Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe
288
Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe
288eBook
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Overview
• Nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and the 2011 Hilary Weston Writer's Trust Award.
During Charlotte Gill’s 20 years working as a tree planter she encountered hundreds of clear-cuts, each one a collision site between human civilization and the natural world, a complicated landscape presenting geographic evidence of our appetites. Charged with sowing the new forest in these clear-cuts, tree planters are a tribe caught between the stumps and the virgin timber, between environmentalists and loggers.
In Eating Dirt, Gill offers up a slice of tree-planting life in all of its soggy, gritty exuberance while questioning the ability of conifer plantations to replace original forests, which evolved over millennia into intricate, complex ecosystems. Among other topics, she also touches on the boom-and-bust history of logging and the versatility of wood, from which we have devised countless creations as diverse as textiles and airplane parts. She also eloquently evokes the wonder of trees, our slowest-growing “renewable” resource and joyously celebrates the priceless value of forests and the ancient, ever-changing relationship between humans and trees.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781553657934 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Greystone Books |
| Publication date: | 09/02/2011 |
| Series: | David Suzuki Institute |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
We fall out of bed and into our rags, still crusted with the grime of yesterday. We’re earth-stained on the thighs, the shoulders, around the waists with muddy bands, like grunge rings on the sides of a bathtub. Permadirt, we call it. Disposable clothes, too dirty for the laundry.
We stand around in huddles of three and four with toothpaste at the corners of our mouths, sleep still encrusted in our eyes. We stuff our hands down into our pockets and shrug our shoulders up around our ears. We wear polypropylene and fleece and old pants that flap apart at the seams. We sport the grown-out remains of our last haircuts. A rampant facial shagginess, since mostly we are men.
The sun comes up with the strength of a dingy light bulb, illuminating the landscape in a flat gray wash. The clouds are bruised and swollen. We stand in a gravel lot, a clearing hacked from the forest. Heavy logging machinery sits dormant all around, skidders and yarders like hulking metallic crabs. The rain sets in as it always does, as soon as we venture outdoors. Our coats are glossy with it. The air hisses. Already we feel the drips down the backs of our necks, the dribbles down the thighs of our pants. We’re professional tree-planters. It’s February, and our wheels have barely begun to grind.
We crack dark, miserable jokes.
Oh, run me over. Go get the truck. I’ll just lie down here in this puddle.
If I run over your legs, then who will run over mine?
We shuffle from foot to foot, feeding on breakfast buns wrapped in aluminum foil. We drink coffee from old spaghetti sauce jars. We breathe steam. Around here you can hang a towel over a clothesline in November, and it will drip until April.
Adam and Brian are our sergeants. They embroil themselves in what they call “a meeting of the minds,” turning topographical maps this way and that, testing the hand-held radios to ascertain which ones have run out of juice. We wait for their plan of attack as if it is an actual attack, a kind of green guerrilla warfare. They wear matching utility vests made of red canvas. They stand exactly the same height, heads bent together. Their lips barely move when they talk. Their shoulders collect the rain. At the stroke of seven, we climb up into big Ford pickup trucks with mud-chewing tires and long radio antennae. We slide across the bench seats, shoving ourselves in together. Five diesel engines roar to life.
Adam sits at the wheel. He has an angular face, hair and skin turned tawny by the outdoor life, eyes the arresting color of mint mouthwash. He pulls out at the head of our small convoy. His pupils zip back and forth over the road’s unpaved surface. He drives like a man on a suicide mission. No one complains. Speed is the jet fuel that runs our business.
While he drives, Adam wraps his lips around the unwashed lid of a commuter mug. He slides aluminum clipboards in and out of his bag and calls out our kilometers on the truck-to-truck radio. Logging trucks barrel down these roads, laden with bounty like land-borne super-tankers. Adam slides his maps into various forms of plastic weatherproofing. Multitasking is his only speed--as it is for all of us--too fast, too much, and all at once. We’re piece-workers, here to make money, a lot of it, in a hurry. It can feel like picking quarters off a sidewalk, and it can feel like an emergency.
Logging routes are like human arteries, mainlines branching out into fine traceries. We pass from civilization to wilderness on a road with muddy ruts. Old snow decomposes along the shoulder. The land around here is jaggedly three-dimensional, fissured with gullies and brush-choked ravines. Mountains bulge from the seashore. We zoom through stands of tall Douglas-firs, conifers bearded with lichen. A green blaze, we’re driving so fast, skimming along the surface of our known world.
Most of us are veterans. Crusty, we call each other, like those Special Ops who crawl from war-ravaged mountains with wild hair, matted beards and battle-mad glints in their eyes. Sean and Pierre were doing this job, they sometimes remind us, when the rest of us were in diapers. Pierre is 55. He tells us he has a resting pulse rate lower than Lance Armstrong’s. He tells us a hundred things, every day, in great detail. He shows us the display screen of his digital camera. He shows us photos of ravens and skunk cabbage. Snapshots from his civilian life--his faraway kids, his foxy lady friends.
