Rain Day

It was 6:08am, and Jenna was watching the raindrops splash onto her plate while she stood in line for breakfast, hoping for any sign that it was slowing down. She had awoken that morning to the telltale signs of a rain day -- the steady beating against her tent that made it clear it wouldn’t be stopping anytime soon. May in northern British Columbia meant that the sun was up by the time her 5:45 alarm went off, but you wouldn’t know it from the scarce light making it through the translucent walls. She had pulled her heavy-duty raincoat over layers of wool and reluctantly emerged into the wet world outside, the forest’s thick underbrush soaking her leggings as she made her way along the path to the main area of the tree planting camp.

There had already been several people in line in for the kitchen trailer, some chatting, most hunched and looking miserable. Just ahead of Jenna, two of her crewmates were goofing around, arms tucked inside of their raincoats, spinning to smack each other with their empty sleeves. One of them spun too close to Jenna.

“Oops, gotcha!” Keira laughed, deliberately hitting Jenna with the other sleeve too. Keira was only 19, and like Jenna, a rookie tree planter.

“You two are way too energetic this morning,” Jenna replied in a mock chastising tone, “Haven’t you taken a look at the sky yet?”

“Why look when I can feel?” replied Ben, Keira’s sparring partner. He tossed back his hood and turned his face to the sky, expression as serene as though he were enjoying a day at the spa. “Nothing like a good rain day.”

Keira and Jenna glanced at each other and laughed, shaking their heads.

“Maybe I’ll be like that when I’m a vet,” said Jenna, “but I doubt it.”

“You’ll learn to love it,” said Ben confidently. This was his eighth planting season, making him a planting “vet”, and he looked the part. He wore his long brown hair in a messy braid, his raincoat had so many rips that it seemed almost useless, and his hiking boots looked about ten years old. He had probably bought them new last month. Jenna knew him as the planter that was first in the land and last out, whose terrible singing you could hear all the way on the other side of the cutblock, who juggled in the breakfast and dinner lines. She could see his juggling balls tucked into his pocket now.

Ben was exactly the kind of person that Jenna’s parents feared her turning into: someone who went tree planting as a hopeful 22-year old and never came back, choosing to live in the bush during the warm months and drift around ski hills and Central American hostels during the cold ones. In other words, a lifer.

Keira, on the other hand, had a rowing scholarship to Harvard. Her dad was running for office in Vancouver. Jenna doubted that she would see Keira next year.

Jenna liked to think that she was somewhere in between, that though she came out for more than just a one-time zany experience, she wouldn’t lose her hope of finding a calling doing something else eventually. She may be here to do manual labour and figure her life out, but it wasn’t forever.

After eating in the mess tent, Jenna brushed her teeth at the sinks, threw a few sandwiches into her day bag, and made sure her planting bags and shovel were in the back of her crewboss Erin’s truck. Then she spent the ride to work watching raindrops run down the window, trying not to let dread of the day ahead overwhelm her. Every day they drove forty minutes down beat-up forest service roads to the cutblocks they were reforesting with conifer seedlings. The ten-hour days seemed to alternate between flying and dragging by, depending how well Jenna felt that she was doing. The more trees she planted, the more money she made, but she was still struggling to meet the 1200 daily trees that would ensure they’d keep her on for the whole season.

“You’re out here, Jenna,” Erin called from the front seat. “Go make some money.”

The wave of dread that Jenna had been trying to suppress washed through her chest as she stepped out of the truck. Trying to ignore the mud glomming onto her boots with each step, she grabbed her gear and trudged over to the cache, a neat collection of tree boxes tucked under a white tarp. Erin must have been out last night, setting them up.

Jenna's assigned piece of land lay on a steep downhill below the road. Dotted with stumps and crisscrossed with discarded logs, the clearcut block was an ugly, brown scar on the wilderness. In the distance, low, tree-covered mountains stretched all the way to the horizon, just visible through the rainy haze.

Reminding herself that the longer she stood around, the colder she would get, Jenna bent to pull a box out from under the tarp and tore the flaps open. Inside, neat bundles of pine seedlings, twice the length of her hand, stood ready to be planted. Having counted half of them into her planting bags, Jenna grabbed her shovel and stood up, steeling herself for her first bag-up of the day.

It did not go well. Every log and rock on the ground was so wet as to be treacherous to step on, but the ground between them was just as slippery. Several times she slid in the wet earth, ending up far below where she had been planting. The mud stuck to her gloves, making it difficult to slip the seedlings into the holes she made with her shovel. Her boots quickly filled up with water, squelching nauseatingly with each step. She had a panicky sense of losing more and more time with every tree that she planted, which was confirmed when she checked her watch once her bags were empty.

She had finished around 50 metres below the road, and Jenna was exhausted after the upward slog to the cache. The wind had picked up, giving the rain a highly unwelcome sideways slant. She slumped to the ground on her knees, head resting on her sodden backpack, which she had forgotten to hide under the tarp. Only 135 trees in, to Jenna her daily goal seemed so far off as to be impossible. She was tempted to tuck herself under the tarp with the boxes, prevented only by the thought of Erin catching her under there. Erin was nice enough, but so tough that she seemed unable to relate to the weaknesses of her rookies.

