How tree planting taught me to love (and hate) the Canadian bush

I was squatting in a swamp in Northern Alberta wishing I was either dead or back in Toronto when I realized what a good story this would make someday.

The helicopter had just left, abandoning us to our task of replanting lines of trees cut down in the search for oil. We were miles from camp; even further from civilization. The sound of helicopter blades gave way to a familiar and unwelcome buzzing as the stable flies started to swarm us, again.

Beside me Charles munched on his fourth cigarette of the hour, trying to smoke out the bugs as he swore under his breath in French. We looked so miserable that our crew boss, Katherine, couldn't even muster the vigour to yell at us.

I was coming to the end of my first summer planting trees out west: starting in Saskatchewan, then on to Manitoba and finally winding down in the muggy Alberta woodlands. It had been a demanding, frustrating and yet deeply rewarding rite of passage. The experience was steeped in the proud Canadian tradition of torturing yourself in the bush to pay your debts.

As Charles puffed away, Morgan lifted up his pant leg and elbowed me. "Does this look like Hep-C to you?"

I looked down at the scrawny, self-inflicted tree tattoo on Morgan's calf. It was near impossible to distinguish the red splotches from all the other wounds he'd collected doing this job.

A week later we found out Morgan was experiencing the first stages of a flesh-eating virus.

Truly the Canadian backwoods would be the death of us.

No Camp Caribou

Before the summer of 2014, I considered myself, like most Canadians, to be a lover of the outdoors. I believed wholeheartedly in the carefully crafted images of loon calls and snowy trails — and so I signed up to spend the summer tree planting. When I took the job, they tried their best to dispel me of these ideas. After all, I wasn't going to be planting Christmas trees. We were there to fulfil the obligations of a variety of logging and oil companies, re-seeding the blocks they'd cut clear.

In my first season, I traveled from a blooming April spring in Toronto to Prince Albert, Sask,. where it was still –2° C and snowing. Before we headed into the bush, I met up with a few other rookies on my crew, other urbanites that were just as soft and gullible as I was.

The experience was steeped in the proud Canadian tradition of torturing yourself in the bush to pay your debts.- Connor Johnstone

Together in a run-down Prince Albert hotel, we cherished our last few nights in civilization with cautious optimism and a serious lack of understanding about what we were getting ourselves into. Case in point: one of my colleague's chief concerns was how bedazzled she could make her hard hat.

But before we get to the misery, I think it's also important to understand the math of planting trees. It's piece-work after all, and each piece took a little bit of my soul with it in those first few weeks.

The trees were delivered to the block in wrapped pods of seedlings, with each seedling worth about twelve cents to you once you put it in the ground. This might change depending on what kind of quality was expected and what kind of trees you were using.

Basically, if the trees were destined to grow up into furniture and houses you made more. If they became the discount toilet paper of the future you made less.

It was only as I planted my first ten trees in the frozen ground of northern Saskatchewan  that I realized what a load of crap I'd been fed. I worked for eight hours and planted 150 trees, which I'm entirely certain are dead right now.

After the cost of paying to live in a luxurious bush camp, my earnings for that first day were roughly negative six dollars.

Within a week of this, I realized that I actually hated nature. And it seemed like nature took every opportunity to remind me that the feeling was mutual.

Survival of the stubborn

There were many things to be miserable about.

One week, a mild form of cholera broke out at the camp. Even those lucky enough to be spared found themselves collecting a patchwork of scars and strange itchy blotches.

During the day it was possible to experience heatstroke and hypothermia in the same afternoon. And at night you tried to ignore the sound of bears pawing around camp.

[Early on] I realized that I actually hated nature. And it seemed like nature took every opportunity to remind me that the feeling was mutual.- Connor Johnstone

Naturally, some people broke. For some, the temptation of throwing a few bundles of seedlings off a cliff or burying them in the swamp became too great. Others thought they could con the system and fake their numbers.

Some ended up crawling back to the city with what little bit of pride they could scrape together.

For the rest of us, the only way to succeed was to surrender yourself to the experience. Become one with the bush.

I specifically remember realizing this after the (first) time I had to go right from camp to the hospital to have an infected foot treated. I was resting on the lawn waiting for my boss when a pair of stern-looking hospital orderlies came and asked me where I was staying in town. I explained to them who I was, and they immediately understood.

Like geese and bears, planters were a perennial pest that crawled out of the woods and left our mark on their town. However, it didn't occur to me until some time later that night that their first assumption was that I was homeless.

It was clear that civilization didn't want me back as I was. But still, I did, in fact, have a home. It just happened to be a tattered tent in the woods with a muskrat skull I'd put out front for decoration.

One with the bush

And then I started to love it. Sure, it was a scary kind of love that probably has more in common with a psychological condition than a Hallmark card — but it was real, and it was freeing.

I learned to respect how fierce this country still was in a lot of ways; how much of it remains totally untouched and indifferent to our human sense of specialness; how big a difference there is between the recreational outdoors and the dense bush that makes up most of the wilderness in Canada.

That summer forever changed the way I thought about the Canadian claim to outdoorsmanship.- Connor Johnstone

More than once I'd stop and look around at the thick woods around me and think "If I walked ten minutes that way they'd never find my body."

And then I'd smile about it.

That summer forever changed the way I thought about the Canadian claim to outdoorsmanship.

Sure, I'd lost sleep and chunks of flesh, but I'd also gained so much. I had come to understand that tree planting has its own culture and code, its own language. It was an experience that brought me closer to nature than I ever bargained for. It bleached the image of the beautiful and sunny Canadian forest out of my head forever.

The year after, I was convinced to go for another season with some of the same people. And despite the wrenching anticipation and full knowledge of what I'd be putting myself through, it felt like coming home again.

Both times I came back from planting trees, I felt myself to be a different sort of Canadian. One that had become attached to the land; not for the beauty of it, but for the way it had wrestled me to the dirt and pushed my face into the mud.