Jake, at 21, is the youngest. Jake calls Pierre “Old Man.” He calls himself “Elfie” in the third person.
Elfie’s not digging this action, he says. Elfie thinks this is fucked up.
Oakley and Jake are best pals. Jake is short and muscular, and he talks in rowdy shouts. Oakley is tall and sturdy. We always know where he’s working, because his lunchbox is a plastic tub that once contained a body-building supplement. Find the Mega Milk on the side of the road and know Oakley’s beavering away behind the rise. Oakley and Jake play Hacky Sack for hours every evening, and Pierre documents this, too, with his digicam.
We spend a lot of time in trucks, and it’s here we get to know one another. The bench seats are our sofas, the crew cabs our living rooms. Nick is red-headed, like Richie Cunningham. He doesn’t drink. He says he used to. Some call him “Risky,” like the business. Carmen knits. She’s a single mom. Her boys are at home with her parents. On commutes she clicks away with her needles at socks the size of kiwi fruits.
Sean has more seniority than anyone, and he has an inexhaustible supply of jokes to prove it.
How many tree-planters does it take to screw in a light bulb?
One. But you’ll find five bulbs in the socket.
What do you call a tree-planter without a girlfriend?
Homeless.
No one is offended. We’re unisex guys, the men of man-days. The work wears us down and lift us up, everyone together, equally. Sometimes we glance sideways at the old-timers with their chapped lips and their titanium hips. We think: Take me out before I end up old and battered and stooped like Quasimodo. But in truth we’re halfway there already. It feels to us as if we’ve been doing this job for a thousand years, and our bodies are rusted with it.
I nestle in among my work comrades as I have done for nearly 20 years. The rituals and routines of planting trees are as familiar to me as boiling water or brushing my teeth. But February always shocks me. Usually, I’m unfit after a lazy, indoor winter. So is K.T. He’s my boyfriend and also my co-worker. We’ve made a life of it--city dwellers in the winter, tree-planters come spring. Now, after one week on the job, even my eyelids feel sore. My palms and heels are blistered. I still yearn for the comforts of home.
Table of Contents
The Last Place on EarthA Kind of Tribe
Green Fluorescent Protein
Beautiful Losers
A Furious Way of Being
The Town That Logging Made
At the End of the Reach
Extremophiles
Sunset
Exit Lines
What People are Saying About This
"An arresting look into another world. …What sets “Eating Dirt” apart is the vividness of the writing. Gill’s prose puts the wasp in your shirt, the weariness in you at the cellular level, the grizzly too close for comfort."—Seattle Times
"[a] brilliant memoir …Gill’s stories are fascinating, but she is possessed of that rarest of attributes among memoirists: an understanding of her own story as only a part of a broader picture, a willingness to broaden the focus beyond the particulars of her personal experience. …This is a deeply researched, beautifully written book."
—Emily St. John Mandel, The Millions
"Never have I read such a beautiful book with such a dull premise: what it’s like to plant tree seedlings in the wake of logging companies’ destruction. ...Gill turns a subject that might seem narrow and confined into a lyrical essay about labor and rest, decay and growth" —Smithsonian Magazine
"Charlotte Gill gets my enthusiastic vote as the best nonfiction book of 2012. ...highly readable ...Gill’s narrative is by turns gripping, funny, informative but always tactile"
—John Sledge, Alabama Press Register
"The humility that lies in the title of Charlotte Gill's extraordinary Eating Dirt is more than borne out in this astonishing chronicle of work, the elements, and place. …Charlotte Gill writes with a dexterity and nobility that soars. This is the best book, on several fronts, that I've read in a long time."
-Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company
"The trees they plant each year “shimmy in the wind. There, we say. We did this with our hands. We didn’t make millions, and we didn’t cure AIDS. But at least a thousand new trees are breathing.” For that, she can be proud—and it makes for a good story."
—Publishers Weekly
"An inspired narrative in a unique topic that is half memoir, half magic. ...A radiant piece of non-fiction by a talented writer, whose descriptions will make your back ache by the time you finish reading."
—Sacramento Book Review, 5 stars
"In language as sharp as obsidian, as unsentimental as a clear-cut, Charlotte Gill tells the story of her tree-planting tribe, men and women who spend their lives atoning for the deeds of the rest of us who, to this day, continue to sacrifice the greatest temperate rainforest on earth on the altar of our prosperity."
—Wade Davis
"Charlotte Gill is everything you could want from a storyteller: honest and wise, leanly lyrical, tough and tender in equal measure. In this exquisite book about a gnarly occupation, we come to appreciate the resilience of nature and humans both."
