bags and head out. Rainer is out on the block today surveying trees, which is unusual. About 30 trees into my bag-up, I notice he is walking up my line.
“You’ve got some leaners here, Anneke,” he says, gesturing toward my trees, “there’s a couple things you can do about that.” He reaches for my shovel and I give it to him. Opening a hole and sticking out his hand, I place a tree in his hand. He slides it against his shovel into the corner of the hole (rather than against the back) so it doesn’t lean slanted once the hole is closed with his fist. Alternatively, there’s the back-cut, where you quick throw the shovel into the dirt behind the tree, pushing it upward and against any previous slant. He continues to demonstrate these, reaching out for more trees as we move along the line. He plants almost faster than I can feed trees to him; I’m struggling to keep up with him while handing him trees and bundling more and more. He continues to narrate what he’s doing: “see here we’re coming up toward Kendall. She’s a professional, see, so she’ll bounce against our trees. If we follow her down her line now, she doesn’t need to flag. Stop flagging, Kendall. Here we’ll turn back again and fill this area. We don’t need to flag here because we’re following our own line. Now we’re coming up toward Molly. See, Molly knows what we’re doing; she’s smart. She can see trees too, so it’s okay if we don’t flag. What’s this she flagged? I don’t see a tree anywhere; she flagged this dead larch so we’ll put one here anyway. Now we can fill this section here so don’t flag.” This goes on for a while. I’m pretty sure Rainer’s loving this; he doesn’t get to plant trees anymore. While trailing behind him, I look up toward Molly, who gives me a huge, sneaky grin.
After 150-200 trees, Rainer stops and hands me my shovel back.
“I should go check on Jimmy,” he says, heading back toward the road. Planting toward Molly again, she gives me another teasing smile as we get closer.
“Ha! How was that?” she coos, “I looked up a couple times and was like ‘oh he’s still going.’”
“Ha, it was great! That was over half my bag-up!”
We keep planting. Our entire crew is having such a good day that we finish our block by 1:00. This block was supposed to last us until 4:30. We keep pounding in trees on the next block, which is almost equally as lovely. Dave comes three times to replenish the truck with more tree boxes.
“My job isn’t a tree deliverer,” Dave complains upon delivering the third load.
“Well today it is,” Molly responds, eagerly grabbing at the boxes and opening them the second they hit the ground.
Back at the truck by 4:30, Chad and Gwen are slumped exhaustedly against the truck, but Vincent, Molly, and Kendall are still out there. I grab 50 more trees and head out again. When I get back, the others still aren’t done, so I grab more. By 5:00, everyone is finally back at the truck. We throw the bags, shovels, garbage, and folded empty tree boxes into the Fist and jump in. I’m the only one who planted under 3000 trees today, but hey, I’m the only second year and 2485 is still my personal best. Chad, of course, planted 4000 trees. Freakin' highballer.
Driving out of the block, Molly swerves slightly to the right, letting out a quiet “whoops”. While getting flashbacks of my drive with Jazzy, I look over to see her struggling to open a little packet of dried seaweed. We let it rest until suddenly she swerves waaaay over to the right.
“Are you alright, Molly?” Chad asks in an amused voice, “Do you need any help?”
“No no, I got it,” Molly says under her breath, still struggling with the seaweed, “I’ve done this so many times before, I don’t know why it’s so… there we go!” She holds up the open packet of seaweed in triumph.
One thing necessary to mention about Molly (and it’s truly a shame that it hasn’t been mentioned earlier) is that she has these two dogs that love her to death (and vice versa). One, Tula, is a fairly regular-sized (but on the larger side) dog that is rather feisty, while the other, Harley, is a massive, cuddly ball of fur. They are always waiting for our truck to come back at the end of the day and jump excitedly outside of Molly’s door before she opens it and leaps out to give them both a bunch of hugs and tells them how much she missed them. When Harley jumps up and puts his front paws on Molly’s arms, he towers way above her head. I’m telling you, he is absolutely huge. If you watch his rear end as he walks away from you, he literally looks like a little horse.
On Day 2, the block we are planting is relatively close to camp, so Molly asks the crew if it’s alright if the dogs come along. We say yes, and one large dog and one massive dog pile into the truck cab along with the six of us. Harley lays across people’s feet on the floor (an excellent foot-warmer), while Tula stretches across people’s laps. When we get to the block, they jump out and jump up and down excitedly before bolting away into the block and coming back again. They love coming to work with us.
This morning, Nina had made her delicious banana pancakes for breakfast. Everybody absolutely adores Nina’s banana pancakes. Molly, however, ate five of them. And they are not the tiniest pancakes. During my second bag-up, she and I cross paths.
“Ugghhhh, I feel like I’m gonna puuuke,” she moans, a pained expression on her face, “Chad friggin’ lapped me already with his second bag-up.”
“So puke,” I shrug, “get it out and then you’ll feel better.”
“That was Chad’s advice,” Molly laughs sadly, “but I have this thing against puking. I just can’t do it.”
“Then I guess you suffer through.”
Molly lets out another sad whimper and continues planting.
Everyone is slow today, after working so hard yesterday. Back at the cache between bag-ups, Kendall has dark chocolate with sea salt; two different kinds! She kindly offers me some and we take a nice, long cache break. I head out first and plant for a while, but she catches up with me soon enough.
“Anneke,” she says as we’re near each other, “what’s your biggest fear?”
“Ummm what kind of fear?” I ask, slightly thrown off by the question, “like, petty and irrational fear or real, deep fear?”
