Treeplanting #12: A DAY IN THE LIFE on a Brinkman Crew

Lol hardhats

My alarm goes off at 6am, but generally, I don't leave my tent until around 6:40. Dropping some things off in the truck on my way to the mess tent, I see Tula already sitting in the truck. She is keeping her seat safe so as to not be left behind. Unfortunately, she probably will be.

Here is the lunch table in the morning: the selection of breads and wraps in the back, various spreads and toppings (meats, greens, sprouts, pesto, hummus, beets, quinoa, etc.), and one container each of candy, chips, and nuts. Fruits are stored underneath the table. Opposite this table is the breakfast table, with an assortment of potatoes, bacon,  and usually something like pancakes or breakfast bagels. Nina also makes eggs to order in the kitchen. The breakfast table also has homebaked squares and energy bars for people to pack in their lunches. Bee, the cook's assistant, likes to experiment so these squares are exciting and different every day.

After making my lunch and loading all my gear into the truck, I generally take my breakfast with me for the drive. Here we've got a cup of coffee and a large mug full of bacon, potatoes, and ketchup. The hour-long drives to the block every morning are more than enough time to enjoy a meal.

Trucks roll at 7!

After arriving, we all climb out of the truck and take a solid look at what we're up against today. Here's one of our lovely frost-covered blocks when we arrive around 8am.

By the light, this is clearly multiple hours later. Let's ignore that. Opening the door to the Fist in the morning, we pull out boxes of trees to bag up according to the daily mix of species.

A small bag-up's worth of trees. Around 300 trees of four different species - spruce, pine, larch, and fir. A typical mix could be something like 45% pine, 30% spruce, 20% larch, and 5% Fir. Each species has different specifications - spruce goes in wet and shady ground, larch goes in sunny and dry ground, Fir goes is shady and dry ground, while pine goes basically anywhere else.

Bags fully loaded, ready to head out into the land, with my shovel leaning against it. So artfully arranged.

Successfully caught a photo of someone wearing cork boots - finally! If you're a track person, they're kind of like extremely heavy duty track spikes. Aside from being practical, these guys are lots of fun for walking up and down logs and through slash like an insect or something.

We are all excited to notice that we have entirely small trees - only pine and spruce and they are all in bundles of twenty. We all have a lovely and light first bag-up feeling almost weightless with our tiny trees. Unfortunately, the reason we have tiny trees is so that we can bag heavy in order to plant all the way to the back of the piece and fill it. The block has a sort of bottleneck and, ideally, we would be able to back heavy enough to plant the back before pinching off the bottleneck.

"You know," Molly says, "If you can bag 360 of the big trees, you can carry 500 of these small trees." 

Bullshit. The next bag-up, I take 500 trees and feel it immediately. No matter how you phrase it, hauling 500 fucking trees up a hill feels like hauling 500 fucking trees up a hill. None of this "oh it's just like 360 big trees" shit. It's not. It's 500 fucking rees.

Disclaimer: Molly is 100% correct here. Trees are measured by weight and 500 of the small trees is literally the exact same as 360 bigger trees. However, for the sake of my own grumpiness, it is the opinion of this blog that she is wrong.

With 500 trees, my bag-ups take around 2 to 2.5 hours. This is much longer that my average bag-up and make the day go by much quicker. 

After bagging heavy, the bottleneck fills out nicely and all finishes well.

The view always becomes more and more lovely as the fog clears.

What a beautiful little freshly planted spruce baby making its way into the world. You can tell it was probably a bitch to plant because it's in the middle of a pile of slash. You can't tell very clearly, but whoever planted this managed to find an actual section of dirt in the middle of this slash pile in order to plant the thing. The plug of each tree must be entirely in dirt.

"Cattle planting" is something nobody likes. At the end of the day, we finish our piece and begin looking for more land before the day's out, usually jumping in with another crew. Sometimes this happens to multiple different crews in the same area, resulting in a "cattle plant". Too many people on one block results in frantic scrambling to get trees in and not fall behind the giant herd of people around you. There are 10 tree planters cattle planting in this photo - can you spot them?

The lovely feeling of dropping your bags on the ground at the end of the day.

Once everyone's piled their things into the back the Fist at the end of the day, we lock it up and climb into the cab, ready for the long drive back to camp.

Turning off the logging road and back onto the highway, we sometimes find ourselves stuck behind a coal train. We all settle in - coal trains are notoriously long, often pulling several hundred cars at once. From where we are parked on this day, the train curves away from us so there is no way of telling how much of it is left. We entertain ourselves by seeing how many variations of "shit tits pussy dick" we can spot in the so-elegant graffiti on the train.

On the drive back from work, Jasper and Damian often become involved in heated and completely useless arguments. Two of the most recent ones have incuded: Are "fat" and "meat" completely separate things or can fat be considered part of meat? And if a train has a caboose on both ends and goes back and forth rather than having to turn the whole thing around, does it have a front and back?

In this particular scenario with the rain, there was also a caboose being pulled in between two regular cars. This initiated a stream of jokes about how the train is actually moving in a circle (and from our view of the train, it very well could have been).

Eventually the train ends with yet another caboose on the back.

Arriving back at camp around 5:30pm, we pile all of our things into the dry tent where they will hopefully dry out before tomorrow morning. On cold days and rainy days, this is the first real real warmth a planter feels all day. While the fire in the mess tent is much nicer, people are often reluctant to leave this one and make the trip from the dry tent into the mess tent. This stove is where I burnt my nylon tights onto my leg last year. The mark is still there.

In the mess tent every evening, there is always a fresh pot of soup and homemade bread waiting for us that Nina and Bee have made. Sometimes, planters bring ingredients back from the block to give the cooks. While every soup they make is delicious, my favourite is the nettle and morel mushroom soup made from the nettles and mushrooms off the block.

While dinner is "officially" at 6, it generally starts around 6:15 or 6:30. When Nina and Bee have it all laid out on the same table where lunches are made in the morning, Nina opens up one of the crew cabs and honks the horn in multiple long bursts, calling all the planters into the mess tent for dinner. Often, Nina and Bee will come up with some sort of themed meal, like Indian Night or Thai Night. Whatever the meal is, it is plentiful and delicious. Everyone offers a thank you to Nina and Bee for their hard work.

From around 7:30-8:30, people wander around doing their own things. I usually join the group of people reading by the fire. With the exception of Sparky, it is much the same group as last year - Francois, Chad, and sometimes Sophia. This year, Vincent's boyfriend has come planting as well and he often joins us as well.

Somewhere between 8:30 and 9, people clear out of the mess tent and head toward their tents. It's another full day of planting tomorrow and everyone will be climbing out of their tents in 8 hours' time.

PS - don't forget about the Palestine delegation in which I am participating this August! Around $200 has been raised so far - lots more to go! To donate, go to http://cpt.org/donate and follow the steps to donate. Toward the end of the process, there will be a box that says "donation inspired by". Be sure to enter my name in this section to ensure that the donation goes to this delegation.