On the verge of heading out for lucky number seven, seasons in the bush. What the hell? How did this happen? How does this keep happening? Upon arriving for my second season in Hearst, I felt like maybe I had misremembered how fucking crazy and ridiculous and wonderful and simultaneously awful and ludicrous the entire thing had been the year before. Ensuing seasons at Blunderhouse and the cherry orchard have matched and surpassed, but to be completely honest I’m a little happy I don’t have to keep up with this nonsense anymore. Coming up on thirty, my kidneys protest when I foist too many glasses of whisky upon them, and the devastating gutrot and anxiety I experience after a night of partying is enough to put me off.
Our cooks, leaning out of the cook bus, crazy eyed, with an Olde English bottle filled with brackish swamp water and the biggest god damn leech I’ve ever seen in my life. “EES NAME IS LEONARD,” G crowed at me. S, wearing nothing but an apron that read “Kiss the Cook” chimed in “LEECHFEST 2016!” They disappeared into the mist on Jay Dee lake with a goonsack and an inflatable boat. Was that the day the acid arrived? It’s hard to remember. The staff trailer, where our camp manager distributed mail from the table with a copious pile of cocaine that occupied it’s center. It was a Treeplant Tuesday night, we know this from the pieces that have been put together over the years following. Remember the old Thunderhouse 5 and 1’s. Or 6 and 1’s. Or 14 and 1’s. Anyway, it was the middle of the shift, and the massive mail order of hallucinogens and party drugs that the cooks had put in had arrived.
I’d like to clarify at this point that this was my first season, and before I was responsible for feeding people. I was not a cook. This was not my doing. Ok, let’s proceed.
Dread Sex Santa, a twinkle in his eye, probably knowing better, says that the staff have to test the drugs before distributing them to the kids (being us, the little baby rookie Northern Ontario planters.) “I think one picture of a clown is a tab,” he says. The perforations would indicate that one picture of a clown is in fact four tabs, but I digress. The entire staff take four tabs of acid each on a Treeplant Tuesday night.
The next morning the cooks stagger into the mess tent with the weight of a steaming stock pot balanced between them. It is filled to the brim with freshly hard boiled eggs. Shell still on. The haggard looking cooks wipe the sweat from their brows and exit the mess tent. We all look each other in the eyes and shrug, and dive into the pot. The eggs keep us warm on the cold drive to the block.
—
Nipple 69.
Naked sexy carwash.
Butter butt buddies.
Naked seat races.
Clothing swaps.
The realm of truth or dare. Our first camp out in the boonies on Waxatike Road in Opasatika, over an hour off the highway, then another hour down the highway to Hearst. What to do, to occupy those hours of driving to and from town. At first, the pretense of keeping bottles of alcohol confined to logging roads is maintained. “International waters!” the bus driver, a slender, beardy dude in polarized sunglasses announces when we pull off the highway to Chemin McCowan. “Fuck yeah DD we need a piss break,” and then we’re on the dusty shoulder of a road pissing in a ditch. Back on the bus warm bottles of PBR are cracked open and the returning planters are inducting us into a culture of craziness I didn’t even know was possible. Safety third. Hurry up and wait. I fucking love it.
Truth or dare escalates over the course of the season. Toward the end we are purposefully shopping at L’Independent for props. S returns with a pound of butter. Everyone on the bus is on acid- it must be Canada Day, a true town day off. We sat outside the HoJo scavving their Wifi and somebody is bored at 11am and this thing is gaining momentum and a life of it’s own. A murmur. A cracked beer. A rustle of tinfoil. Giggles. I can hear every ice cube in my cup- we go to a garage sale. EGD wants to buy a scooter. “That’s like… 20,000 trees,” he laughs. “Oh shit,” I say. At McDonald’s my Big Mac disintegrates in my hands. People are staring at us. We depart, languidly, strollin’ back to where we know our people our. Where is our tribe?
Here’s the thing about a day out in Hearst, or a night. It’s small and your people are everywhere. You melt organically into the town without making plans. A group splinters off one way, one the other way. Everyone is either at La Companion or in the vicinity of the HoJo. If they’ve splintered off elsewhere, you'll find them if you’re meant to, when they emerge from the abandoned lot along the railway track and pull you down into the swamp water and the mud with them, or you hear their laughter ringing out from an upper story window on the main street. “What the fuck, is that F?” and you’re knocking on a door and shouting at a silhouette in a window.
Anyway. Butter Butt Buddies- when, in truth or dare, one person is dared to hold a stick of butter between their ass cheeks until it melts into the mouth of a recipient, this locking them into eternal brotherhood of the butt butter.
In another truth or dare, on a camp move from Waxatike to… Thunder Road? Fushimi? Who the fuck knows. F, sassy, french, truly delightful, drawls, “Beeeeex,” and then cackles maniacally. “I dare youuuuu to piss out the bus window.”
Don’t ask me how I did it. Bus rolling down the bumpy logging road, I squeeze my asscheeks out the cracked window and let fly. “I can confirm that happened, I saw the pee!” New planters arrive to help us finish a contract. “Hey, aren’t you the girl who pissed out the bus window?” This infamy is later eclipsed by a planter who pisses in a hard hat and flings it down the aisle of the bus, splattering several unwilling participants with urine in an act of exit revenge before being fired (again, for real this time.)
