Screefing: A Tree Planter's Reflection

By Rodger Wilkie

'Screefing' tells the story of a group of tree-planters living and working on the clear-cuts of the northern forest, tracing the psychological development of the main characters as they become increasingly removed from the urban society in which they have lived most of their lives. The book is a collection of short prose pieces and a few poems, with the prose consisting of short narratives, journal entries, and the occasional letter. Prominent in the book—not only in terms of description but also in terms of its relationships with the characters—is the land of the Precambrian Shield, which serves problematically as a source of employment on the one hand and spiritual contemplation and insight on the other. While most of the narrative is based on real events, several of the prose pieces and some of the poems tell of Stone Man, a trickster earth-spirit who personifies some of the wilder and seemingly whimsical elements of the northern landscape. The book is divided into three sections, each set in one of the bush camps in which the characters live. These sections—“Chapleau,” “Terrace Bay,” and “Elliot Lake”—follow the characters as they undergo a simultaneous breakdown and awakening, internalizing some of the amorality embodied by the land itself and by its avatar Stone Man, and learning to see beyond the limits of their own biases and expectations. The book, which is difficult to fit into a traditional generic category, might best be called creative non-fiction,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rodger Wilkie
• Release date: Mar 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311086440

Rodger Wilkie

Originally from Windsor, Ontario, I grew up in the Toronto area, graduated from Dunbarton High School in Pickering, and later attended both the University of Toronto (St. Michael's College, BA) and the University of New Brunswick (Fredericton, MA, PhD). I've worked as a night shift janitor, tree planter, drugstore assistant manager, ESL instructor, and teacher of literature, non-Western thought, and human rights, those last two of which I currently enjoy doing at St. Thomas University in Fredericton. I taught for four years in South Korea, and my travels have taken me to various locations in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Longstanding interests in fantasy literature, mythology, science, and the philosophy and poetry of East and South-East Asia, have all influenced my writing in one way or another, as has my love of hiking, camping, and paddling.

Book preview

Prologue

Like a fuckin’ war zone.

Andy is one of our two foremen. He’s driving the van, slouched and scrawny, fingers on the pale blue steering wheel in a loose-fingered, tobacco-stained grip. We’re an hour out of Chapleau, thirteen hours out of Toronto. At Iron Bridge, I remember, we turned north off the Trans-Canada onto an unpaved road officially called a highway with a sign that said Chapleau 224. Now, we’re bumping along a dirt logging road, crammed in shoulder to shoulder.

A fuckin’ war zone, Andy says again.

Outside, past the scrub that lines the road, the world is broken bones—shattered slivers of the northern forest stabbing up roots and branches at a red sky sliding into sunset, and no leaves visible anywhere. Not that this is the first clearcut we’ve passed. They came and went at intervals since not long after Iron Bridge, over flats or up the sides of stump-stubbled hills. But this is no small cut. It offers no boundary in any direction: a silence that tears your eyes and stabs your lungs with the broken ends of sticks.

Sometime from someplace.

We enter as we leave.

One:

Chapleau

Arrival

Stopped. Sore. We push through the side door of the van and stretch, rub our butt-cheeks, swear at the seats and each other and the last 200 kilometres of road, at the rough drive and the orange sun that’s collapsing against the bumpy horizon too quickly for us to have our tents up by dark.

Welcome home. Andy slams his door and steps around from the driver’s side, scratches the top of his backward green ball cap, and pulls out his pouch and papers to roll himself a smoke. Paul lights an Export ‘A’ and passes Andy his red plastic Bic. They breathe—we breathe. Behind the thin veil of tobacco, the air is as clean as the quiet that hovers behind the shuffling of our feet.

Around us is mostly sand—low dunes streaked with thin grass like the half-buried heads of aging giants, pale in the yellowing light. Dark to the right a little behind us, a rounded hill stands crowned with birch—new leaves, young green—grey rock—blue lichen—last year's ferns brown and fragile between still white trunks. Further back—the mutter of water over unseen stones. And down to the left—the wrinkled surface of an unnamed lake fragmented through almost-bare branches, pierced by thin lines of marsh-grass.

Shit. Joe, looking past Andy and past the cargo van parked in front of us, past the flat sand tucked between the dunes. Joe, who’d grinned and said This is what land is all about as we drove through steep hills with grey cliffs and green tops, who’d bowed his head and closed his eyes at our first sight of a clearcut and hadn’t smiled since. The motherfuckers. Joe.

Straight ahead, through a gap in the grass-streaked mounds, a clearcut stretches west maybe half a mile and washes its jagged brown up against a flat-topped hill. On top of the hill, spaced almost evenly and black against the grey-orange sky, four trees stand straight and naked as gallows. The few thin branches of their crowns tell of the forest that used to stand around them. They reach across the silence—pull words out through our eyes—until all we can do is look.

The crunch of work-boots on dry earth draws us back—Andy walking to the cargo van, trailing smoke. Cranking open the hatch, he hauls out the first backpack, tosses it onto the ground, follows it with a bundle of shovels held together by yellow rope.

Boneland I

Morning mist doesn’t cling—forgotten

shadows huddle, shrunken between

dry roots untrembling even

in the wind.

Even in the wind

you are alone:

alive with lichen, a rock

may look inviting.

Saturday, May 9:

First work day. Drove an hour and a half into Chapleau, picked up food and fuel, then spent a couple of hours planting. Looks like a good job, but I’ve got a long way to go before I'm making the kind of money they said we’d get.

The seedlings aren’t what I expected. Jackpines, small, about two or three inches high. Fragile as grass, potted in paper cylinders maybe an inch across and three inches deep, filled with soil and roots. The cylinders are packed into red basket-bottomed trays about one foot by two feet, and Mark—our camp supervisor—says there are 236 seedlings to a tray. He calls them container stock. Our pay is piece-work and will vary from site to site. First time we break 1000 trees in a day, we get a free beer.

The land is empty. Almost. Evergreen’s gone. Some poplar and birch left or growing in, covering whole hillsides or sticking up in isolated stands. Where we’re working, the land’s been ploughed into furrows—Danny, one of the owners, told me that during my interview—but my picture of a furrow then was different, and maybe ‘ploughed’ isn’t the right word. It made me think of farms, and this is not farmland. True, there are lines in the ground, more or less straight, about a foot deep where there’s enough soil. But in many places there’s not. There are rocks—big ones—all over the place—and the bedrock often pokes up through the soil. There are also a lot of logs lying around, half buried in twigs and roots and branches too small for lumber or pulp, and we have to step over or through this stuff as we work. Mark says the scraps are called slash. That’s a good word. It fits the violence that the idealist in me says we’re trying to heal.

The cynic in me just wants to get paid.

I should probably also say something about our equipment. We’re wearing steel-toed work boots. As for the stuff the company supplies, it’s simple. We carry our seedlings in hip bags: two big off-white canvas pouches fastened to a belt, supported by shoulder straps. We can get around 100 seedlings into each pouch. The planting is done with three-foot long metal