I find myself just not loving the treeplant season in the same way I used to, feeling at the end of the season more like a burnt out, bitter, resentful, bitch than a badass bush babe. I saw the writing on the wall the first season I camp cooked, I think, but at least then I got days off to spend with my friends eating poutine at John’s or going to the beach at Johnson Lake, swimming in beaver ponds on Waxatike and still reaping the social benefits of a season in camp. The past three seasons have been almost entirely devoid of the camaraderie that made it worthwhile for me. I haven’t left with the same sense of fullness and well being and goodness, of knowing my friends are all around and never too far, of capability and excitement. It isn’t to say that they’ve been bad seasons (except the one with Outland. That one was absolute trash) but they have, more or less, just been a job. An extremely draining job that has been damaging to both my physical and mental health and that really, I’ve only been doing for the pay cheque. The company I have worked for for the past two seasons has been really fantastic, but the love is just gone.
The lack of blogging certainly reflects that burn out- it’s been a long time since I’ve posted a dispatch from my mobile phone, sitting in the grass outside the laundromat on a day off, or inside the Pontiac Pocket Party (RIP, Bebe my love). The people are always what have made it worthwhile- traipsing around town in the day after fug with your buds, everyone bathing naked in the river, the accordion ringing out in the blackness of a night on a railbridge above a nameless, inky river. Vodka on top of the kitchen bus and Joni Mitchell and oh, those wonderful overcrowded hotel rooms, brimming with love and drama and friendship and dirt, bottles of OE and Baby Duck, doors open, jumping on the beds, sawdust, bribing the receptionist to let us come back, three a.m calls to Brad to plead, on behalf of us, his unruly bunch of employees, to allow us to remain at the one, solitary hotel in town that will still allow us.
I got one or two of those nights in over the past three seasons. Running naked down the highway north of Manning, Alberta, with a horde of planters, laughing and me, horridly out of shape, laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. A moment or two. Dancing in the back of a 5 ton truck, on the gravel road outside after a huge, Manning rainstorm, setting up camp in the torrential downpour. They’re there, but they’re fewer and further between and they don’t nourish me in the same way. It’s quite calm and I live for the chaos. The chaos cancels out the endless three a.m alarms and the constant tug of being needed, needing to stay responsible, providing, nourishing, mothering, caring. It was the chaos I was after all along.
I turn to Neeko one night in Hearst, somewhere out by a gravel pit on Thunder Road. We’re racing a keg to a fire that has only been a rumor until we sit it aglow, far away on the horizon. We link arms and stroll, limp leggedly, through the night, skirting the steep edge of the gravel pit with casual aplomb. “We’ve been here before,” I say. “I have seen this before.” That deja vu sense of belonging and rightness.
What to do, now? For so many summers it’s all been set. No matter how many times we say we aren’t coming back, it’s become a cliche- almost everyone does keep coming back, again and again and again. One year off, then back, missing it already. Veering so close to committing to not coming back until December, January roll around, then remembering only those very, very good nights, not the black flies and the rain and the mud and the exhaustion.
Opportunity knocks, I guess. I’ve bandied with the idea of doing some sort of catering or bakery on Manitoulin for a few years. Being self employed is very appealing, and I miss home. It’s been a long time since I walked the boardwalk at Prov in the summer or went swimming off the sharp drop off of honeycomb rocks at Meldrum Bay. Sandcherries are always gone, by the time I get home, garden season is over, the days are getting short and cool. I could see parking the bus on the lot in Tekhummah for the summer while I did event and wedding catering, spending evenings in my absolute favorite place in the world, roaming the dunes at Carter Bay and finding every cool spruce shaded pool of tadpoles, mapping the way the river has changed its course through the dunes week by week. Still having winters free for travel, and personal, lazy downtime.
And always, always, always missing the towns that lie along the tracks, piled high with pulp trees and smelling in their own peculiar, sawdusty and sulphury way of home.