—
Jean Guy, the sexagenarian DJ of La Companion won’t come out to play any more music for us, so we stand arm in arm on the dancefloor chanting “Jean GUY Jean GUY Jean GUY” until we give in and sing every single word of Journey’s “Midnight Train” still linked arm in arm and swaying, before disembarking for the HoJo. Every hotel room door is open, every room a separate and revolving party. In the first season nobody at the hotel calls the cops or Brad, our boss. I remember, second season, J standing swaying, upright by a Herculean feat of willpower, sliding twenty after twenty into the receptionist’s hand, slurring “How much is it gonna take to make this go away?” until she left. We took up a collection for him the next day to pay for his out of pocket expenses and selfless heroism.
Across the road at the Queen’s, the nice hotel with the hot tub and the sauna and the pool and the laundry room, where strictly speaking, planters aren’t allowed to stay, the staff are busy ensuring that rule will be enforced going forward. Q rips a bible in half and misses somebody’s face when he tries to have them slap the sack and instead douses the cream carpet with L’Ambiance brand bagged red wine. “Blood of christ,” he slurs, now pouring it onto the carpet intentionally.
—
At the very end of the season, after the wrap party in camp, when Brad came and barbecued burgers and hotdogs and whispered almost tearfully, “I am so proud of how hard you guys party,” we spend another night in town. We’re not ready to let go. La Companion is a neon lit sports bar dream. Just one more pitcher of Purple Helmet. Who knows when we’ll all be here together again. Just one more just one more just one more. E produces some molly from who knows where. My cousin who is supposed to be driving me home leans over to me and Neeko and says “I put molly in the beer,” and we look at our half emptied pitcher of Coors and just laugh. Oh fucking well. Good. Great. We aren’t ready to be done.
We’re dancing everywhere we’re walking, now, getting back in line to get another pint. My camp crush is there, waiting patiently, looking the other way. “YOU don’t drink!” I say, almost accusatorily, butting in line in front of him. “You won’t mind.” He doesn’t. He smiles at me, strikes up a conversation, and orders a very rare for him beer. Sweaty, dancing, the bathroom fug of cigarette smoke which the biker babe bartenders ignore, because we tip very, very, very well. Sitting on the sink counter with a split, bloody lip- moshpit? How? When? This is love. Everything inside is a reeling beat of music and noise and chatter and I want a god damn cigarette. Outside.
He’s out there and he slides me a smoke, lights it for me and we chat. I do the impression of him I’ve been working on all season. To the best of my ability, I make my face super super chill, really relax, put on a genuine grin, and drawl, “Yeahhhh man,” enthusiastically. He absolutely loses it. “YOU did an impression of ME?” and then the patio is a crush of people and he’s pulling a chair up to the railing and helping me climb over it and we’re off walking into the night, smoking. We’re absorbed into a group of the staff on their way to the room at La Companion’s attached motel. Keg stands and cocaine ensues. There’s a rumour of a last night bus party in the parking lot behind the Esso, and we wrap ourselves in blankets from the room and depart. The night has gotten somewhat chilly.
“Look,” T. says, with his infallible logic. “We pay to rent everything in the room, right? So as long as everything is here at check out time, we’re good.” So, with a keycard for my room at the Queen’s in my fannypack and wrapped in a blanket from La Companion I depart. Three am shopping at the Esso- we find ourselves there, but decide to leave our paisley room blanket capes outside. Halfway in the door, we realize we are holding beer bottles filled with tequila. “Oh, this simply won’t do!” I admonish myself. We leave them on top of the ice cooler.
Within we shop for gum, cigarettes and Farmer’s Almanac. Curly haired blond C. is within, holding a universal remote in her hands and staring at it in absolute awe. “You guys,” she says with reverence. “This remote… does… everything.” Gently, we round her up and go to pay for our goods. Oh, scratch cards, too. Lady luck be with me tonight. Outside we collect our shrouds and find the bus, curiously empty of planters and people, so we lie down in the muddy ditch with the hotel room blanket and watch the yellow cranes loading pulp trees onto the slat sided train cars in an endless procession, slow, deliberate, reliable, oddly luminous and lovely.
”So uh, nothing can happen,” he tells me. “But do you want to come back to my hotel room?” I know he has a girlfriend. I respect that. But we fall asleep watching infomercials, and a scratch card glues itself to my sweaty bicep beneath where he’s wrapped around my body, sleeping. In the morning (later in the same morning, much later) I reluctantly disentangle myself and glance at my flushed, fucked up face in the mirror. I tuck the scratch card under the bedside lamp with a quarter and depart. My own friends are at the third hotel in town- many of us are creeping through the incriminating morning light back toward the door at the same time. We’ve missed rides, disregarded schedules and itineraries. But we’re still together and nothing else matters. My bottle of Baby Duck is still sitting on the windowsill from where I left it before departing for the bar a million years ago. I pick it up and drink. C’est la vie.