Crying, however, will not get me into a summer hockey league. Yes, I know that D. DeVries told you that Peterborough has ice year round, but I don't think it will be ideal for hockey. Even if it were possible to play all summer here in Peterborough, I will not be here.
I've decided to head back up north to Thunder Bay and plant trees this spring. I did it in undergrad and so enjoyed the experience that I begged Laura to let me go again. Really, the options are limitless once I get north of Chapleau. The ailments that hide, waiting to spring on the unsuspecting planter are virtually limited only by the imagination.
Trench foot, a common affliction for planters who have their feet in wet boots for upwards of 13 hours a day.
Twisted knees, the outcome of climbing over a deadfall and slipping with an added 70-80 pounds of trees strapped to your waist.
Frequent impact pain in the shoulder and elbow from attempting to plant a tree the correct depth in granite.
Hands with cracks in them deep enough that they bleed for a few days, compliments of cold weather and several weeks of blisters combined.
Beaver fever, compliments of badly filtered water.
Incessantly dripping nose, caused by living in permanently wet clothes (rain, dew, snow, hail, sweat, swamps, etc.)
A physique vaguely resembling a hunched skeleton, thanks to a negative calorie count and being forced to stoop all day to plant trees.
Permanently itchy skin, caused by bites from black flies, deer flies, horse flies, bees or bears...usually a combination of several of these at any given moment.
Whew, I can hardly wait to get up there. Oh, I almost forgot forest fires, twisters and floods.
I even knew a guy who had been attacked by a bush chicken and a killdeer on the same day.
The truth is, planting trees is an experience that is likely only duplicated by a few other jobs in the world. I think that King Crab crews on the West Coast must have a similar experience. The army is probably another, although I ran into some forestry guys one year who told us that planting trees was so bad that they did a stint in the army in order to get out of it. They said that in the military you had to carry hundred pound packs and a gun through the bush, but at least you didn't have to do that and plant trees at the same time. The other career is forest fire fighting, which is a pretty crazy vocation.
So what is this experience that is so unforgettable? Extremes. When people say that they hate life, they never mean it the way a treeplanter does. When treeplanters say that they love dinner, treeplanters actually love dinner.
A good day tree planting is an amazing thing. It is even more obvious when starkly contrasted with the ever-present bad day tree planting.
A warmish, mostly dry bed is an amazing thing to crawl into after a day of climbing over slash, waist deep in mud in the middle of a hailstorm.
A bus, broken down or mired in quicksand, fifteen kilometers in on a logging road is a bad day. Truck headlights coming over a hill that hasn't seen a vehicle in hours, just in time to get you back to a camp where a cook, conscious of how precariously her life is situated, has prepared hot food, and a lot of it, can instantly make it a good day.
Philip Yancey, after interviewing Paul Brand (the surgeon who isolated the cause of leprosy's deadliness) concludes that humans only experience good as an opposite of bad. That is why language is full of such binaries as good/bad, joy/sorrow, love/hate. The degree to which we experience the negative is the degree to which we are able to experience the positive.
That's why I always loved pan-fried bass on the shore of Pine Lake after I had gotten a soaker on the way in, lost a set of lures and burnt my hand on a pan trying to start dinner. It's like Dad always said as he laughed at one of my brothers pulling themselves out of the knee-deep mud that inevitably surrounded every beaver dam on any trail he had ever led us down, "A bad day fishing is better than a good day in the office."
Well, it's something to look forward to, I guess.
Tot ziens
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