I Was Treeplanting One Day Definitions of some Treeplanter Terms: Bagging up: filling your planting bags with seedlings. Screef: an area of ground cleared of all vegetation and debris in order to plant a seedling. Screefing: Clearing the ground. Prepared ground: after a site has been logged, it can be mechanically made better for planting by digging mounds, trenches etc. High Baller: a treeplanter on the crew who usually always outplants the crew. How long has it been since I last bagged up? Shit, I haven�t been focused. The damned bugs are starting to piss me off too. And this ground, what lousy prep this shit is. Prepared ground that�s supposed to make the planting easier, make the trees grow better. �I wanna see you guys �itting all the �igh spots and �itting every prepared site or you go back to replant,� fuck you Marcel, you power tripping foreman with your French Canadian accent. This crappy land I�m on, half of the mounds are fucking waterlogged, practically no bloody high spots; hell there�s not hardly any plantable spots in most of this crap. Replant my ass, replant yourself. And of course if I can�t hit a prepped spot I gotta go in between and screef. Fuck, I�ve done more screefing than I�ve had fast stab and go prepped spots. �Upside inside out, livin� la vida loca,� that fucking stupid song, if I could only get it out of my head I could concentrate and be more focused and plant much faster and efficiently. Fuck you Ricky Martin and your god awful crap you call music, enough to drive a man crazy. Not like this job wouldn�t make someone already predisposed for insanity go mad in a damn hurry. Fuck, this spot fills with water too, try and screef over there I guess. How and the hell do the highballers do it, make over two hundred bucks a day everyday, some close to three hundred a day? Why can�t I plant that good? I�ve surpassed two hundred twice and that was the best ground I�ve ever yet seen. What am I talking about anyway?- This is only my second season, some guys take three or four years to get that good. Do I want to tree plant for that many years? No. Then again, what the hell else am I supposed to do to make good coin in the summer? Even on bad days I�ll make over one hundred and thirty dollars for eight hours work. That's like sixteen or seventeen bucks an hour on days when I don�t really push myself and am discouraged and don�t care and things like that. None of my friends are making that kind of money, so I guess that�s good. The downside is this is only three months a year, then I have to do something else. What the hell am I supposed to do in the fall and winter, live off unemployment like some pathetic loser, smoking weed and snow boarding? Fuck that, I�ll take any job I guess, to keep busy and stuff. Damn, I haven�t eaten since this morning. Why is she in my head again? Out of nowhere, she comes in my head and I can�t shake her image. Well, seeing her is far better than getting a lousy song, or any song stuck in your head all day long. It makes absolutely no sense for me to have feelings for her like this. I mean, she lives in Nanaimo and I live in Penticton. Through mutual friends I might see her every few months for a handful of hours. Those hours are easily the finest hours of my year. �I find your desire for her highly illogical,� is what Spock would tell me. And it�s not like I can just move there in the off season and call her up and say, �Hi, I just moved to town, you know, to look for work. Want to meet for lunch?� How fucking psychotic would that look? Man, she�d have a restraining order slapped on my ass in no time, would probably freak her right out. Besides, just because we clicked immediately and enjoy each other�s company doesn�t mean she feels the same as me. I tried telling her how I felt last time I saw her too. Did I ever screw that up, �When I first met you I got this strong feeling that you are good.� What the hell does that mean? Talk about being the poster boy for ambiguity, what kind of a pathetic line was that anyway. Ah, draw bag is empty already. One, two, three, four, five, six bundles left, 120 trees to go. I�d better start planting down toward the cache, don�t want to do too much walking without planting. How many have I put in the ground so far? 240, 500, 740, 880, after these are gone that�s a grand. Price is 13.5, so that�s 135 bucks. Should be done this in half an hour and I�ll have two hours left. If I really push I should get fourteen hundred in. That would be 135 and 13.50, 27 and 27 is 54, so I could make 189 bucks. That�s not too bad, guess I�m doing better than I thought. Too bad there�s only a couple of weeks left in the season, I�m doing much better, finally getting the hang of this treeplanting stuff. Still, this is the Okanogan, not coastal BC, where the big money is supposed to be made. Supposed to be way the fuck harder than this on a regular basis too. Imagine planting on the coast in early March: cold and raining most of the time, steep and unstable slopes, and nightmare slash. If you stay there through the summer, those monster fucking horse flies that bite through clothes. Unreal, that time back home in Kitimat when one