Planting Trees
One woman. Seven weeks. 80,000 trees.
When a friend of mine, Nicola Gladwell, 23, wrote to me that this is how many tree she'd planted during May and June of this year, I wrote back for clarification.
"Did you personally plant 80,000 trees? Or was that a group total?"
She replied:
"That was all me!
"This summer (my second summer doing this) I planted with a girl in her fourth season, and she pressed me really hard. Because it's piece work (10 cents a tree), the faster and better quality trees you plant (better quality, so you don't have to spend hours the next day re-planting a badly planted piece of land), the more money you will make.
"The first day I ever planted, I planted 318 trees. I remember thinking how impossible it seemed to plant 2,000 in eight or nine hours. Now I can do it by just after lunch.
"Each day I would plant about 3,000 trees. The most I ever planted was 4,000. It takes a lot of practice. Definitely an acquired skill."
Nicola was in northern Ontario, where the government has a goal of planting 50 million trees by 2020. She said that the two seasons she went there, she went for different reasons.
"First year (May/June 2008), I went because I wanted to prove to myself I could do 'the hardest job in Canada' and beat it. The second year (May/June 2009), I went because I needed to make money to come to Thailand"
Nicola is in Thailand now, but that is a whole other story. For now, let's stay with trees in Ontario.
Here's a bit of an interview I did with Nicola. (Photo's are her's, used by permission.)
How did you hear about the tree project?
I’m not quite sure... it is almost like a myth in Canada: the dangerous world where students needing money go, and where most come back early because they can tough it out.
Some of my sister’s friends had gone, and I met someone in Bible College that was really it to it. I had always kind of wanted to do it . . . mostly to prove that I could, more than anything.
What kind of trees did you plant?
We planted Black Spruce (in swamp/lowlands), White Spruce (high and dry), Jack pine (high and dry), and Red Pine (sand).
How big were they?
The saplings were anywhere from just longer than my pinky finger, to longer than the distance from my elbow to the tips of my fingers. The smallest ones we called minies (you could fit thousands of these in your bags, they were so light!), while the impossibly huge ones were appropriately named [an unprintable donkey reference]; they were hard to plant straight. And heavy: at the most, only 300 could be squeezed into your bags.
A planter filling bags with baby trees.
Describe the planting process.
1. Screef - clear the ground so you can see soil. (You can do this after you plant the tree, too.)
2. Dig a hole - I usually do a C-cut - with enough room to slide a tree in to tuck it against the side, standing straight.
3. Slide the tree in, so the top of the plug (root bit) is covered, and it's totally straight. If the plug is bent, it's called a j-root, and the tree will look like a J when it grows.
4. Kick the hole shut!
5. Tug on the tree a bit to make sure it's tight.
6. Walk six feet and repeat.
Nicola eye to eye with a tree she's about to plant.
Where did you stay?
If you don't have a portable trailer, you stay in your own tent you brought. I have a great little tent that I bought off a tree-planter in my first year who needed money to buy a ticket home.
Sadly, this year, a bear decided to attack it with its claws, and it now has a sweet rip all the way down the side. You go through a lot of duct tape as a tree-planter.
Who were the other tree-planters you worked with?
My crew had about 38, I think. That is pretty big for a crew. There are rookies (first year planters; in my first year I was called rookie more than I was called my name), vets (experienced planters), crew bosses/foremen (these guys ride around on quads delivering you trees and cutting you in to new pieces, telling you where to plant, etc. We had three on our crew), the supervisor (director of the whole camp, usually an ex-crew boss who wishes he was on a quad, but has to do a lot of paperwork instead), and the cook (very popular person).
What training were you given?
I had one day of training in my rookie year - how to pack your bags, how to hold your shovel, how to clear the ground, how to plant a tree, how to follow your trees, how to line in (starting from a logging road or path, plant in a line to the treeline or someone elses line, etc.); stuff like that.
What was the work day like?
Every day the bus left at seven a.m. Before this you had to dress in your dirty clothes and mostly soggy boots, pack a lunch, fill your water, and have breakfast in the mess tent.
On the bus. They must be heading out. They look too happy and clean to be coming back.
Everyone would pack into the bus, the back of a truck, or in the work van, and head out to the block, a large piece of land that a crew would work on at one time. Each team (partner planting) or solo planter would have a piece cut out of the block for them; a piece could last a couple hours or a couple days, depending on how well they plant and how big the piece is.
