Dirt Work (5 page)

Some mornings when I crawl out of my tent and my neck hurts and one sock's gone missing in the bottom of my sleeping bag and my knees pop when I stand up and my breakfast is the crumbs from the bottom of a damp paper bag and a banged-up banana, when the weather's turning and the first huge drops start to fall like they'll go all day and when the saw's carburetor won't stay in tune and the axe handle's busted and I can't stand the sound of my crewmates chewing and my knife isn't in the pocket where I thought I left it and I'm itchy from cow parsnip and old mosquito bites, when I'm out of peanut M&Ms and I want to sleep next to Gabe in a bed where our feet can touch without feeling a zipper and when $13 an hour seems like working for free, I feel crabby and sore. I'd rather have any other job, one without physical misery, or better yet, no job at all. There's a deep rottenness in me: no one's going to please me and the only words I can think of are crass and ugly—
fucking shit job, crappy bastard crewmates.
Where most people go for vacation, I go to dig another boring hole, and how long after I quit will it take for me to associate being in the woods with something other than this goddamn
job
?

In the North Fork, the bugs can be bad, one of the worst places in the park, everyone agrees. By midsummer in a year of normal precipitation, mosquitoes run the place, trailing warm-blooded critters like the cloud of grub that follows Pigpen. They swarm anything that stands still—elk, mules, bears, people—burrowing in ears and nostrils, inserted into any crevice. Which is worse, the raw itch of a bite on sweaty skin, or the whine of a single bug circling the cabin at 2 a.m. when everyone is asleep but you? (Both are worse.)

You can't work for long in the woods without gloves. Some tasks—sharpening chain, clearing a culvert—are better done with bare hands, for dexterity or quick cleanup. But most jobs are eased by gloves. Swinging an axe, dragging brush—without the thick leather palms of gloves to protect them, hands will be blistered, wet, embedded with splinters and the prickly sting of devil's club.

Government-issue gloves, with size stenciled on the gauntlet in black and a little strap to tighten them around the wrist, are ubiquitous. Anyone who's worked for the feds in the woods knows them. Just issued, they're bright white and inflexible (just like the higher-ups, we joke). We use the pliers of multi-tools to turn the gloves inside out so the rigid seams along fingers and palm face outward and the hand slides into smooth, cowhide lining. They're undeniably more comfortable this way, but the exposed seams abrade quickly. By the middle of a ten-day hitch, the thumb yawns like an envelope, the tip of the middle finger worn away. You bring a spare pair of gloves on a hitch, but still keep wearing the old ones, duct-taped, jury-rigged, until after pinching a fingertip through the hole. Like most standardized benefits, government gloves are a mixed blessing. They're free (leather gloves at the Army-Navy store cost upward of $12), but clumsy, inelegant, and cheap.

There's no consensus on favorite gloves; preference varies. Goatskin is tough, deerskin buttery soft. Cotton gloves are cool in summer, but awful in rain, and wear out fast. Neoprene is good for working in wet fall or with submerged hands, but leaves your fingers damp and white, the skin easy to tear. Lined gloves delight on cold autumn mornings, or in unexpected snow, but after ten minutes, they'll be too hot, and do you really want to carry more than one pair for day work?

No glove is a good glove when wet. Wet gloves are slippery inside and out, hot and clammy when you're sweating and icy as soon as you stop moving. And heavy. Wet gloves are worse than a wet hat, but not as bad as wet socks. When you stop for a short lunch in 40-degree rain under the dry tent of a low-branched spruce, is it better to take the wet gloves off, or leave them on? Eating lunch with wet gloves is horrible, and it's hard to mine trail mix with a gloved hand. But taking the gloves off is bad, too, because your hands get cold (unless you keep them in your pockets, which you can't do and still eat), and by the time everyone is shivering badly enough to prefer an extra fifteen minutes of heat-generating work over the rest of the entitled lunch break, the gloves will be soggy and freezing. Sliding a cold hand into a colder glove is like ripping off a Band-Aid; you know it'll be over soon, but it still makes you cringe. You grit your teeth, tense up your stomach muscles, and hope no one notices your whining. But no one is watching. Their gloves are wet and cold, too, unless they've brought a spare pair. In that case, they pull them on and quietly gloat. Comfortable, yes, but then, their gloves will be soaked in ten minutes, and they forfeit the tortured satisfaction that comes from the tolerable, temporary suffering the rest of us share. Who comes out ahead?

