A Day in My Life As A Planter

Boots were hard to wrestle on; the leather’s getting tired. I should probably condition them soon, the mud here’s a nightmare for these logging boots. Mud and rain, the midlands have those in abundance this time of year. Boots were stiff and made my ankle blisters chafe when I loaded up with the rest of the guys to go to the worksite, but they’re soaked now just like the rest of me. It’s not that it’s a heavy driving rain as much as it’s just a persistent saturating rain. I think I preferred the snow back home, most of the time that stuff doesn’t wet you through. Some guy’s wear heavy rain gear, and all the power to them. Problem I have with that stuff is that you get wet anyhow; just the wet is your own sweat rather than whatever you put the gear on for. I don’t care for that, makes it so you gotta put up with your own stink between when you get around to washing your work clothes. We plant trees out here in these old fields. I reflect often on the history and the legacy of these forgettable farm fields by whatevershire. Generations of folks have worked this land just like I am, tool in hand and churning up this unforgiving muck. First time I put my shovel into the ground out here I thought to myself “yeah I can see why the Vikings came out here to conquer”. Today we’re out by some village-we often are, but sometimes we get to ply our humble trade by a bustling highway. Makes me uneasy, I think the sound of the cars puts me on edge. You don’t really get work like that in Canada, most of that’s just way out in the true no-wheres of deep industry. Down logging roads or the vast infrastructure put in place for the oil and gas industry. I miss it out there when I’m here, and I miss here when I’m out there.

I take comfort in the kind of contracts that the company I’m working with wrangles for us. A lot of the time I’m working on making what I like to call “forever forests”. Back home I’m planting crop trees to be harvested again when they’ve matured. Here they’re planting for some kind of tax break. It’s a clever scheme that lets farmers write off rocky old fields that probably never were really able to grow much of anything. Win-win in my books though. Does mean that I’m drudging through miserable flint and dense unyielding clay for the most part. Winter here means there’s rarely any sun and persistently some amount of rain. I think when folks talk about the UK being miserable in the winter, they’re picturing something like the sleet that we get in the shoulder seasons in Canada in place of biting cold. If it was that bitter here in the midlands I don’t think I’d have been able to hack it for these years I’ve been coming out. Really, it’s mild as far as challenging weather goes. If it gets cold enough the ground freezes and you simply can’t work. Some guys will try to bully the frozen crust and cram saplings into it regardless, but the ground will reject it. Dirt expands and settles strange when it thaws, so it can outright reject the sapling from the hole that you put it in the day before.

The day drags and bounds by, it’s the strange dichotomy of piece rate work. Every moment is precious down to the second for your days wage, but every moment is as dreary and repetitive as the one that came before it. When you’re paid by the tree in this piece rate set up you’re not guaranteed a set wage for your effort. That’s the sport of it I figure, its what makes it worth pulling on soggy crusty boots in the morning and dragging myself around some bleak field. Through your effort and mastery of the craft you can take peasant work and live like a lord. Well, maybe not that lofty, but certainly make a handsome amount of money. An old crew boss of mine called it a “mad amount of money for what we’re doing”. Certainly can feel like banditry some days when the conditions are good. The conditions in this field however, are not good.

The job’s simple. Probably about as simple as a job can be, really. You open a hole in the ground with your little shovel, bend down and slide a little sapling into it and then put some dirt over top. Anyone can do it really, and it doesn’t take that much effort to do. It just gets brutal with the thousands of times you need to do that a day and for the amount of time you’ll be doing those days during the working season. Piece rate work is a devil in that everyday that boulder rolls down to the bottom of the mountain and you just have to roll the damn thing back up to the top. It doesn’t matter if the days bright and sunny or hateful and wet like it is today, that boulder isn’t rolling itself. After you make it past benchmarks in the day it starts to feel more exciting though. Getting past the first thousand in the ground is reassuring, it’s easy math to figure out what I’ve made by then and how much I can make with whatever is left of the day. There’s a lot of finicky details about what a client will accept as far as standards that the work is done to, but none of that really bothers me. Some guys are out there for themselves first, and the work is just a necessary evil to be done in the fastest way they can get away with. I never really got that mindset, if I wanted to be doing work for works sake to make whatever money I could get away with taking, I wouldn’t be planting trees. There’s a firm reality to the work being done that quells existential dread that plagued me through my earlier adult years. Clocking in and out at other jobs so I can afford rent and to eat had been killing me. Sure, I had flexibility within what I could do with my free time and the days were predictable and more importantly dry, but I couldn’t help but have time slip through my fingers. Months would creep by without my notice; seasons would change and I’d be passively present as they passed me by. But out here I’m fighting for my seconds and gritting my teeth through my back ache and burning lungs to get the most out of the time I have. Real life saving stuff. It’s not the being wet that’s even much of the problem, really. You just have to keep moving to keep your temperature up. There’s no nice shelter I can warm up in, or clean table I can sit at to have my lunch. It’s just me and this rocky mess of mud for the day. I toil in the rain, peel my soaking gloves off to hastily cram muddy sandwich halves into my mouth in the rain, hell I even have to relieve myself out in the rain. It’s fine by me at the end of the day, I like the grit of it, or maybe more the absurdity of it. Sun up to sun down three days at a time, trees from your bags and into the ground. Days are short this far north at this time of year, so it’s a gentler time than the shifts we’ll put work in Canada. At sundown though, after your frantic last few trees, you can have a look back of your shoulder as your trudge through the sucking mud that’s been threatening to yank your boots off and have a look at the work that you had finished that day. All the little saplings arranged in tidy little rows that the foresters here love to task us with set up to take root and become a healthy little forest in the years to come. I think it’s important to get sappy about the work. There’s innate sense of posterity to it, those little guys that had gone into the ground will hopefully outlive me. The same trees will be wandered in by wildlife and people wandering off the footpath. The landscape will change, creating a break in the sameness of the rolling hills around here. Like scrawling my name over onto some tourist place I’ve scratched a sense of legacy into the earth here out by this village. Folks there can watch from windows as this little patch takes hold and transforms into a stately little wood.

All in all it’s worth it to me to forgo comfort and familiarity. To migrate with the work and to never get to feel like I belong in anyplace. It’s tough to never stay anyplace more than a month for years on end, but I feel like I’m living. That’s worth pulling on brittle soggy boots and get soaked to the bone every day.