Dirt Work (12 page)

I couldn't exactly blame the skeptics. I hadn't planned this life for myself, and the ins and outs of it still surprised me, too. But while I had firsthand experience to convince me it was right, my folks could only take my word and hope there was more to it than what they saw from the outside: moving every six months, no security, intermittent income, what seemed at best like a tenuous perch on the roost of adulthood. I knew they were proud of me—my dad openly admiring of a job that had me out in the field all day, using my hands—but there was an undercurrent of slight dismay: our daughter, who wanted to be an archaeologist or an NPR correspondent when she grew up, the girl who meant to go on for a graduate philosophy degree, is doing
what?
Again? My mother asked if I ever thought about being a professor anymore (not really), and if my winter job paid enough (no). An aunt asked if I had health insurance,
tsk
-ing when I admitted that I did not. The prodding felt rude at times (who asked an investment banker how much she made?), but I knew that beneath the concern lay a persistent hope for my happiness. I wished they could see what I could: happiness too easily confused with orthodoxy.

Just when it's clear to seasonals that people think we're flighty and resistant to our true callings, someone will sidle up, with a “real job” and a salary, and whisper,
I envy you.
Including high school friends, distant cousins, and seatmates on airplanes. No sooner has one person at a dinner party back east finished shaking his head over
How can you live with that kind of insecurity?
then another comes over to say she'd move to a park tomorrow if she could. Many of the envious have good careers, some even jobs that they love, but describe feeling restless. Or, they want to try something new but can't because of the stability, the kids, the bills, the 401(k), the economy, the degree, the expectations.
Oh, I couldn't
, they say when I offer to put in a good word for them at hiring time next season.
My husband would never move there my folks paid for law school my kids are at a weird age we just finished the house.

It would be tempting, in these scenarios, to agree with the enthusiast, that yes, I'm lucky, brave, noble, and happier than most. But as fervently as I defend myself to critics, I am just as resistant to the airbrushed longing. It's true that there are legions of us in the seasonal workforce sharing the woods—smoke-jumpers and naturalists, raft guides and researchers—many of whom are, if not blissfully content, at the very least enjoying our work day to day. But. I know deeply fulfilled accountants, happy real estate agents, and miserable traildogs. I have felt the restless squeeze of discontentment, even in the woods. My worries and roadblocks, when they appear, are as crippling as anyone's: what if Gabe needs an MRI for that knee injury, or worse, surgery? Where will we live this winter if last year's rental falls through? Could I even take the GREs anymore? Am I wasting my life?

Something interesting connects the two responses—both the critics and the admirers of my seasonal career find it novel, in part because it's temporary. Although rehire is likely for skilled employees, it's never guaranteed. To some, a seasonal job is not a real job because it isn't permanent. But my worries, and yours, confirm the opposite: nothing's realer than impermanence. I work with elements—rain, mud, metal, sun, rock—always in flux, no more or less immutable than the figures an accountant balances or the health a nurse works to promote. Even in the most secure professional circles, people get laid off, change jobs, lose interest in one field, learn another trade late in life. As witnessed in the past few years, corporations collapse, industries shut down, and economies falter. Nothing's too big to fail. One of the many things I love about trailwork is that in its seasonality, it is honest. No false assurance. Security only in the moment. Take the rest it as it comes.

And though I covet good health insurance and being laid off is stressful, impermanence is the fickle siren that draws me—many of us—to this career. I love working as hard as I can for a time, and then being cut loose, free not from work itself—other tasks and habits beckon—but free from the burden of being completely defined by a job. My career thus far has been as a seasonal worker, and I'm proud of my membership in that group. Traildogs are shape-shifters, opportunists, freelance experts. Our work's parameters are weather, budget, season. Temperature, health, light. Now here, now gone.

