Out by Jay Dee Lake in my first season of planting, Pipes and I sit in the mess tent on a summer day off and have a Joni Mitchell singalong. Yesterday was pieces of land that made me cry- one island of floating duff over a muskeg infested with black flies, another entirely of sticks and slash. But today we are not working and we sing. I warble along, “Carey you’re a mean old daddy but I like you, I like you, I like youuuuu.” Serendipity. Another day I hear Britt strumming A Case of You across the field, and I smile.
I could drink a case of you and I would still be on my feet
These days saved me. I fell asleep in my tent knowing I went out and did it, that I survived, that I participated as much as I possibly could and I didn’t miss out on a damn thing. And I fall asleep listening to Joni, my tent in a field of wild flowers, dreaming of what is to come and what could be. One night I leave the bus party behind to go to the shitters, situated in the same field of wildflowers as my tent. All around are van dwelling weirdos, travellers, believers, living how they desire, and I ache for the same. Anything goes, here in the Hearst forest. While I sit over the hole I helped dig a thunderstorm breaks out- the lightning and a full moon illuminate the field, fireflies are dotting in and out of existence and right there on the shitter toilet, I have a soul changing epiphany of a moment. The shattered glass sadness of Toronto is not too far behind-Joni was there too. When I go a few doors down for a coffee and Cesaro is working he has Court and Spark on vinyl. I get my nice coffee from my friend and we argue about our favorite album- mine is probably Hejira, or Ladies of the Canyon, or Travelogue, or Blue. I love them all.
I find pipes passed out in the hallway of the HoJo one night, head cradled in hands, and direct him into the room I’m sharing with other friends. I fall asleep between two of my tallest friends hogging the blankets in an overfull hotel room full of stories and unconditional love on the side of the highway in the Boreal forest.
So you sign all the papers in the family name, you’re sad and you’re sorry but you’re not ashamed
I spend a long time grieving for the Hearst Forest. I arrive shellshocked to camp on Waxatike, knowing I’ve finally found my people. The chaos and the wildness I craved is evident from the get-go. The bus arrives in Hearst around 3 am, although I have made the twelve hour drive with my mom and Britt. The pre-season preparatory email lets us know there will be two buses in the Esso parking lot, one for gear, one for people. We can sleep there, or party, or whatever (verbatim). Sure enough, two shabby paint peeling school buses are parked in a potholed dirt road excuse of a parking lot against a backdrop of train tracks and stacked pulp trees, slow moving equally shabby yellow cranes loading them into slat sided freight cars. I load my gear onto a blue bus with a cross-armed garden gnome mounted on the hood and wait. Our driver arrives, bearded and confidently cool, polarized sunglasses and worn out baseball cap adorned and we head into the boreal forest of true northern Ontario. “International waters!” a vet shouts as soon as we turn onto chemin McCowan, an hour and a half down the highway, past Kapuskasing, into Opasatika, into nothingness. And everyone who knows is cracking beers. “Piss break, Dan!” someone in front of me shouts, and the chill beardy guy pulls over and we’re all out in the sunshine pissing in the ditch and smoking cigarettes and the rowdiness is already ramping up.
When we arrive in camp a foreman is doling out our equipment, Work Wizers and hardhats and planting bags. What is it in my face that makes him say, “Oooh, we got a lifer here!” I don’t even know yet. We trail after a veteran planter with empty beer bottles in our bags. That’s how I learned to plant- leaving behind a trail of beer bottles, their necks buried in the soil of the ditch outside of camp.
Dan picks us up with the bus from our first day on the block. As we drive past Tony’s crew he says, “Give ‘em the old fruit basket, Bry,” and Brian cracks the bus window and hangs his buttcheeks, cock and balls out the window. Tony’s crew waves and shouts and we rattle and jounce off down the barely there road.
You just picked up a hitcher another prisoner of the whitelines of the freeway
Next season (life has become measured in terms of seasons, not years) Soph and I sit on top of the kitchen in the camp infamous for the foot aids epidemic. Our directions to get here were opaque. “60 kilometers west of Hearst on highway eleven, right on Pitopiko Road. Drive over the bridge where we took the naked photo, then until the camp where the foot aids happened.” Soph and I are drinking a mickey of vodka that was left in the glove compartment of the kitchen bus during a prior party night. We are bonding after several rifts that leave me writhing in anger and we are listening to Joni and having a much-needed heart to heart that will get us through the rest of the season and pervade our eventual friendship. I play Blue Hotel Room for her, and we cry and confide, and then we need to piss but the climb down and back up is so daunting, we just piss over the edge of the roof. Prince Pony/Daddy Dane is walking by at this late hour for some reason and he glares up and us and announces, “Disgusting.”
I slept on the strange pillows of my wanderlust
Now, eight years later, so many companies later, so many drives across the country and friends coming and going, so many highs and lows and forests and trucks and buses and kitchens and parties later, I’m on my way to do a small fall plant with Daddy Dane in the Chilcotin. It all comes around. I was viscerally bummed out when we all left Thunderhouse and so many people ended up together at other companies- a lot of friends ended up with him, and I wanted the camaraderie and trauma bonding of having survived Blunderhouse together, the memory of being kicked out of the HoJo and the sawdust trails and the sloshing pitchers of Purple Helmet. I was mad I was alone, and that where I was didn’t have the faintest ring of the Ontario lawlessness. Now, I don’t necessarily want it anymore- but it will be nice to be with him and remember that once we stood arm in arm in the Thunderhouse shop, drinking his homemade wine and singing The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald with our eyes closed, until our hands failed us and we smashed the bottles on the floor.
I leave a hotel room the morning after the last night of my first season, disentangling myself from the warm, complicated body of a sweet camp crush. I remove the scratch card stuck with sweat to my breast and tuck it under the bedside lamp with a quarter and leave.
No regrets, Coyote, we just come from such different sets of circumstance.
I’m driving through the Qu’Appelle valley listening to Buffy covering Joni- The Circle Game. It seems appropriate, between Buffy’s home in the valley and Joni’s hometown in Maidstone. I’m on my way to an accidental friendship, one of the best kinds, the ones that blossom organically out of nothingness. We both work at the same treeplanting company. The homestead outside of Rocky has become a place of refuge for me, pre and post season. Late night, down on the banks of the North Saskatchewan river, that accidental friend turns and says, “Hey, do you like Joni Mitchell?” Do I like Joni Mitchell? And we spend the easy, early morning hours of the day listening to Joni at the Bridgeport festival, singing the songs of her youth, still her, still wild, still beautiful.
We watch basketball comfortably in the house in the spring. Sometimes we all make food together, sometimes we play board games, sometimes we are comfortable with each other’s presence across the yard, doing our own things. We sit around a campfire at night and my mom is there and we all share our favorite planting stories. We WhatsApp each other our frustrations during the work season, in different camps. We drive aimlessly around Horburg, sometimes stopping to pick up stumps of likely firewood. The mundane has become wonderful. At a wedding, surrounded by mutual friends, I realize I have arrived again, without knowng it.
I let go of my need to control it all and know that the beauty and the love will always come to me when I am ready to accept them.
The seasons, they go round and round and the painted ponies go up and down. We’re captives on the carousel of time.