“Whichever one you want,” Kendall responds, “Molly and I were having this conversation yesterday.”
“Hmm well irrational fear would have to be spiders,” I answer. That one’s easy enough; it’s the other that’s the hard one. “For the deeper fear, maybe not allowing myself to open up and talk to people, and then not build meaningful connections with them.”
“Aaah,” Kendall responds, “I used to be really quiet too, and would really see it as a weakness. But it’s not really. It allows you to carry more value in the things you do say. And there are other ways to build connections with people. The Tao Te Ching has a saying something like that.”
“There’s something similar in Proverbs, I think,” I add, “it goes like ‘the more you say, the more people find out how much you don’t know’ or something.”
“Yeah,” she says, “it’s a pretty reassuring statement.”
We talk a little longer about withholding our thoughts from others and the strengths/faults of guarding your words. Some people speak freely while others slowly calculate their words while others only speak to certain people, and it’s all okay.
“What’s your biggest fear?” I ask.
“I think being so stuck in my own head that I miss the beautiful things going on around me.”
“What was Molly’s?”
“Not being worthy of the gods.” (Necessary side note: After talking with Molly later, it turns out she had actually said ‘not being worthy of love’, not the gods. So y’all can drop the image of Molly chanting naked around a bonfire.)
“What was her understanding of ‘the gods’?”
“I don’t know. I think everyone has their own interpretation of what ‘the gods’ are,” Kendall responds as we plant our way out of the brushy spruce ground and into a giant burn area (pine ground). Unbundling a couple pines, she asks, “What do you think ‘the gods’ are?”
“I’m not sure,” I struggle to find an answer, “I think I believe there is some sort of higher power that we can tune into and that’s present in all people and all religions. I definitely think there’s something more out there that we don’t all see but have the ability to access. What about you? What do you think?”
“I’m not sure either,” Kendall admits, “but I think it definitely ties in to nature. Like, I believe in magic and that it is strongly connected to nature. And as nature ourselves, we as humans are an integral and beautiful part of that.”
We talk about this for a while. Then Kendall asks, “Do you believe in morality? Like, do you think morality naturally exists in the world?” I pause for a moment: these are really difficult questions.
“Well I want to say yes,” I finally answer, “but I feel like all there really is is what is and, through our empathy for others, humans create value and concepts of morality, but they’re not naturally there. Like kids, for example. They’re wonderful and all, but they’re incredibly selfish - morality and selflessness seem like something we grow into through developing empathy.”
“That makes a lot of sense,” Kendall responds, “but I’d really like to believe that there’s something more natural in it. Another planter and I were talking about this, about how we are fundamentally beings of love. It’s a really refreshing thought when you’re having a terrible day or your mind is in an awful place, to just take a few moments to remember that we are being made entirely of love.”
“Do you think,” I wonder aloud, “that love could just be the absence of selfishness?”
“Yeah,” she responds after a minute, “that’s a really nice thought, that once we remove our own selfish preoccupations, all that’s left is love.”
We discuss this for a while longer until we bag out. Conversations on the block are generally either nonexistent, absolutely hilarious, or extremely insightful; there is almost never meaningless chatter (except in the case of those Fernie girls) because the physical work is too demanding to exert extra effort into chatter. Propelling conversations, however, can bring out more energy. This was one of the more insightful conversations.
Walking along the road back to the truck at the end of the day, I notice that I am walking beside a massive trail of boot prints in the road. Looking back along where I’d just walked, I notice that my boots aren’t even making any prints at all: the road is completely dry and hard. Yet the footsteps I’m walking beside have managed to leave massive, deep indents in the roads. Back at the truck, Molly is putting on chapstick in the truck mirror, so I mention the giant bootprints.
“Chad,” Molly automatically mutters under her breath without stopping or looking up, “a fully bagged Chad.” I smile. Whenever Molly talks to or about Chad, her tone always seems to adopt this sense of eye-rolling and ‘oh my god would you fucking believe this kid’ (only in a very nice, almost motherly way though).
One evening while sitting around the wood stove in the mess tent, Sparky and I are talking about the lack of tasty cereals available in camp.
“Yeah, but once they get good cereals, they’re gone almost immediately,” Sparky says, “remember the time when we had Golden Grams? They were gone in less than a day.”
“That’s such a dad move,” I say, rolling my eyes, “In my family, we used to get the crunchy granola bars because my dad liked them and because ‘they last longer’, meaning they last a week while the chewy granola bars would be gone in like a day. It was like ‘yes, of course they last longer because you’re the only one eating them! These boxes have six bars in them and we are five people; of course the ones everybody likes will be gone in like a day!’”
“That is such a dad move,” Sparky revives a couple swans, “I love ‘dad moves’.” I think part of the whole appeal of the term “dad move” is that, grammatically, it could be a combination of “dick move” and “bad move”, which is essentially what a dad move is.
“Like controlling the music,” I add, “when a dad says ‘okay, let’s listen to music everybody enjoys’ and it actually means ‘let’s listen to music I enjoy and nobody’s allowed to complain about it or they’re being selfish’.”
“We could do that around here,” Sparky adds excitedly “when we get the music going by the campfire: ‘Okay guys, time to listen to music everybody likes’, and then turn on some really dull, mellow music.” Sparky’s face turns into a mock-authoritative expression, “‘Or how about silence? That’s something we can all agree on!’” I laugh. Sparky needs to work on his whole ‘controlling father’ persona — it’s 100% not his nature.
Additional note: Optimus Prime eats raw morels off the block.
