Before I could expand on that sentiment, Barrett, who had been listening in from the next table over, chimed in with, “Let the kid eat his dinner, Ted—can’t you see he’s on a date?” Debbie howled out loud with laughter at the suggestion, and Ted shrivelled to half his size and stormed out of the Quonset hut, tripping and nearly falling flat on his face in the process.
As the contract stretched out into June, Debbie and I grew even closer. We continued to spend our evenings together. I showed her how to play a few chords on my guitar. She even stayed late with me on the block a few times to tack a few hundred extra trees onto her score. Regrettably, intimate evening showers did not become our “new thing,” but I sensed that she was beginning to look at me in a different way. After everything I had experienced over the previous two months, I was also beginning to think differently about myself.
As we entered week five of the contract, and week nine of the season, I began to notice a change in the crew. Beaten down by the extreme heat, bugs, and general state of exhaustion, people began retiring to their tents earlier in the evening. There was less celebrating. There was less music. Even Curt, who was normally good for an hour or two of pickin’ and grinnin’, limited his sets to only twenty or thirty minutes per night. And there was something going on with the hardcore smokers on the crew. They were running out of tobacco. The ubiquitous pouches of loose tobacco that were generally left unattended on the dining tables in the Quonset hut were now being scooped up and pocketed when not in use. Tobacco had suddenly become a rare commodity, and a carefully guarded one at that.
In the trucks, on the way to work, we speculated on the desperate times that lay ahead for smokers unless Barrett was able to find a way to bring more in. We had a shipment of provisions barged in earlier that week, but tobacco wasn’t on the list. The smokers joked about how they would soon be forced to raid the dirty stinking ashtrays in the trucks. I thought they were jesting. They were not! There came an evening when they collectively raided the ashtrays in all of the trucks, sifting through nine weeks’ worth of discards, sorting and grading the used butts according to their level of raunchiness. Nothing was thrown out, though. Eventually, even the raunchiest of the lot were pulled apart, re-rolled and smoked. When the supply in the trucks was exhausted, the discarded butts that had been ground into the dirt outside the Quonset hut were next. Big Tobacco really had these poor folk by the short and curlies.
As our spring season entered its final shift, the black bears, which until then had kept a healthy distance from our camp, became bolder, attempting to break into the kitchen and Quonset hut late at night. One of the girls who was camped in proximity to the kitchen claimed that a black bear had actually poked its head in through the front door of her tent. That explained the blood-curdling screams I woke up to at 2:00 a.m. Curiously, these Williston Lake black bears all sported beautiful white patches on their chests, some larger than others, but always prominent. It gave them a cuddly-looking quality and we always stopped our trucks to admire them whenever they were spotted on the road. But beyond a few isolated incidents, they didn’t pose much of a threat, and they remain a fond memory—one of the few fond memories I have involving bears while camping in remote locales.
We were coming down to the final few days of the contract, and as I would soon discover, these were often stressful times for the crew. People would grow anxious in the final push. We always knew the number of trees that remained to be planted, and in the final few days, simple arithmetic revealed the exact number of trees each planter would be required to plant in order to draw the contract to a close. Often that number overwhelmed people. Adding to the stress of this particular contract, we were forced to abide by an inflexible barge schedule. Three days’ worth of trees would need to go into the ground in the space of two; otherwise we’d be forced to wait another five days for the next barge run.
A decision was made to start work an hour earlier the next morning, work a full day, drive back to camp for a one-hour supper break and then head back out to the block for an evening run. I was fine with the idea, but there was resistance among some of the more exhausted planters on the crew. When it came right down to it, we didn’t have a choice. Geographically isolated contracts often end in this manner. It seemed to be the rule, rather than the exception, as I would discover over time.
The second to last day of the contract was brutal. We needed to pound in an extraordinary number of trees that day, and we didn’t quite reach our goal. A decision was made to start even earlier the next day and work until the final tree went into the ground. We were encouraged to work together in small groups in order to play off one another’s energy. This made sense to me. Debbie and I decided to pair up, and we carefully scanned the crew for a third partner. Kevin!
Kevin was a bred and buttered Cortes Island boy. He was one of the more straightlaced and likable guys on the crew. He was clean-cut, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink and he was always polite, almost to a fault. He was also a fastidious man. He actually washed out his treeplanting bags at the end of each shift—no one on the crew had ever seen anything like it. And he planted with a mattock, an old-school pick-like tool that required an entirely different skill set to master. Kevin was the only treeplanter I have ever met who planted with such an archaic tool. Debbie and I both respected him for that.
Everyone retired to their tents shortly after finishing supper. Knowing that our time together was coming to an end, Debbie and I embraced each other longer than usual that evening. When she retreated to her tent, I found myself all alone in the Quonset hut. It was a strange feeling, being the only soul awake in camp while the sun was still visible on the horizon. I used the opportunity to fire up the generator and pump for a nice long shower. I had a lot to think about.
After ten minutes of squatting under the intense heat and spray generated by the two shower heads I had angled to form a single powerful stream, I barely noticed the sound of the shower door opening and closing. I expected Barrett, or one of the foremen, to barge in thinking someone had accidentally left the shower on, but the rap of the shower door was followed by silence. Then, softly, Debbie emerged from the layers of steam. She was wearing only a towel, which she allowed to drop to the ground the moment our eyes met. The image of her slowly advancing through the white vapor is one that is indelibly burned into my memory.
The final day of planting—the final day of my 1983 spring treeplanting season—was an emotionally charged experience. Barrett loaded Debbie, Kevin and me into his own personal truck and sped off ahead of the rest of the pack. A few minutes into the drive, Debbie leaned into my shoulder and fell fast asleep. We were both exhausted. We were too exhausted to show up for breakfast that morning. While attempting to choke down a few handfuls of granola for energy, I observed Barrett turning our truck onto a brand-new road system. We were to be “block-openers” on that final day of the season.
As we pulled into our new block, I nudged Debbie and directed her weary gaze toward the beautiful expanse of cream that was coming into view.3 With a grin on his mug, Barrett instructed us to plant down the slope against the forest line to our right, hook up with a riparian zone boundary half a kilometre below and plant single lines of trees through the cream until we were instructed to do otherwise. From a treeplanter’s perspective, it was a dream assignment. It was a massive area, encompassing at least one hundred acres. Normally it would take the three of us five or six days to plant an area that size. On that day, we would have company, eventually. Two or three other crews were expected to arrive by the end of the afternoon, promising to turn the area into an epic gang-plant.4
Debbie and I were operating on only three hours of sleep. It took an inordinate