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Systematic Rube

the great adventure

I hadn’t planned to spend my summer slopping through swamps wanting to tear my skin off. I came to it surreptitiously, sneaking up on it without realizing what I was doing. And like most accidents it was sudden and explosive. In retrospect I should have seen what filthy jaws were clamping down on me. I’d had friends who had done the work so there was precedent. And I had always been somewhat bohemian – not that having the bohemian gene was helpful at all, but perhaps it hinted at a willingness to self delusion. It was a thing in the world that I knew people did, a thing that people I knew personally did, and therefore it was a thing in the world that was acceptable. I let my doom kneel down behind me, and my dunderheadedness push from the front.

Between classes, I sat down with my tray in the cafeteria. A guy from my house was slobbering and raving about all the wonderfulness that was tree planting. He’d never done it before, but already he was bought and sold. His brain had been reprogrammed and he’d been sent out to get me. He was a rich kid, son of a affluent father, didn’t want for much, his program at school was more of a hobby than a calling. He talked a lot, and often, his words jumbling out of his mouth all the time like a long parade of ticker tape. Everywhere he went he spewed his words out before him and piled them up behind, not caring where they fell. Every sentence began with an audible breath and stopped on a halting laugh.

“I was talking to the guy and he said that there’s no reason a rookie can’t make two hundred dollars a day after a couple weeks. Imagine that, two weeks and you’re making two hundred dollars a day. That’s a thousand dollars a week. Two hundred dollars. I mean, wow.” Both hands flat on the table, he’d sit back then, let somebody else grunt out a sentence, then unwind again with another long roll. “Two hundred dollars….”

I said nothing. I ate my lunch, nothing green for sure; chlorophyll was poison to me; and I thought, Yum, lunch because I didn’t care, I didn’t want to sign up for a tour of the woods; I had my field school to attend in the summer; I was blooming into archaeology; emulating the bears interested me not. His jagged flailings littered the table and I pushed them away from me, making a barrier around my plate so they wouldn’t unbless my dinner. Satisfied then I bent to it and focused on my fork.  

Unaware of the web I was caught in, I went about my business. I attended another six hours of classes for a discipline I was ill suited for. I wandered home to write sappy poems in my cubicle of a room. I drifted to my friend’s cubicle next door to play video games on his computer and shout down the hallway. In bed I pondered the niceties of communal living and the salacious grin of the cute Russian girl upstairs. But it was too late. I’d already been snagged. That’s one of the problems with having an open mind. Sometimes it can be like having an open door to your building. On occasion the riffraff are going to wander in and poop in your nice clean laundry room where your folded facecloths are joying in their precision and your towels are dreaming happily.

With Systematic Rube I want to detail the disastrous spring contract of Woodlot Reforestation in the year 2000, exploring my own personal experiences and comparing what I thought planting would be with what it actually was.

I want to explore planting as rite of passage, detailing how we dealt with various hardships and our ignorance of the business as a whole.

I want to compare the Canadian ideal of the burly bush man with the actual people who can be found working in our forests.

After that the days blundered towards summer. Field school, I soon learned, started in mid-July. School was to end soon in that hot April. There was an interminable gap there. I needed a job that I could do for two months and then move on without any animosity; meanwhile I couldn’t stray too far from the middle of the country.

Two hundred dollars. That’s the thirty pieces of silver for which I sold my pure and unsullied mind. Two hundred dollars. Sounds great. It makes me wonder if slaves signing up to row ancient Greek galleys were lured in with similar promises. Two pieces of gold? See strange new lands? Sounds great. Then the clamps were notched around their necks which cost exactly that, for which they were charged a rental fee, and a good flagon of beer was slung just out of reach of their knobby, slavish fingers. Then, row you bastards!

Jane interviewed me for the job in front of my university residence, sitting on the curb. She asked why I wanted to plant and I said, “Well, my friends went and they all came back smiling.” She laughed at that, and only years later did I understand why.