Should you have an unexpected shit-in-the-woods scenario, look for “toilet paper plants”: false hellebore, thimbleberry, mountain maple. A clump of anything soft works in a pinch—ferns, moss, fireweed leaves rolled tight. Do not use tempting cow parsnip, especially if the sun's out. Its oils are photo-reactive and contact with skin brings an itchy rash that's bad enough on hands.

Forest fires shape the North Fork, as commanding a force as glaciers in eras past. Decades of misguided suppression tactics and climate change's heavy hand have resulted in tinderbox groves throughout the West, and the North Fork's dog-hair lodgepole and spruce forests are easy fodder for conflagration. Late-summer heat, a dry year, a lightning strike, and the skies grow apocalyptic with ash and plume, a dirty glow visible from miles away. Some fires burn out fast and others are nipped in the bud, spotted by the fire lookout, extinguished by initial-attack teams or the glamorous smoke-jumpers who leap from the sky like superheroes. But every few years, Glacier sees a big one, often in the North Fork.

Trail crews are backup Type II firefighters; when the need for people power trumps expertise, we get called in. Sometimes we do day work, washing hoses and cleaning saws, or, if lucky, fly in a helo to a remote cabin for structure protection. Other times, the stint is longer, a detail in fire camp, a little boomtown with canvas tents and trailers, IT systems for payroll, and two catered meals a day, more meat than even a cowboy can stomach. No steaks if you're spiked at a backcountry site or unexpectedly out overnight—then it's MREs with microscopic bottles of Tabasco sauce and space-age meatloaf salty enough to sap out of you whatever moisture hasn't already gone by way of smoke or sweat. Our yellow shirts and green pants, made of fire-resistant Nomex, chafe the skin, and by the end of a two-week tour, they smell like a laboratory that went up in flames.

The world of fire evokes ambivalence in me. Fighting fire can be fun, a welcome late-season break from the monotony of trailwork, a chance to envision ourselves heroes. There's adrenaline and camaraderie, doing good work and bacon every morning, and, of course, overtime pay plus occasional hazard premiums. (Fire seasonals in the West like to sniff smoky air and say, “Smells like money!”) But there's also the militarized mentality, the “hurry up and wait,” macho smoke-jocks strutting like hopped-up Marines, and the almost-too-hot-to-bear weather that nurtures fire, underwear soaked with sweat. Eventually the sneaky pleasure at getting paid premium wages to play Hacky Sack while “standing by” gives way to demoralizing sluggishness. Weeks of inefficiency and the rumbling machinations of bureaucracy grind all but the staunchest work ethic to a pulp.

Nationwide fire policy has improved dramatically in the past thirty years, with an increasing emphasis on fire ecology and the role it plays in forest health. Some of my best friends work in fire, mapping fuels, plotting burn patterns, and prescribing where to manage a burn and when to let the flames do their work. On the ground, though, a crisis-response outlook still eclipses the long view, and the tone of fire camp lingo is all battle and charge. Epic blazes predicated on prior mismanagement don't do much to help the ordinary citizen see the benefits of fire (for example, certain plants need fire to propagate the way other plants need water), and the media fuel the problem with their drama-hungry emphasis on
homes lost! acres devastated!
In mainstream rhetoric, there's little critique of a continuing trend—multimillion-dollar home construction in fire's version of a flood plain, which increases the human-fire interface and the likelihood of displacement. No one, it seems, can look a guy who's lost his house in the eye and ask him,
Why the hell'd you build it there?
So fire remains nature's whipping boy; a century of bad press is hard to undo in a decade or two, and for many, fire will always be the enemy to be vanquished, not a necessary part of ecosystem health. Smoky the Bear can't be part of the problem, right?

In spite of the media and politics fanning the flames, the smoke eventually goes out. Enough crews on the ground, a rainy spell that raises relative humidity and dampens fuels, or the inevitable September frost puts an end to the burning season. After fire camps pull up stakes and the fat paycheck's been spent on a new truck or a plane ticket or last year's bills, the ash begins to work its way into the soil. Charred stumps smoke and underground roots cradle fire's warmth. Lodgepole pines incorporate the chemistry of ignition into their reproductive ritual, some cones opening to spread seeds only under extreme temperatures. By the following summer, morels will peek out of the ground. Fireweed leads the flower brigade, and in two years, a burn is laced with green plants that draw ungulates to forage.

