“Six billion trees planted in the province of British Columbia. An unfathomable number, but not as mind-boggling as the size of the forest they replace.”
So begins one of the early paragraphs in Charlotte Gill’s Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe, setting the tone for a book that is at once as seemingly simple as the act of planting a tree into a small hole of soil, and as complex as the forest ecosystem itself.
Having worked as a tree-planter for two decades, no doubt Gill has had plenty of time to think about the time-honoured labour she executes, one sapling at a time. Over the course of those years, it’s also clear as a remote mountain stream that she has spent those months she wasn’t developing her muscles tangled in slash debris sitting at a keyboard finely tuning her writing craft. And it is here that Gill’s talents shine through like a full-moon beam on a wide-open clearcut.
Taking the reader through the annual seasons of a B.C. tree-planter’s working life, Gill’s prose speaks the language of rain pattering on broad devil’s club leaves, of boot-encased feet squishing in gooey mud, of neon-tinted moss and lichens decorating trees both fallen and alive.
A thorough researcher, she unearths the natural history and evolutionary processes of the vast, intricate forest ecosystems, from Earth’s most primitive bacteria, the spark of all organic life, to the splitting of the continental plates to the ground shaking rumble of modern tree harvesting machinery.
Exploring the ‘strange industrial marriage’ of the logger and the planter, she delves into tree-planting traditions and business practices of not just B.C .and other forested areas of Canada, but also more exotic overseas locales.
Taking the reader right into the dirt, the mud, the wet, damp, chilly, fecund coastal rain forest with her, Gills dips her pen into her tree bag at her side and extracts a seemingly limitless supply of descriptors from which she paints her world and the myriad creatures, plants, fungi and natural elements in it. Insightful and curious, her writing is alive with the mysterious, primordial, pulsating, interconnected life of every single organism on the planet, as she takes the reader on a steady-paced adventure into the dark places, the backroads and inaccessible inlets not highlighted in tourist brochures, aboard helicopters and mud-crusted pickups and barebones water craft.
Throughout this book – printed on one product of the logging/planting continuum – Gill’s sharp eye for incongruity and contradictions, however, brighten the page the way spring flowers burst into colour in open spots bordering deep dark forest.
An alert, eagle-eyed observer tuned into her orb, Gill’s writing is poetic and raw, weaving a story of people, economics, the environmental marks of deforestation, human desires and up-close grizzly mom and cub encounters, turbulent boat rides in stormy seas, grimy laundry and pruney blisters.
There’s no halfway in the tree-planting world. For many young and a handful of middle-aged planters, the repetitive, body-wrenching work is a rite of passage. For some, such as Gill, it grows like the very saplings they plant, into a strongly rooted testimony to strength, perseverance and eternal hope.
It’s not a pretty job, but she paints it beautifully, growing like a well-nourished spruce to a crescendo of life reaching its potential only to begin again.
Eating Dirt, by Charlotte Gill, 247 pages, is published by Greystone Books.
