Bushwhacked
by Charlotte Gill and Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Governor General’s Award Fiction nominee Charlotte Gill and I were recently VIA Rail partners on a trip to the Ottawa International Writers’ Festival. It wasn’t long before we realized we had more in common than writing and first class train tickets; we were treeplanters. Charlotte has toiled in the coastal crew-cuts for fourteen years, factory planting. I planted my last tree in Alberta fourteen years ago, fed-up with the weather, the wasps and the politics. The trip to Ottawa ended but our conversation about work did not.

I cornered Gill, author of Ladykiller, by email to ask her about writing, planting, and the work ethic these two tough professions create in one person.

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer: I don’t know if you are in town or on the block. I was hoping in a way you were bushwhacked; I like the idea of having this conversation while you are out there.

I just finished your collection of stories having read half of them in the wilderness of northern Ontario and half back in the civility of Toronto. I enjoyed them very much. Your voice has an intense economy as if every movement should count, which I like, and your characters have a bleak edginess that reminds me of certain Richard Ford and Raymond Carver stories. Of course, when reading for a purpose one always flounders around looking for comparison and for some reason your writing, in its elliptical tone kept bringing Joni Mitchell to mind. There is something of the lyrical in the way you get at your characters; like Mitchell you have a light touch that hits hard and in the right spot before one even sees it coming.

Your stories are set mostly in the outskirts of towns or in less than nice apartments and your characters often have unspoken neuroses; they seem to hover between love and hate of themselves as well as their partners. It surprised me how indebted you are to these mythic urban settings when my context for you is treeplanting, which is about the most rugged, wild and extreme work around anymore. How many years have you been planting? What is it about planting that draws you back and how has it managed to stay so completely outside your writing?

Charlotte Gill: Well, you may have the best of the city and the bush, as I’m departing next week for a month-long tour of duty. With that I finish my fourteenth season of treeplanting. (Just typing “fourteen years” makes me feel like a tired-out burro. That’s the funny thing about planting trees for a living, it can make you feel old even while it’s keeping you young. Do you agree?)

My settings don’t come from treeplanting, you’re right. I find the wacky world of treeplanting so dense, so cram packed with details. It’s sensory overload for the writer–even the details have details. Treeplanters speak their own language. We have twenty different expressions for “slashy pile of crap,” and our verbs are really shorthand for dozens of linked, specialized actions I chose urban settings because they are familiar to nearly everyone, and since it was my first book, I needed landscapes that wouldn’t sprawl. Since reading your novel, which captures very well the richness of treeplanting, I’ve been meaning to ask you: how did you paint that picture so succinctly without getting lost in the woods?

I haven’t written about treeplanting, and yet there’s something about that life that’s sneaked onto the pages of Ladykiller. This may sound strange, but treeplanters are just like everybody else, only more so. I’m sure it’s the intensity of the labour, the weather, the solitude, and perhaps even the subliminal effects of the environment–clearcuts, after all. Over time, our social armour and our defenses are sandpapered away. What’s left is this huge range of emotional possibility. As you know, it’s not unusual in the treeplanting context to develop a deep friendship, a romance, or even a vendetta in a matter of days. Elation and love, on the one hand, and at the other extreme, psychological darkness. You captured both in The Nettle Spinner. I think everyone experiences these moments, just not commonly. For me, fiction is just like this–life, but in concentrated, amped-up form.

Kathryn: That’s right. Your characters are bare-souled and brutal in ways that remind me of how I was and how other people were up north. There is a kind of amplification of personality in a closed society, as if the complexity of oneself becomes narrowed down to one or maybe two attributes, and I wondered at some point in the writing of The NS whether folktales are less archetype and more a reflection of the kind of tighter communities, in which people truly relied upon one another, that I imagine would have existed long ago. I have a theory that when community groups are small, people take on roles or identities that fit them in. This sort of thing certainly happens in families.

I think the way in to describing treeplanting was for me this idea – that the community of treeplanting as well as the landscape could offer a weird, rather devastating mirror, to the tropes one finds in folktale. The clear-cut reflects the honest woodcutter, and the dark passage of discovery that ‘forest’ represents in old stories, and the workers signify the various archetypes evil count, jester, naïf. There is this common misunderstanding of folk and fairytale that they are light, and built for children but they aren’t. These are stories that form narrative of the events of people’s lives in order to contain these events in a place of pseudo-historical safety. The Song of Roland, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, as well as practically any retold fairytale is gothic in nature because it comes out of a depth of human experience, a dark place that tries to resolve into light. So it was the old stories that brought me a way to tell about treeplanting; that, and about fifteen years’ hiatus from the bush.

You mentioned to me once that you write very slowly. Is this that ideas come slowly or that the work itself emerges slowly? Do you mess about on paper or wait until the story is ready in your mind? I’m curious about your process. I wondered as I read your work whether the contraction, the economy of words was editorial. Do you Hemingway the work? The words have been chosen with such particularity that they emit energy the way they bump up against one another. Intensity is built up in the language of your stories. The human relationships are often subverted and smoldering while the giving over of the relationship by the author, you, has a distinct electricity:

They mill and unzip. They open and close lockers. How long will it take for them to notice him? (from “Hush”)

I guess I’m asking you what your relationship is to language. Why do you write? How does it happen that you are a writer? Why words and not paint or travel or film? How did you get here?

Charlotte: Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you–we’ve been doing looooong days.

