The next morning, as we waited in the motel parking lot for a fleet of vans to transport us to our water taxis, I spotted Debbie moping around outside her motel room. I approached her cautiously and asked how she was coping after the peeping Tom incident. She blew it off, saying that she wasn’t even aware of the commotion, having slept right through it. She wasn’t functioning all that well. Her boyfriend had bailed on their planned two-day retreat, coming up with some lame excuse as to why he couldn’t make the trip up north from Vancouver. It was plain to me that she was hurting, but she wasn’t willing to admit it. Desperate to see her glow restored, I asked her, “What would Ethel say?” Without skipping a beat, she launched into an unbelievable rendition of Ethel’s “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” complete with flailing arms, gyrating hips and stomping feet. I lost it. Fits of laughter swept across half of the crew—the other half stood stunned, unable to calculate what the fuck was going on.
After packing ourselves into two big shiny aluminum water taxis, we began our long journey up Williston Lake. Cruising along the eastern edge of the reservoir, we spotted tree stumps dotting the shoreline and, occasionally, the black weathered tops of mature trees jutting straight out of the water, only metres from our boat. Apparently, when the construction of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam was given the green light back in the 1960s, a decision was made to leave much of this great northern forest standing. Vast expanses of conifer and deciduous trees were simply left to drown. It was a political decision—politicians needing to get things done fast in order to get re-elected and all. Even at my young, naive age, Williston Lake stood out to me as a monumental environmental disaster. With all of this devastation as our backdrop, a sombre mood hung over our crew that morning. The dark grey skies that challenged us in the distance offered little solace.
Our destination that morning turned out to be a narrow stretch of hard-packed sand, and what appeared to be a concrete ramp protruding from the water’s edge. This was the genesis of the road system that would lead us inland to our project area. Creating an insurmountable barrier just beyond the ramp, however, was a four-metre-high wall of beached logs, one that stretched hundreds of metres in both directions. Our trucks were nowhere in sight. Radioing the barge captain from the water taxi, we discovered that he had arrived earlier that morning, discovered the huge volume of wood onshore—a consequence of several violent spring storms—and was forced to head back down the lake in order to pick up a large backhoe. His plan was to use the backhoe to punch a hole through the wall of wood—one large enough for him to offload our vehicles and send us on our way. In the meantime, we were stuck without our trucks for at least three or four hours.
Visible through the trees on the other side of the giant pile of beached logs, about half a kilometre inland, were several long rows of red and white trailers. It was a logging camp. With nothing else to do, nowhere else to go and with the skies threatening to open up on us, we grabbed our packs, bid farewell to our boat captains, climbed the wall of wood and cautiously made our way toward the camp.
As we entered the compound it was immediately obvious that it was an inactive camp—a ghost camp. It was clear that it hadn’t been occupied for a good many years—perhaps decades—judging by the condition of the mattresses and furniture in the trailers. But it was shelter nonetheless, and the weather was unsettled and threatening.
Having scoped out several of the least offensive rooms, we packed ourselves in and tried to relax while we waited for the barge to return. Curt, veteran treeplanter and designated camp musician, pulled out his guitar and began grinding out a few Neil Young tunes while we settled in.
Curt was a gentle, wise and thoughtful man. He always paused to consider what you were saying before responding. I really liked that about him. He also had one eye that slightly crossed over toward the other. He wasn’t self-conscious about it, not in the least. I liked that about him too. His partner was a black lab named Jessy, who Curt liked to burden with a backpack, one designed to carry precisely one hundred seedlings. With his backpack loaded, Jessy would hang out in the shade until Curt needed trees. “I feed him chow, he feeds me seedlings—that’s a fair division of labour,” Curt liked to say. One day, halfway through the first contract, while on his way to deliver trees to Curt, Jessy picked up on the scent of something he couldn’t resist and gave chase. When he finally returned, panting from exhaustion, his tree bags were empty, having been jostled free during the wild chase through the woods. Curt didn’t like being reminded of that little episode.
In the first two weeks of the season, Curt had urged me to join him up on stage with my guitar in the evenings. I rejected his invitations, time and again. One night, after listening to the same old litany of tired excuses, he advised, “You need to find a balance here—you’re missing out on some really cool shit, man.”
I happened to be carrying my acoustic guitar with me on the water taxi that morning. It was too valuable to risk sending off on the barge unattended. Having several hours of downtime until the barge arrived, I decided to take it out and tune it up in front of Curt. His face lit up like a pinball machine.
Curt was prepared. Apparently, he’d had a good listen to the cassette tape I sent to my sister months earlier and knew that I wasn’t much of a rhythm guitar player. He understood that I was more into improvising rather than providing a foundation for others to play off of. He understood that I was selfish, that I liked to show off. The guitar rhythm he laid down for me was inspiring. We were off. Within a matter of minutes, we had twenty-five people packed into our tiny room and at least a dozen more in the hallway trying to squeeze inside. I’ll never forget Barrett pushing his maps aside, turning his clipboard upside down and using it as a drum (thank goodness everyone’s bongo drums were safely stowed away on the barge miles offshore). We played for well over an hour, and it was an incredibly moving experience for both of us. In my six years of obsessing on the frets, three of which were spent experimenting with a number of different bands, rarely had I achieved that level of musicianship. We would have continued playing long into the mid-morning drizzle if it weren’t for the mysterious truck that pulled into the camp compound and blasted its horn.
From an old beat-up pickup truck, an elderly First Nations gentleman emerged, leaving a wide-eyed young girl behind in the front seat. He was more than a little overwhelmed when all forty of us spilled out of the gutted trailer. After hearing our story and shaking a half-dozen outstretched hands, his relief was palpable. He immediately asked us if we had any food. When Barrett threw his hands up in the air and joked about sending a small crew out into the woods to forage for grubs, the old guy, without saying a word, jumped back into his truck and sped off.
The sun had just broken through the clouds when he returned thirty minutes later. Without ceremony, he and his granddaughter, Anna, pulled down the tailgate to his truck, spread out a woollen blanket and carefully began laying out an assortment of local delicacies. There were jars of fish, bright red fillets of smoked trout, an assortment of pickled vegetables and two tall stacks of fried bannock. The outpouring of gratitude from every one of us nearly brought the old man to tears. Young Anna took the opportunity to mingle with the ladies on the crew, and before long, they were pampering her with every indulgence one might expect from a five-star spa. She sat propped on Debbie’s knee while several of the girls worked on styling her hair, dabbing her with various perfume oils and applying “stuff” to her tiny excited face. It was a beautiful scene.
It was late in the afternoon when Dr. Josh, while engaged in a spirited round of hacky sack with the crew’s French Canadian “hacky contingent,” hollered with an outstretched finger in an exaggerated French Canadian accent, “Oua de la barge!” (I