Work started from whenever you got to your piece and had trees to pack into your bags, until about 5:30 or six. Some days would last longer or shorter depending on what the block was like. If we could finish a block that day we would stay until seven or eight (even nine once). Sometimes, if we ran out of land close to us, we would have an early day.
The bus would either drop you off, if it could get to your piece, or you would walk in, or hop in the trailer or on the back, and get a quad ride in. Walk-ins were brutal. Once in my first year, we had a walk-in for over an hour.
On the bus ride, music would blast from the speakers as everyone got ready for their day: sunscreen, ipods, tying boots, and the sound of ripping duct tape. We would tape our fingers and wrists each morning for protection when jabbing your hands into the ground three or four thousand times a day, and the wrists to protect from carpal tunnel/tendonitis (worst nightmare).
At the end of the day we would load up the bus again and head back for supper in the mess tent.
Waiting for the bus, Nicola stacked some rocks. She called it "meditative."
Sometimes we would have to 'load the reefer'- pass heavy boxes of trees from a delivery truck into our refrigerated storage truck ('reefer') before supper.
Often I would go straight to bed after supper. Sometimes we would have a campfire, sometimes a swim in the ice-cold northern lake we were camped beside.
What was sanitation like?
There were only two showers for over forty people, so the chance of having water and it being hot was really, really slim.
Sometimes we would plant in a blizzard (northern Ontario in May is not very friendly) or in the snow, and cold water wasnt very appealing. During the first couple weeks I wouldnt have a shower or wash more than my face and hands until the weekends; the water was sooo cold.
The men made a sauna about half way through - complete with a wood stove they found somewhere. Swimming became a lot more popular when we had a sauna built. We had a couple musicians in our camp, too. Sometimes I would lay beside my friend's tent and listen while he played Jack Johnson and Jason Miraz on his guitar. That was nice.
What part of your body took the most getting used to the process -- your back? Your hands?
My hands/wrists have been affected the most. Since I started planting, my hands go numb at night unless I have them completely straight. I took to wearing wrist guards at night while I was planting so I wouldnt have to wake up so many times to massage my hands. Sometimes they would even go numb while I was planting.
I know lots of people who got tendonitis as well. It is also really hard to sit in a desk now. My back is not a fan of my tree-planting career.
Lastly, my big toe on my right foot has just recently had feeling come back into it. Normally known as 'Christmas toe' (the feeling doesn't come back til Christmas), my toe had been numb since my rookie season. After kicking the ground a couple thousand times a day, it's a miracle that only the big toe gets numb!
You said that tree-planting is considered the hardest job in Canada, yet people - like you - do it for more than one season. Why?
For some reason, this crazy job is addictive. For some reason, it feels good to be at home in the bush, to be familiar with each plant in the forest (which plant has invisible thorns, etc) and what the ground looks like if it has soil under it.
It's brutal, yet people come back. It's painful, yet every tree-planter I know talks about it with pride, and if you ever meet a fellow tree-planter, you immediately have hours of easy conversation and laughs; understanding friends who only a second ago were strangers.
Planters with bags of trees, heading through rough (typical?) terrain.
Maybe it's the endorphins... they take you through the day past your first bag up and deposit you smiling and soggy onto the bus at the end of the day, until you sit down - a dangerous prospect which nearly always results in an immediate nap. Or maybe it's the close knit friendships that happen; after hail the size of golf balls, bears in your camp, blizzard planting, huddling in the back of a truck in the rain, bars on the weekends, and being accepted when you have never looked worse, results in a community aspect that is totally surprising.
I'm living in Chiang Mai, Thailand, now. This month, two planters I know came to visit me for a couple days while they are traveling around SE Asia. Once, while we were walking back to my house, completely exhausted, one of my friends said under her breath, 'Just one more bag up . . .' That muttered phrase initiated hidden energy and practiced ability to continue past exhaustion.
Rachel, my friend with dreads [dreadlocks], talked to me while we sat in a little cafe about the influence of tree-planting on her life. She said that it has allowed her the freedom to realize she is capable, that she can actually do what she has always wanted to do. She has volunteered in Nigeria for a couple months, traveled around China, and is now making her way through SE Asia and New Zealand before planting season starts again in May.
Tree-planting is a good network to belong to. It's filled with environmentally conscious people, eager to be world citizens, and dangerously enthusiastic to live all of life.
One woman. Seven weeks. 80,000 trees.
And one very impressed me.
Permalink for "Planting Trees" Posted 03 Dec 2009