Highballer
True Tales from a Treeplanting Life
Greg Nolan
Copyright © 2019 Greg Nolan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [email protected].
Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0
All photos courtesy of the author
Edited by Caroline Skelton & Derek Fairbridge
Cover design by Setareh Ashrafologhalai
Text design by Shed Simas / Onça Design
Printed and bound in Canada
Printed on 100% recycled stock
Harbour Publishing acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.
Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.
We also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Highballer : true tales from a treeplanting life / Greg Nolan.
Names: Nolan, Greg, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190090448 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190090537 | ISBN 9781550178685 (softcover) | ISBN 9781550178692 (HTML)
Subjects: LCSH: Nolan, Greg. | LCSH: Tree planters (Persons)—Canada—Biography. | LCSH: Tree planting—Canada.
Classification: LCC SD129.N65 A3 2019 | DDC 634.9092—dc23
This book is dedicated to all of the young men and women who braved their first few weeks on the slopes, who despite the unrelenting fatigue, the pain, the bruised body and mind, summoned the resolve to carry on, and thrive.
Chapter One
The Rookie
It’s mid-April. You’re in a tent perched on the top of a hill overlooking camp. You’re reluctant to leave the warmth of your sleeping bag, especially this early in the season when everything is coated in a thick layer of frost. Even the inside of your tent and the exterior of your sleeping bag are colonized by a thin layer of ice crystals.
Courage attained, you shed the insulation of your down-filled cocoon, pulling cold, damp work clothes over your goosebump-raised skin. You crawl on your hands and knees to the front of your tent and unzip the nylon flap that functions as a door—no matter how you approach this simple task, it’s a zipper that always seems to stick.
You’re on full display, at least that’s how it seems as you stumble outside and confront the elements. Slowly pulling yourself upright, your joints and vertebrae creak and snap, a reminder that you may not be as invulnerable as you once thought. Shivering, you face the frigid landscape, and the first rays of light emerging from the distant eastern horizon hold your attention, but only for a second or two, even though you’ve tuned your senses to be on alert for these moments of extraordinary beauty—a mere snapshot will have to suffice.
You tentatively make your way toward camp, periodically stretching your stiff quadriceps and hamstrings as you advance. The frigid ground crunches under the weight of your boots, and as you draw closer to the Quonset hut, reggae music suffuses the air, as does the bustle of an anxious crew milling about inside. Pulling the canvas flap open to the dining tent, you’re immediately hit by a blast of warm air from a cedar fire burning inside the airtight wood stove. All around, a swirling mass of hippy treeplanters, vying for position at the lunch table and breakfast counter, are fixated on securing their nutritional needs for the day. It’s an important task. Merging into the chaos, you fill your mug with hot coffee and brown-bag whatever is leftover from the feeding frenzy. You then plop yourself down on one of the empty chairs in front of the wood stove. As you try to choke down a few morsels of breakfast—you’re not used to eating this early in the morning—you lean back in your chair and reflect on the day ahead. You have a few minutes to think.
You think about your reputation as a “highballer,” how you’ll soon be forced to throw your body in motion, expending more physical energy in a single eight-hour day than most people will in an entire week. The thought is intimidating, but you pretend to be at peace with it. You think about the drive to work, the ruts in the road and the lousy suspension on the truck you’ll be forced to ride in. You think about the vapid conversation you’ll have to endure in the cab of the truck along the way (you remind yourself to change the batteries in your Walkman, just in case). You think about arriving at your cutblock and being unceremoniously dumped at the bottom of your area, back into the cold morning air. You think about pulling back the tarp covering your tree cache and shattering that thin layer of ice that will have formed on the tops of the seedling boxes overnight. You think about the bitterly cold bundles of trees that lie underneath—you can already feel the icy bite on the tips of your fingers. You think about stuffing your treeplanting bags full of seedlings, stuffing them to the point of bursting. You think about your shoulders and hips straining under the weight of your bags as you pivot to face the mountain that rises before you—it’s some five hundred metres, a single line of 150 trees to the top. You think about those first few shaky steps on broken terrain, poking through the debris on the surface of the ground with your shovel, attempting to home in on good soil. You think about that first tree—it’s a grunt, but it’s finally in the ground. You think about how you’ll be required to repeat the same task, again and again, at least two thousand more times before your day is done. You think about the madness behind such an endeavour.
Several blasts from a truck horn snap you back into the moment, back into the here and now. You think about how you have less than five minutes remaining to enjoy the rest of your coffee in the warmth of the wood stove. It’s nearly 7:00 a.m. The trucks leave at 7:00 sharp. As you step outside, back into the icy early morning air, and begin organizing your gear, the smell of truck exhaust tags your senses. It’s time. It’s time to hit the slopes.
This scene, with variations according to season and locale, was my daily reality for twenty-seven years, between the ages of nineteen and forty-five, beginning in 1983, when I was a hardcore British Columbian treeplanter. It was an exciting, exhilarating period of my life and I embraced the subculture enthusiastically, becoming a top producer, known in the trade as a highballer.1 Looking back now, from sedentary middle age, I remember my early days of treeplanting as a kind of charmed existence, bound up in the glories of my youth, whereas in reality the times of triumph and joy were more than balanced by times of trial and even terror. But it was seldom dull, especially at first when I had the normal youthful doubts about being able to