One night in the Hearst Forest I stumble off the kitchen bus, topless and smeared in chocolate pudding and completely disoriented. We’d just had Stuff in a Bowl for dessert, a bastardized version of a trifle on a Thunderhouse budget, leftover cake bits smashed into chocolate pudding and Cool Whip, and it had merged into a game on the bus, passing around the bottle of Baby Duck and adding clothing items to the pudding bowl. Logan marches up and down the aisle balancing a broom in the bowl, my bra hangs from the exhaust fan covered in pudding and at some point, a giant luna moth flies through the center of the entire scene. Two planters march by duct taped to one another, wearing the other like a backpack and parading around all silver and bugeyed in their rockstar sunglasses. Jake emerges wearing a familiar tie-dye dress (Nikole’s?) The night is a mess of light and color and wonderful, sublime confusion.
Outside, I just point sadly and say “My bus.” I have lost control. It is full of people. I don’t have to cook tomorrow, but the feeling of unprofessionalism is rising within me. I am losing the plot. Tony looks at me, tranquilly. Ol’ Party Dad. “Do you want them off your bus?” he asks, and I nod feebly, fiddling with the contents of my fanny pack. “Oooook! OFFFFF THE BUS!” and he is herding everybody off my bus and now the night can resume. Don’t take off your fannypack. That is the only rule of party night. Within it are all the necessities that can not be misplaced. Jude has been secured in the staff trailer by Nikole, who periodically goes to check on him, feeding peanut butter sandwiches through the window slot to keep him happy and occupied.
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The present week has been a pretty wild rollercoaster. I bought a bus. It is a 27 foot retired schoolbus, converted into a camper. It has a full kitchen, a propane fridge, stove, burners, sink, furnace, outdoor hot water shower, queen bed, dinette, fold out bed. There’s a lot I want to do with it aesthetically, and some minor inside upgrades. It needs to be insulated, the furnace needs to be installed by a professional, and unfortunately, there is a reasonable amount of mechanical work that needs to be done for her to pass her safety. I’ve also been running around signing affidavits about ownership and ordering registration records from her previous home, Saskatchewan. Our very first trip together I stopped to fuel up and the gas cap wouldn’t come off, but G, my constant enabler, had her tire iron in the trunk and a few good whacks loosened it up. G also gave me a significant loan for the purchase of said bus, for which I am eternally grateful.
This summer in the Alberta bush, I discussed what I intended to do this fall with a few new friends. Sweet, bad-ass Mariah, the helicopter pilot, asks, and I idly say I think I’d like to buy a bus. Treeplant money comes and goes. I bought a much needed car, paid off my student loan, paid off my credit card, indulged in a pair of very expensive but very nice boots, finished my half sleeve. I read subreddits about investment and retirement and realize I have no gameplan. I can’t even afford rent in my province anymore. Or rather, I don’t want to. I don’t want to spend a thousand dollars a month to share a shoebox with a stranger and not even be able to walk around naked.
As scary as it is, I want to be back in Tofino surfing, making my coffee over a butane camp stove in the morning. I want to sleep beside a grain elevator in Brandon, Manitoba and play The Tragically Hip on my guitar with the freight train hobos, I want to stay on the hippie commune again growing magic mushrooms in exchange for rent. I want to feel my life as a series of diverging and converging concentric circles that overlap with the vast range of friends I have made over the years of plant and fruit picking, the elastic band feeling of stretching out and then hurtling back together, always attached by something tenuous and indescribable. I remember the last year spent in my apartment in Guelph, re-reading old journals and laughing out loud and knowing “This is your real life, this wild one,” and waiting out the dull and lonely city days.
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It seems the closer I get to something I want, badly, the more concerned I am about it falling through. Depression is a funny thing. You learn to not want anything too badly, and when it comes to you, you are suspicious. At least I am. This hope, this joy, when will it evaporate, too? Will this thing be enough? Do I place too much stock in it? Am I crazy? What if this isn’t good enough. But the bus draws me in, even driving it the hour back from Erin to Clifford, I remember myself. Hurtling down logging roads at 90km an hour in the kitchen bus, racing after Max, nobody has given me directions. The most beautiful day I have ever seen in my life, a blue, clear northern Ontario day, warm and endless. The forest spreads out around us indefinite and indescribable, the sky bigger and bluer than you could ever dream. I lay on the horn at a pair of adolescent moose that gallop awkwardly off into the swamp and I feel centered in my own life. Here I am, right where I belong. Empty highways of frost buckled pavement, the deep clay logging roads lined with swaying jackpine, the swamp, the lakes, the french named rivers, the sleepy small towns of miners and suspicious gas station attendants. The laundromat in Manitouwadge has been blown up by Brinkman, the rumor spreads. It isn’t entirely true- they just blew up one of their propane tanks, so only a cold wash is available.
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Can you drive the bus? Danny asks me, finding me working on menus in the staff trailer at the shop. Everybody else is driving vehicles out to camp, setting up blocks, delivering trees and digging grey water pits. “Uhm, legally, yes, technically. Have I ever? No.” Good, good, he says. Come with me! And just like that I am perched in the captains seat of a giant orange bus, easing her into drive and bouncing along the pitted and cracked highway through Hearst. It isn’t far from the shop to the Esso parking lot, where we are dropping the buses off for the incoming planters. I remember my first season, the stark vehicles along the ditch, the railway behind them lined with pulp trees and the slow, incessant yellow cranes loading the slatted side cars. The smell of cedar and sawdust shavings and diesel fill the air. Al meditates on top of a bus, lays in savasana and “Om”s contentedly.
I back the bus up to the ditch and Danny and I stand outside, smoking a cigarette, when the bus starts rolling timorously toward the ditch. I swear I have engaged the parking brake, in my deep anxiety about performing a new task successfully. I reach out futilely with my hands, grasping at the rubber door lining, and Danny, cigarette clamped between his teeth, boosts me through the door with his hands on my hips, crying, “Go, go, go!” and I jam my foot on the brake just in the nick of time. I sit there while he scrounges sticks of firewood from the parking lot and throws them behind the tires as makeshift chocks. Shakily we finish our cigarettes and repeat the process again and again, shuffling buses around, him following me in his white crew-boss truck while I rattle and jounce around in buses of questionable legality and road worthiness.
It emerges sometime later that Tony, in his first year of crew bossing, had burnt out the parking brake on that particular bus driving it with little to no instruction from the yard to camp, the brake engaged the entire time.
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So many nights, seated on top of the bus. We listen to Joni Mitchell and drink vodka. I try to jump off the bus for a piggyback from Keegan and, drunk, tear a ligament in my knee and am locked in the staff trailer for the rest of the night to prevent myself from further injury. One night on Waxatike we are all up there. Our end of year crew photo my first year of planting, all washed out and overexposed, obliterating our nudity.
I am scared that I will never feel this happy again, but I am excited, too.
An open invitation to come on a roadtrip in My Bus- maybe we can sit on top of her in Alaska, drinking a fifth of whiskey and playing guitar and looking at the stars. Or Mexico, or Alberta. It isn’t where we are, so much as who we are with. I miss you, friends. The door will always be open.