The talking heads call the blackened landscape of a very hot fire a “holocaust,” a “ruin,” and people watching TV say,
What a shame.
Which it is, and it isn't. On one hand, this landscape has burned and bloomed for centuries without spokespersons or contingency plans, and really, what lies ruined? Our fragile illusion of control, mostly, which needs a good drubbing. On the other hand, forests are different than they were even ten years ago. Climate change has had documented effects on tree mortality, temperatures, increased lightning strikes, snowpack depth, and snowmelt timing, all of which create imbalance. Fires burn longer and hotter and more frequently than ever. Because of us. There is the shame.

Forest fires strike a chord in part because they force us to confront a fierce Mother Nature, with everything at stake that matters: work, shelter, money, ruin, ego, remorse, power. And also, somewhere in there, love. Love for forests, and for the creatures that live in them, and love for trees, especially the green-needled Christmas-y kind, strung with glittering symbols we don't even realize we've asked them to bear.

How many forms of dirt are there? Loam, clay, muck, dust, grime, loess, fill, mud, silt, grit, soil. Language seems most perfect this elemental. When beneath the single syllable, there is bedrock.

Larch trees grow all over western Montana, from Yellowstone to the Canadian border, bristling the west side of the divide like a five o'clock shadow. They are dense in the North Fork, growing small on the mountains in twisted subalpine form, or in forested valleys, clumped in old-growth groves. The western larch, cousin to the eastern tamarack, is a deciduous conifer, a tree in the pine family that sheds its needles every year and grows new ones the following. In summer, to the unknowing eye, it looks like any evergreen, its brushy branches and elliptical cones blending in amid the Engelmann spruce and Douglas-fir. But closer inspection reveals the larch's distinctive needles clustered on twigs, a vibrant, almost neon-green compared with the duller needles of other trees. Larch feels most singular in autumn, when it shucks its evergreen guise and the needles turn yellow-orange over the course of September and October. A hillside of larch in late fall is a spectacle, trees lighting hills in wavy colored swaths like the aurora borealis gone to ground.

The larch is a well-loved tree in the North Fork. Aside from its autumnal beauty and the brilliant green it lends the summer canopy, it thrives in cold climates, burns hotter in the woodstove than many conifers, makes decent timber for building, and better survives the frequent fires that clear out junk pine and brush from the understory. Also, larch has personality. Its slender branches ringing a one-hundred-foot trunk look, I swear, joyful, silhouetted against sky. The needles bristle, standing at attention like they've been shocked and the tree's aura is at once stately and gleeful, bringing to mind an old man with a joke or a dizzy child balancing.

Up Kintla Lake, the snowstorm dumped a foot and a half in twelve hours. It was May, and assigned to an alpine crew for the rest of summer, this would likely be my only hitch in the North Fork for the year. The foreman sent me and Gabe and our housemate, Kent, an old friend from Missoula days, the one who'd gotten us into this world in the first place.
I work trails
, he'd said when Gabe first met him in the apartment they'd shared on Front Street.
Park Service, up in Glacier. You guys would love it.
In six years, we'd never been on a hitch just the three of us before. Old friends, chainsaws, the North Fork, beer and brats coming in on the mules. Nothing to add.

The first day we'd hiked in seven miles to the cabin at the head of Kintla Lake, clearing light deadfall, maybe two trees per mile, hardly enough work for three. The next day we planned to hike to Upper Kintla Lake, clearing as far as we could get. It was usually a long day, but with such sparse downfall, it looked doable. We woke at dawn and peeked out the cabin window to things changed: blowsy snowflakes, a winter sky over spring ground.

Gabe went to the outhouse first and came back urgent:
Come look, quick!
The new snow was thick and unmarred, a sea of white on which bear tracks stood out like flares: prints as big as pie pans emerging from the woods, past the cabin, disappearing at the shore of the lake. Where did it go? For a swim? We investigated, followed the tracks backward from the beach into the woods. Under the cabin window near the bunks, the four-paw gait pattern shifted to two where the bear must have risen up on its back legs, paws to the pane above Kent's bunk, and peered in while we slept, nose pressed against cool glass.
Them again. Winter's over. The cabin creatures are here.