This is a post which I've taken from my blog. I'm afraid I'll only be able to post a partial of it here as to post the full thing might violate some of the TWC's terms of usage. Plus, I hate seeing all those WUBS everywhere. I'd especially hate to see them in my own work.

This is an excerpt from Systematic Rube, a short novel I'm working on about my first year treeplanting in Northern Ontario. This piece however, is about an instance a few years later, while mopping up for a forest fire in Northern British Columbia. I was very happy to have raised in measure through hard work in the eyes of the loggers around us, but these days I realize that it's important to pick the right people to try to impress.


An Unnecessary Redemption (excerpt from Systematic Rube)




Late in the summers I forsook my shovel for a saw. Saws. Planting for more than two months made my head feel like a scooped melon. The monotony and the long hours got to me. I liked to go brushing to change the flavor of the monotony for a while. The company we brushed with had a small but loyal work force, consisting of myself, my buddy, the owner, who was also a good friend, and one cramped truck.

It was sunny. It was hot. I was a salad of chopped grass. We were dressed in high durable boots, battered pants, crusty work gloves, helmets with visors, earmuffs, surrounded by the killing buzz of our saws, the greasy smell of our smoke. At the end of the day we’d return home smeared with the green genocide we’d just committed. Imagine how tenaciously a piece of lettuce gets stuck in your teeth for hours after eating, then imagine that lettuce is a hectare wide and fired at your teeth at a hundred miles an hour.

Looking up I peered through the blue haze of my exhaust. A white vision was cresting the hill, a girl dressed in white slacks and a frilly white top and a regular pair of sneakers; white ones. I looked around in vain for a white horse.

The vision was the Mill’s summer student, doing her internship. I’ll capitalize the M in mill there; the Mill was all. Capital M like Mother, and Matriarch. What the Mill said, we did; we depended on the Mill, the Mill Made us Money; we were nice to the Mill. However, seeing the Mill intern floating up the hill dressed like a tennis-pro seemed incredibly incongruous at the time, like miners finding a nice set of bone china sitting on a shelf of rock deep underground.

I yelled at Al, the owner, and knocked a branch off his helmet to get his attention, staying clear of him in case he turned suddenly, not knowing I was there, and chopped my feet off at the ankles. The girl came over and talked to us. Dry lightning had sparked a fire in a swamp the evening before. The fire had been put out before it could spread, but they needed us to come help mop up the operation. It was far cheaper to get us to do it than real men with machines.

It was our first morning on the job. We’d worked so hard to iron out the wrinkles in the operation the summer before, making little money, and were finally ready to buckle down and get rich like rock stars. Al was not pleased. The Mill paid a set wage of thirteen dollars an hour for the sort of unskilled labor we were being asked to do. He’d calculated the bank of the block we were on already, and we were about to take a huge paycut. Chris and I, on the other hand, didn’t mind as much. We’d never fought a fire before. It would be a new experience.

Dirty and rugged, we packed our gear with slow fingers, and returned to the logging camp before we went to fight the fire. We were already on the clock. Road minutes mattered.

As many as eighty men lived in the logging camp for nine months out of the year. I say logging camp but I could say huge locker room. A man’s place. Men showered away their excess testosterone and lumbered about in huge towels. Thick yellowy toenails poked from beneath the bathroom stalls. Every meal had a serving of meat and a serving of French fries. Thursday was steak night. When you reached the head of the line Andy the cook would bow his hair net in your direction and mutter through his mustache, how many?

Camp proper had a thirty foot kitchen and a cafeteria that could comfortably seat forty. Three long trailers housed modestly sized rooms which some men called their homes. The owner’s trailer was next down the boardwalk, then the foreman’s trailer, then the Recreation trailer. The recreation trailer boasted a pool table, a dartboard, a ping-pong table, a stereo with a Jimi Hendrix CD, a weight set, two sets of couches, and a big television with a DVD player and satellite hookup. All of which cried itself to sleep at night, never touched by anybody but Chris and Alan and I.

After supper a few of the loggers might loiter around to chat in the cafeteria, but never for long. And never with us. Every one of them had a satellite link and a tv in their room, and also rugs, slippers, movies, board games, hopscotch, hello kitty. Camp was a little hunk of civilization plunked down in the middle of the wilderness. Drinking was prohibited but a lot of it was going on anyway. Management never cared as long as it didn’t interfere.

Each of the loggers, as we called them, had to be up early, often as early as 3:00am. That way the buncher drivers could get to where they were falling as the sky was lightening. The earliest truck drivers would soon follow to get their morning loads of worms and catch the first barge going back across the lake at 5:30. We were the lingerers, the last to leave at 6:30. Once we were gone poor Andy could finally get a few hours rest.

We’d been instructed by our former boss not to tell Andy how much money our camp cooks made – eight dollars a head, per day, or more, for thirty-five or forty people. Word had trickled boss to boss. Andy wasn’t making much more than minimum wage with the catering company who’d placed him. I hadn’t considered it until I had been forbidden to talk about, then I felt bad about shackling my tongue. Though I’m not sure Andy would have fit in with camp life anyway. Inevitably, when a small but significant contingent of hungry planters went to ask about the vegetarian option for the evening, Andy would have leaned in and said, How many steaks you want, two or three?

We were the camp lepers. And ignorant to the fact. The loggers had no-planters signs scribbled on their hard, discriminating hearts. We ate in the camp, showered in the camp, used the camp’s drinking water and got our gas from camp, but our tents were set up down the hill by the lake, where the camp had once made a clearing to use as a vehicle dump. We liked our tents and slept well away from the sidelong eyes of the loggers. We drank beer by the dock and skipped rocks across the water. The loons sang to each other all night long. Hawks had nests nearby and swooped over the lake in the evenings. Rats had made burrows in the abandoned vehicles and sometimes at night would fight inside the seat cushions of an old brown van.

At the burn, which smelled like the world’s biggest campfire, where we’d spend the next two days, Chris and I were handed a pick and a shovel, and told to go stand by a small group of loggers near the entrance to the block. We’d passed these loggers in the halls and had stood by them in the lunch line. Nods to all of them. They were old and grizzled, and if they weren’t old they were at least grizzled and making healthy progress towards old. Living in a camp made a man like that, even if he was young. He shriveled and tinted a reddish brown. His fingers widened with his belt. We asked these guys what we were supposed to do, and one of them didn’t mind telling us, dig under the stumps, and in all the humps, the roots are burning. Jesus Christ.
Continued here: http://paperseraglio.blogspot.com/