An autumn hitch at Ole Lake, crew camped on the beach. The Middle Fork is under no-open-flames restrictions; the summer's been hot and dry and all of Montana is a kindling pile. Smoke hangs in the air from wildfires in the Bob Marshall to the south. After dinner, always eager to flout whatever rules are most pertinent, the crew builds a contraband fire on the beach exposed by drought, and drinks beers, crunching the empties against their knees. The crew leader disappears, unnoticed. Minutes later, a flash down the beach makes the guys look. There's Brook, standing on the widest strip of sand with his back to the crew, feet planted wide, head tipped skyward, fists in the air. He's at the center of a fiery anarchy symbol, flames knee-high before they shrink to a smoldering ring. A can of saw gas sits just beyond the perimeter. The crew watches Brook stand unmoving in his pose until the fire's out, smoke rising from the beach. He drops his arms and stands still in the dark. In the morning, the anarchy symbol is black and ragged in the sand, as if it were traced with a huge crayon by a maniac. Which in a way, it was.

How to fell a tree: first, size it up. Thump the trunk, listen for rot's dull thud. Scan the upper half for lean, for twin-tops, widow-makers, a strong wind visible in branches. Check your escape routes, safety zones. Then take your saw in both hands. The chain should be sharp, yesterday's work. Flip choke on for a cold start. Pull cord until engine fires, one (choke off), two, three times, don't flood. Feather trigger, throttle to full rev, listen—high whine, low idle. Choose your lay, check your sights. Begin face cut: bottom cut, one-third the tree's width. Check sights again. Match slant cut to face cut, protect your holding wood. Aim for smooth edges, exact angles.

Take a deep breath. Look up again. Branches feather the sky, clouds, a squirrel high up plans its exit. Any wind?

Shout, “Back cut!” Begin a few inches higher than the bottom of the wedge and cut evenly. Keep saw close to body until there's a sliver of holding wood, holding. If the fall lags, pound wedge with butt of axe. The tree will lean forward, grain against gravity until the tipping point. Shout, “Falling!” Back away, eyes on it. The trunk hits ground solid, busted branches fly up, grouse burst from brush. Breath comes back to the mouth hard. Woodchips in your eyes, sweat-greased earplugs, pitch on hands, the sweet smell of saw mix, needles hot in sun, heartwood exposed to air for the first time in fifty years. Then, the limbing, the bucking, low crouch to flush the stump, teeth dogged in, the powerhead so close to your face you breathe in saw mix like greasy air.

I love trees, big, old stately trees, limby and thick-barked. And I love to fell trees. How can I weigh the sides, check the balances: old growth against my truck and our travels; chlorophyll against my bookish dreams? What we love against the cost of loving. I have a recurring dream in which I am dropped off by a small plane in a forest of the biggest trees on Earth. The grove is thick in my nostrils, trees on my tongue like the body of someone else's finest wine. I smell them. I taste them. I cut them down.

Half the fun of living in the woods is eating, and communal meals cement a crew. A good meal scarfed down by five hungry people who've busted ass all day is both balm and bond, easing past tensions and betting against future ones. On hitches we took turns, one person cooking for the gang each night, with rotating dish duty in round metal tubs. Cabin meals were five-star—appetizers, a woodstove pie. Backcountry meals were simpler, but the mules packed in Coleman two-burners and coolers with ice so we didn't suffer. Abby made rich desserts, Max ruled at Dutch oven cuisine, trout jumped from creeks onto our plates. The default meal was burritos, or any version of innards you could wrap in a tortilla and eat with both hands. (With Indian filling instead of Mexican, we coined
currito
long before the franchises.) Carbohydrates were critical—pasta, a loaf of bread, skillet potatoes. Frozen homemade soups and stews served double purpose: they chilled the cooler for the first half of the hitch and thawed into a one-pot meal a few days in.

Dinner was for refueling, socializing, chilling out, and competitive eating. We were ravenous and truly needed calories, but we also ate to outeat each other, quantities that would disgust in any other context. No cook wanted to leave crewmates hungry, which led to overestimated quantities and, often, a serving left in the bottom of the pot. Unfinished food was a pain in the ass; leftovers were hard to store in the packed coolers, and thrown away, food stunk up the trash, which, hoisted in Hefty bags from high tree branches, got heavier by the day. We needed a garbage disposal. On some crews, the same guy—a skinny twenty-two-year-old boy, usually—always cleaned out the pot. But a crew without a designated bottomless pit rotated the task among members. If you never offered to clean the pot, you'd be resented for shirking. Worse, someone would call you a wuss, your general worth weirdly calibrated to your (non)appetite. This tradition produced a strange, proud relationship with gluttony, summed up in the common trails refrain: “Being full is no excuse for not eating.”

