What It’s Really Like To Plant Trees In Northern Ontario
An uncharacteristically beautiful day paints the sky above us a deep cobalt blue while keeping the temperature below deadly. By 2:30 PM my trusted Editor and I had put in 2250 and 1800 trees in the ground respectively. We’re moving at a good pace before we hit a speedbump: we’re completely out of trees. Without a path or a guide our idling hearts drifted to the comfort of the ground underneath us to wait. Sitting soon turned to laying sprawled under the cover of a tall poplar tree, heads against our discarded hard hats. Absently, my editor ruffles through his dry bag and produces a case of joints, flourishing them with a menacing grin. Why not? We smoke to Mark William Lewis and Alice’s Restaurant Massacree and don’t say much through the smoke that’s taken quickly by the breeze. Then, from a hill far over yonder we hear someone calling for us, something is very wrong. Our perception zooms into her face, and with 4K resolution our crew boss orders us from behind furrowed bushy eyebrows to get our bags and get over the hill. My Editor turns to me with his bursting red eyes glued to mine, “We have GOT to get over there NOW.” I match his urgency and finish off the roach. We make it over the hill and stumble down into the swamp where the next cache of trees is set up and see the issue right away: they have so many fucking trees left. I count like five boxes while our crew boss anxiously explains the situation,
“Basically the whole thing is f**ked, I don’t know what they’re doing in there.”
They? “How many have gone in?” I ask, knowing that the answer is too many already.
Our crew boss looks up with tears in her eyes, my heart breaks, “...like fucking 5 people already. We're probably staying late, just close the land.”
I look at my Editor and he looks back at me, we know what to do. Bagging up half a box of trees each, we make our way into the piece. We’re planting rapidly, our shovels splitting earth with a satisfying gritty sound every few seconds. Around one tree every six seconds will net a consistent tree planter between $400-$500 every day, taking into account the time it takes to bag up your trees and lunch. Tree planting may be the last economically viable way to make money between academic years, at least for those who don’t have an equally viable job lined up. Most don’t. I didn’t last summer, it almost did me in for good, economically. Now all I need to deal with are logs shifting beneath my boots, forest beasts, and vampiric insects doing me in, mortally. For some reason I find the latter much easier to manage. Reality snaps back into place when I realize I’m lost in the mess of tilled rows scarring the earth around me.
It’s okay though, my Editor and I have been through this by now. We space eight feet off of one another and start to plant back and forth, like Roomba robots optimizing its path on your living room carpet. Other planters are at the edges of my sight, orange hard hats bobbing in time with ours. Some come closer and drift away, while others work in little L shapes or in rapid zig zags before disappearing into the poplars. Eventually we run out of trees and return to the cache to get more. Around the cache are the dejected faces of first years who know they’re staying late. Our tree runners are there too, they’re the ones who bring us the trees. One looks like a viking, except on his almost bald head the only hair he has is a miniature set of perfectly combed bangs. The other is handsome and he knows it. Both of them are looking around wildly, trying to come up with a way to fill the rest of the land.
Eventually, once the others finish their trees, we’re ordered to just bag up a quarter box and plant out to the road, through the tall poplars obscuring everything. We snap into action and bag up what’s honestly a pathetic amount of trees. At 14 cents 112 trees is like 17 dollars. Like ok. Anyways,we organize ourselves into a row, some of us slowly sinking into the bog as we line up. It’s fine, we’re professionals and we don’t even make a noise as the water fills our lungs. When everyone is ready we’re off, though I pause to grab a grasping hand before it's submerged in the muck. It's Atilla— eighteen and fresh out of the ends of the GTA. We plant about 5 trees each before we can’t even see each other through the poplar thicket. Since the bush is partially situated on the swamp the bugs are terrible. Thick swarms of black flies buzz around our vision, some of them flying directly into our pupils to scream while they drown in our tears. Some fly to the back of our throat to be spit out, drowning in thick dehydrated saliva. Mosquitos trail our ranks waiting to suck the slowest planter into a mummified state. To my right I hear a scream that seems to echo deep through the earth, going for miles. It was Atilla, never saw him again after that day. He was just a kid. Slowly people start falling away. They slip on logs, fall thigh deep into the swampy water, or bug out and attempt to squash the 6-inch wide mosquito that just landed on their forehead with their shovel. Behind us the tree runners are following, watching the destruction. When I sink my shovel into the duff, the woody aerated sediment that holds no tree, the viking goes, “Hey that’s not soil! You can tell by the way it doesn’t look or sound anything like soil.”
I murder him right then and there, bludgeoned by my shovel with a tree planted into his brainstem.
Balancing on top of a fallen tree after planting my last handful of trees I can see the road. From stump to stump I hop parkour style, then jump between the boulders shoring up the gravel. My Editor stumbles out of the thicket fifty feet away from me. While walking to the bus we still hear the screams of those taken by the poplars. That was the Rookie Poplar Massacree that took the lives of so many rookie planters looking to make a decent buck. So if you want to make a decent buck and bend over for 14 cents, I would say go for it. Bring some friends, it’s really like summer camp. You can meet every kind of person under the sun, see the wild untamed Ontario countryside, and drink until you fall asleep face down in the tall grass surrounded by fireflies (if you want to). But, whatever you do, bring a joint for when you run out of trees.