—Philip Connors, author of Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout
Interviews
A Conversation with Charlotte Gill , Author of Eating Dirt
You were a professional tree planter for nearly 20 years. You grew up in New York State, thousands of miles from the wilderness you describe in Eating Dirt. How did you get involved in the business?
I moved to Canada to go to college. Tree planting was a very common summer job for undergraduates, but I had never heard of it before. My roommate was a tree planter. She would return from summers spent deep in the woods looking fit, bug-bitten and suntanned. She told me stories about her coworkers—they sounded to me like crazy woodland gypsies. She showed me photos of clearcuts that went on in all directions as far as the eye could see. To me, this strange occupation looked both totally fascinating and deeply intimidating. But I knew I just had to try it myself. Certainly there'd been nothing in my upbringing that had prepared me for hard physical labor. If I had known what I was getting into, I would never have gone in the first place.
Planting trees is hard physical labor. You say that it's one of the dirtiest jobs left in the modern world. Why would anyone want to make a career of such a thing?
Planting trees is a sweaty, filthy job. It's done by hand and on foot, often through very rough, steep terrain. There are heavy loads of seedlings to carry. There is bad weather and heat exhaustion. There are biting insects and sore backs, and all the other repetitive strain injuries that come with doing something a few thousand times a day. Most tree planters are in some kind of discomfort all the time. On the upside, tree planters go places most people would never get to see in the course of their entire lives. Some of these are stunning, wild geographies. We commute to work in boats and helicopters. We cross paths with exotic wildlife. And we make incredible friendships—a kind of soldier love. Writing the book, I wanted to explore what that attraction was all about. What makes anyone take on an adventure like this, even though they know they'll get dirty, they'll weep, they'll wish they'd never said yes? Maybe we suspect we'll get to the bottom of ourselves and discover some hidden well of courage and fortitude—often enough that's exactly what happens.
There is also a love story inside the book. Can you say a little bit about that?
There is a character in the book named K.T. He was my boyfriend at the time. We shared our planting experience for several years, and the narrative follows our time together in the woods. I never intended to cover our relationship when I began Eating Dirt. I think it's incredibly difficult to do justice to a workplace romance, especially when it's going reasonably well. But as I wrote I discovered that our work and our companionship were intertwined. Together, we'd experienced exhaustion, stress, hunger, competition and danger. These are reasonably normal things to face on the job, but they're also deeply revealing moments when you're in a relationship. They distil one's character traits. After planting trees, I knew he'd make a patient, caring, hardworking husband, which he is even now. We still talk about our old job. It's a topic of fond nostalgia at our house.
You describe the biology and the planetary evolution of trees and forests in a way that's easy to understand. Do you enjoy writing about natural history?
I've always loved reading natural history, and I find it a wonderful challenge to capture science in a way that's engaging and easy to read. My research began with burning questions. Is planting trees a cure for climate change? Can it do all the things we hope it might ecologically, aesthetically and economically? I discovered that the answers were more nuanced and variable than I'd expected. Does planting trees work? It depends on what we want it to do. Do we want to renew a timber supply? Or are we attempting to recreate forest ecosystems in all their layered complexity? The answers lie embedded in the history of trees on this planet, which in itself is quite an elegant story.
You've planted over a million seedlings in your career. Have you ever revisited some of these places?
We don't often go back. Ours is a forward-moving business, as is the logging industry. We plant the trees and move along to the next place. On the few occasions when I've gone back to see the trees that I've planted I've been astounded by their resilience as a species. It's as if survival is part of their in-built design. You can plant a tree in a cupful of dry dirt sandwiched between two rocks and that tree will try to grow. That's a forest's only job—to build. The trees that I planted when I was a teenager are over twenty years old now. They'd be the size of exceptionally large Christmas trees. And they've still got a lot of growing to do.
Who have you discovered lately?
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot [A Spring 2010 Discover Great New Writers selection. - Ed.] is just the kind of non-fiction I love—a book that begins with a deceptively tiny idea but explores themes as big as immortality. HeLa cells: they're in practically every biology lab in the world. Their original donor, Henrietta Lacks, is brought back to life in vivid detail—her clothes, her children, even the color of her toenail polish.
In my other life I'm a fiction writer, and lately I've been indulging my abiding love of novels. Ever since reading Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief I've been taken with the geography of Florida swamps. I've never visited any of these places, but the heat and the humidity, the lush vegetation—well, it's the perfect place to set a novel, which is why I knew I'd read Karen Russell's Swamplandia. I've also got Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers on my bookshelf. Who wouldn't want to read a story set in a school for psychics? When I read fiction, I love to be whisked off to other worlds where different laws of physics apply. I want to be transported.
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