Good meals so frequent, the bad ones stood out. A new kid on a crew, eighteen and just out of high school, had never cooked for himself before his first hitch meal, which he called taco salad: wet iceberg lettuce beneath a lump of Grade C fried hamburger, chalky shredded cheese, canned salsa, and Fritos crushed atop the gray pile. Compared to Thai stir-fries and pan-fried pizza, this did not go over well. No one told the kid outright that his meal sucked, but traildogs specialize in stoic passive-aggression, and he got the message from our wordless picking and the way we slammed things around in the food box as we packed the next day's lunch. A village stoning hurts the worst. We got $12 per diem, for Pete's sake, and though we all liked banking the extra, a crewmate who went deliberately cheap was scorned. We weren't asking for king crab—he could have bought Grade A beef. In his defense, you learn fast at eighteen. He never made taco salad again.

At a hitch on Logging Lake, Bryce, an odd and pasty fellow who never quite fit in, promised fresh-caught trout for dinner. Eating late is a dinner foul in its own right; we're all starving at 5:30. We want to eat and be free before bed—to read, go for a swim, or a hike, retreat to the tent and privacy. So, when Bryce returned with a single fish at 8:30, which he bathed in cheap oil and supplemented with soft, raw “tahfu” (for the vegetarian), we barely contained our disgust. Making a crew wait for dinner was one thing. Making them wait for a gross dinner that they finished with growling stomachs was a crime punishable by the coldest of shoulders. We rummaged noisily through lunch stores, scarfing down a Clif Bar or carefully rationed cookies. Bryce lasted only one summer.

After five seasons of trailwork and five winters of patched-together jobs (surveyor's assistant, temp file clerk, legal researcher, deli prep cook, US census schlep, volunteer laborer, women's clinic counselor, nonprofit activist, newsletter editor, aide for disabled adults), I began to feel stirrings of discontent. My Protestant roots tapped deep, and I couldn't shake the idea of
vocation
, a heeling dog that walked too close. The niggling hunch that “work” was more than just “job.”

Woodswork satisfied me at a level that nothing else ever had. It balanced me at a time when I had put too much faith in my brain. It authenticated me. But five seasons into my labor career, I had a tentative hunger, an appetite for something I wasn't quite sure of, though I thought it had to do with words. With language. With the slip of the hidden beneath the seen. I wondered about trailwork, how long it would be good for me. My philosophical bent prodded: is the work that I'm doing the work I want to be doing? Forever? Do I owe the world anything other than this hard and simple labor? Is there an itch in me, a passion gone dormant? I remembered old college professors I saw from time to time, who asked what I was doing with my life. I thought of my grandmother, who chastened me after years passed with no return to school. How to separate my own wishes from the expectations of others? The way I saw myself from the way I was seen?

That winter Gabe and I put in for the Peace Corps and I also applied to graduate school, imagining our options beyond western Montana and another season in Glacier. When I was fresh out of college, working in the woods was the challenge, and school off-puttingly familiar. Five years out, my trails job seemed like something I was possibly coasting on, and school the curious new. Classes, lectures, big ideas, I let the prospect of them thrill me again.

It's easy to make the split too simple: choose body, choose mind, a dichotomy that doesn't work even on paper. It did not feel simple at all. The thought of giving up woodswork, consigning it to the realm of “I did that once,” rang a deep, unconsiderable loss. Trailwork was not a phase, a thing I'd say I did in summers when I was young. It had become a part of me, as grafted to my sense of self as childhood stories or future dreams. Yet I needed something. What did one do when the workingman's thinker was ready to become the thinking man's worker? Was there somewhere we could go to augment our life in the woods without leaving it altogether?