Downhill from there, a slope of money. I bought a tent, which I then set up in the lounge of my abandoned residence. School was deserted, exams over, only three of us left in the house. And no I didn’t sleep in it, but frankly, now that I look back it, I probably should have, and nude too. I slathered the weatherproofing all over it, the first tent I ever owned, christened there next to the smelly communal fridge. Then I packed it away until it was ready for field testing. That being done I bought an unremarkable sleeping bag and an exciting backpack and a pair of expensive boots; knives, extra socks, second-hand shirts, whatever I thought I’d need to be a burly bush man. Notice I didn’t say what I would need, but what I thought I would need. I’m lucky my backpack wasn’t a handkerchief on a stick and my bed scraps of flannel and a pile of old newspapers.

I moved in downtown with my friend Mark who would accommodate me for a few happy days before I caught the express limo to the wilderness, the big green bus. He’d gone into the mouth of the unknown before, it was known to him, and he took me shopping for the rest of my inventory. He handed me two water jugs, a pair of gloves, and flipped a dollar bug-net into my cart and said, “You’ll thank me for that later.” And I didn’t question it at the time, and I did thank him later, thanked him heartily. Also I may name my first three children after him. Personal Savior One, Two, and Three.

I have three pictures of myself from those weeks, from the two rolls of film which I snapped off over the course of the contract, three photographs which I think tell a deteriorative tale about the nature of knowledge and experience. A kind of comedy, I mean.

I was so full of hope and gladness in the first picture. My buddy insisted I take a before photo before I left. I should have flipped that word over to see what was on the tail end, the presence of an after photo, and pondered on that long and hard. It’s a heroic picture, a heroic stance, my jaw is a triangular point, my hair is too, and tinted red, the sun is a spotlight on me and everything about me gleams. Not a hair out of place I gaze up into the heavens and thank Zeus for my ancestry; it’s a Herculean comedy. I’m holding all my new, shiny gear, the backpack and the water jugs, each of which I think I lost by the end of the first week, jeans and a brilliant white t-shirt, also new – all of which cost more than I would make over the course of that contract. And oh the innocent doe-eyed gleam, about to leap into the turbulent future to save the damsel of my boring summer from the waters of dull usualness, to ride away with it upon my trusty shovel.

I look good in the picture, but I see it with different eyes now. I want to slap that kid. It reminds me of pictures you see of boy soldiers primping for war, eyes bright as shell-burst. Sadly the lad in the photo fell on an unremarkable brown hill, not knowing what he was fighting for, only for that he was told, for eight and a half cents at a time, face down in the muck, his eyes closed and bitten, having intersected the path of a tiny flying projectile; intersected, and then intersected, and intersected a hundred times more. And his comrades carried on. And he did too, in a way.

The second photo was taken in camp. The week has ended and this morning we ride back into town the vanquishers of a long rookie shift. My hair is rumpled and dirty and my shirt is an eggshell white which is dabbling with gray. I must have worn my jeans while working, which is a stupid thing to do, as I know now, because both the knees are agape like the open mouths of moray eels. There’s no white scars of knees though; long johns must be beneath. I look tired, and glad to have the morning off. In the back there’s trees and a truck, power lines, and a sense of  somber reprieve.

I want to contrast the bright eyes of the new initiates against the many people who’ve chosen to step outside of life as we consider it, and delve into the lives of people who return to the unskilled labour of the industry after having failed massively in other parts of their lives.

The third picture is the after photo taken in the closet-sized box of my friend’s porch. It was an early retreat, eleven in the morning but it was dark in the hallway, drizzling outside; my eyes are closed because I had just slept on the concrete front steps and the cold weariness is still in them. My beard is long, untended, my face is red. My bags are on the floor, not on my back. All the clothes I’m wearing are new to me, but ratty and second hand; the brown shapeless shirt I’m wearing with the hood covers my punkish garb of defiance, my chains and my cheeky black-and-yellow t-shirt. There’s not much story to that picture, only skis and a radiator behind, but it was an ending, that much is obvious, a sudden cleaving halt, and then a stumbling fall forward.

Primarily, of course, I want to make Systematic Rube a book that’s interesting, thoughtful, and fun to read.