bit through Chris� sock, and made him bleed too. Sick fucking bugs. A planter needs to don plenty of clothes because of them pricks, even if it�s 35 degrees out. I�m not getting DEET poisoning again like last year. That was some fucking kind of pain, like a serrated hunting knife being twisted in the liver, god damn it. And why do the mosquitoes always go for the ears with their nasty, annoying buzzing. They�d be a hundred times more tolerable if they made no noise and stayed out of the ears. Fuck do I ever hate that, pisses me off. Shit, bitch! Hit my fucking shin screefing! God does that ever hurt, that�s twice today. Guess I should go home and visit after the season is over, haven�t seen everybody in more than a year now. It�s always pretty awesome around Kitimat in the summer. No way I could move back there again though, well at least not at this point in my life. And where the hell exactly is my life right now? Got to do something with my life soon, I mean friends are getting married now, some have kids already, and most of them have completed their degrees now. What do I got going for me anyway? Some good paying seasonal work for part of the year and not much else. Why do I need to get married or have kids for anyway? The truth is that I can barely take care of my stupid self sometimes. One day I do want that, I mean I�ve always known I would want to be married, but not now, that�s way off. I mean, I need to have at least a date first. Mail order brides? Ha, that�s funny. Almost out of water, it�s sure hot today, must be way above thirty out here. I�ve drank seven liters and I haven�t had to piss once yet. Man that�s fucking harsh, means I�m really dehydrated. I can never drink enough water doing this job. That�s seven kilograms of fluid I�ve drank and in no way can I weigh seven kilograms more than this morning. A person doesn�t get all that hungry when its hot like this, but you still must eat, don�t want to be passing out. That would be fucking hilarious: the guy responsible for first-aid passing out. �Du Hast, du hast meech,� Ramstein or something like that. That song is cool, too bad I don�t understand German. Maybe I should travel to Europe or some place after planting. What would I do there, just wander around? Always seems cool and all, but I don�t know. How much would it cost? How long would I go there? What would I do? Funny, Mom always told me I think too much, paralyses me from making a decision one way or another. She was sure right. She�s the only one who probably had any idea what I am all about. I can�t believe Mom�s been gone three years already. What the hell have I done since of any significance? Exactly. Stupid burn piles. Why do they burn slash on cut blocks? �Got to plant in the ashes, but make sure you �it mineral soil,� okay boss, I�ll bury the whole fucking seedling! There she is again, I�m thinking of her underneath my thoughts. What is there to that strange sensation you get when you meet someone for the first time? Why does it fill you with a pseudo-fear, yet a strong attraction. I mean of course she is attractive, but there is something more to it than that. I can�t explain what it is but it happened the first time and each time since. Sixth sense? Intuition? Spiritual? What the fuck, I�m not spiritual at all. Yet I am starting to believe and feel that there may be something more. Ah, there�s our highballer filling up at the cache. Shit, she�s there at the rate of two bag ups to my one. She did plant over 2500 trees yesterday, bitch. Kidding. She�s cool, works like a dog too. Twenty-five hundred trees today would be 135 and 135 and 62.50, wow, 332 dollars for eight hours work. That's what, forty, forty-two dollars an hour? How many trees an hour is that? 400, no 300 or so. I�ve planted at that rate before, just not all day long. Does she even eat at all? Thing that kills me is she has a smoke at every bag up. So physically, I should have the edge over her, but she�s also been at this, what, six or seven years. It�s all about focus, all about efficiency. Fuck, she�s a virtual efficiency machine I suppose. I�m sure I could do that if I could get focused and in the �mode� or the �zone� as our camp pot heads say. What�s with those guys? They get baked in the morning and then highball all day long. Even when we don�t have creamy land, they still dominate. Shit, I�d be falling all over the fucking place if I did what they did. What ever works I guess. �Why, why, why Delilah,� now I got fucking Tome Jones stuck in my head, oh yeah that was playing in the truck this morning. I should play some of my tapes on the drives here, at least I would like the songs that get stuck in my head. I wonder what kind of shape I�m in these days? I don�t do much else other than planting right now, but I bet my cardio is good. I should go for a run on the weekend and see what kind of shape I�m in, not that I could be in bad shape. Great, here is the wet crap again, no fucking good spots in this shit slop. Oh, there, hit that mound, double plant here I suppose. Have to screef there, that�s past the minimum distance. Okay, next spot should be about there.
Copyright © 1999 Darcy K. Metz |