“She would probably tell me to get in the land right now or quit,” Jenna thought. Then out loud, “Maybe I should.” She wondered how much a flight back to Ottawa would be, and if she could handle whatever her parents would have to say to her at the airport. Her heart turned for the first time towards the possibility that she couldn’t do it at all, that this job wasn’t for her.

A loud whoop startled Jenna. She looked up to see Ben, shirtless, flyaway hairs plastered to his forehead with water and mud, leaping down the hill on the other side of the road. True to his words in the breakfast line, the rain wasn’t bothering him at all; in fact, he looked so joyful that Jenna felt resentment pile up immediately inside her. She suddenly felt as though she were going to cry.

“I’m not one to brag, but I smashed that bag-up!” Ben crowed, arriving at the cache. He tossed his shovel into the air, where it rotated end-over-end twice before sticking handle-side-up in the soft road. He glanced at Jenna to see if she had seen it, noticing instead how upset she looked. “Hey now, what’s the matter?”

She tried to smile. “Just the rain, I guess. I’ve only done one bag-up and I can’t find the motivation to do any more.” She took a shaky breath. “It’s kind of making me wonder if I should even be doing this job.”

“Everyone hates the rain at first,” Ben said, bending down to pull a box from under the tarp. “The secret is to embrace it.” He stood up suddenly, hands on his hips, water running down his torso. “Look, your feet are wet, right?”

Jenna nodded.

“And your legs are wet, maybe your upper body is dry for now but that won’t last long. Your gloves are wet, your hair is so wet you might as well have just showered. It’s safe to say that in a fight with the rain, you’ve lost. So don’t fight it.”

“That’s the kind of thing that vets say all the time, but no one ever explains how to do it. I can’t just decide that being soaking wet and cold doesn’t bother me, my brain doesn’t work like that! I can’t help that my body wants to be warm and dry!” Jenna’s words came out more heated than she wanted them to. She knew that Ben was only trying to help.

“Okay, fair. Let me think for a sec.” He knelt and began pulling bundles out of the box and placing them in his planting bags. A moment later, the box still half-full, he looked up, eyebrows knit together seriously. “The problem is that you still seem to feel like you’re someone that gets to stay dry. It’s not some injustice that you’re getting wet, this is literally exactly what you signed up for. You’re a tree planter. You belong to the woods and the mud and the rain. That water running into your boots, those sticks tearing your clothes, those blisters on your hands? That’s your goddamn birthright. Stop thinking of yourself as a regular person who finds themselves on a cutblock in the middle of nowhere, and start feeling like some sort of wild forest creature. Go feral if you have to.”

Jenna laughed, feeling a little awkward at his earnestness. “Go feral?”

Ben did not laugh. “If that’s what it takes, sure. Become a wild animal on the block. The types of discomfort that you get out here start feeling right, instead of holding you back.” He sighed, going back to putting trees in his bags. “I don’t know if that makes any sense to you.”

“I don’t know, maybe. Thanks, anyway.”

It was starting to feel more doable to fill her bags with trees again, although that could have just been because Ben was there doing the same. Jenna grabbed a box.

“There you go!” Ben was strapping on his planting bags. He grabbed his water jug and chugged for a few seconds before heading towards his hill. “Don’t forget to drink water! Easy to forget on rain days,” he called over his shoulder.

Jenna thought about what Ben had said while she knelt in the muddy road, lethargically moving trees from box to bags. It started to make a weird sort of sense.

If to be a tree planter was to give in to being wild, maybe what was really holding her back was not wanting to give in to being a tree planter. She remembered her mom’s worried voice saying, “It’s just for this one year, right? I know those planters can be very… hippie. Wouldn’t want you to throw your life away!” The last thing her mom would ever want would be for Jenna to “go feral”.

Perhaps for some people, the money or the experience was enough to see them through the season, but Jenna seemed to need more. She needed to understand how she fit inside this alien place, and something within her had been preventing her from identifying as the one thing that she needed to be to thrive within it: a tree planter.

Did she really think that she was any different, any better than lifers like Ben because she hoped to do something else one day? Because she didn’t juggle in the breakfast line? Which didn’t make sense, because she also somehow felt superior to planters like Keira, who treated this job as the one last carefree thing they would do before getting serious about finding an internship. It made her ashamed to think about it. The distinctions that she was making between herself and her crewmates suddenly seemed silly. Who cares what someone did beyond the season? They were, after all, here putting trees in the ground.

“We’re all just planters,” Jenna said out loud.

She looked up to where Ben was nimbly traversing the slope, stepping over logs and planting a tree every few seconds. Further down the road at the next cache, a dirt-streaked Keira was stuffing bundles of trees into her bags, quickly and determinedly. Jenna pictured the endless carpet of forest stretching around her in every direction, and the scar that it was her job to heal. She reached for her shovel, which had been lying in the mud now for longer than she cared to admit, stood up, and started down the hill.