You mentioned that you needed fifteen years to approach treeplanting as a subject for a novel. I think it would take me a similar amount of contemplation to develop a plot scenario that was both dynamic and honest to the experience. Treeplanting can be action-packed, but for me the main odyssey is an interior one. Consider that many young people who go treeplanting for the first time have never worked so hard or spent so much time in alone in the middle of nowhere. I certainly hadn’t. But by the end of my first season I had learned three things: 1) One can be deliriously happy in miserable conditions. 2) Advice, though a comfort, is pretty much useless. 3) Mistakes are not necessarily to be avoided. I don’t know how I absorbed these ideas, but somehow I had. Treeplanting grew me up, basically, in a long series of tiny mental shifts. I’ve always thought that fiction demands something more compelling. Storytelling gives us characters who develop by way of drama–epiphanies, decisions, action. I guess I see real-life metamorphoses unfolding in a different way: slow but constant, as sure and unstoppable as weather.

I was reminded of how lonely the wilderness can be while reading The NS. The book is all about treeplanting, and yet much of the story takes place in a remote cabin. We have two characters (four if you count a baby and a shadowy lurker). The midwinter scenes, when Alma is marooned by the weather, are nearly claustrophobic. Wolves and impenetrable darkness nibbling at the edges of the firelight. I wonder what you think of the treeplanting crew scenario–social, intensely communal–in contrast to the “wildness” that contains it on all sides.

Regarding the wildness, I’ve just come back from a week in Mackenzie Sound, which is on the B.C. mainland, about flush with the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Our crew stayed in a First Nations village called Hopetown, which isn’t a village, really just five houses, a dock, and an outbuilding containing the biggest generator known to humanity. To give you an idea of what this contract was like, I give you my yesterday:

5:30 a.m.: Lunch assembled from no-name white bread, mustard and Kraft singles. Breakfast includes more of the ham no one would eat at the previous dinner. Coffee:, the farther you get from urban centres, the more light brown it becomes. After breakfast there is packing. My outfit of choice is polyester track pants and shin pads. Tops are weather dependent. Boots with spiked soles are mandatory. Today the cleaner elements of my planting wardrobe are stuffed into my rubber backpack for another day featuring rain. 6:30 a.m.: Charlie is the tribal chief, a portly man who quietly dislikes us for reasons we can’t ascertain. He pilots us deep into a foggy finger of the inlet in his twin-engine superboat called The Protector. An hour later I drive a potholed logging road at the wheel of a truck we call The Blight, a Ford F-350 with no shocks. At the 13K marker we meet with our helicopter, a Hughes 500 flown by Rob–nice enough guy, though unsettlingly touchy around the whole topic of fog. Which is good in a way. As they say in the helicopter business, there are old pilots and bold pilots but no old, bold pilots. Rob flies five of us into a clearcut on the far side of a deep ravine. We land on a helipad constructed of logs at the centre of a typical coastal cutblock–several hectares of giant cedar stumps and the heaped-up remains of their bucked limbs. Inaccessible by road, it was logged several years ago with an air crane. Now it’s a small sea of green brush–hemlock and balsam, as well as chest-high salal sprouting up through the slash. All of it wet and slippy. I don’t so much walk through it as wade-and-stumble. I’m not planting in here today, merely supervising, which in treeplanting is essentially disaster management. Today’s misfortunes (too complicated to explain here) involve me as a donkey and three-hundred pounds of seedlings deposited in exactly the wrong place by Rob and his cargo sling. I traverse the block six times carrying loads. On the way I do a little quality control, pulling up a hundred or so naughty trees from the sandy bottom of a creek bed. The crew of four plants back and forth, like knitters at the same sweater. At 2 p.m. we are done, and before the sweat can dry, whisked out by Rob to another slope on another mountain. Then it’s just Rose and me with two boxes of seedlings, our bags and shovels, and a walkie-talkie. It’s so nasty, steep and overgrown it takes us until 6:32 p.m. A 40-cent tree looks like this: five seconds to plant the tree and two minutes to climb to the next spot. Rose isn’t far off. I can’t see here for all the brush, but I can hear her singing the entire time. 7:04: I plant my last one. It’s a western red cedar. I don’t even stop to wonder if it will live. Mackenzie Sound is suddenly done, and all that’s left is a quick zip back down to The Blight so we can do it all in reverse. Helicopter. Drive. Boat. Hopetown, where another, bigger boat called the Naiad Explorer waits to take us back to Vancouver Island. I can pack my entire kit in 8 minutes, I discover. Why are we always in a rush? On board we have beer and pizza, eating like planters, which means swallowing without chewing or tasting. I’m still dirty for this trip “home,” but at least I’m wearing clean clothes. I fall asleep in them, incidentally, when I arrive at the inn. 9 p.m., Port McNeill: asleep before I hit the bed.

When you asked if I Hemingwayed my writing I laughed out loud. I’m a slow writer, it’s true. Ironically I produce huge volumes of words in a very short period of time. Not long ago I wrote a 400-page draft in six weeks. Most of it was crap. I extracted what was worth keeping and threw the rest away. I described this process to a friend, and he said, “Oh, it’s like maple syrup. You get a litre for every twenty gallons of sap.” I think I’m a binge worker by nature. Or even, perhaps, a binger, period. Naturally, treeplanting fits my tendencies, being twice the job in half the time.

Kathryn: I like the notion that treeplanting grew you up and the image of slow epiphany entering you in the first year of planting. I also think of planting in terms of a journey motif in which the hero comes to realisation, or age, in a sense; it’s just that the journey has no real geographic purpose — it is a strange pilgrimage, that all-day walking. I’m thinking of Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines as I write this, and his conviction that nomadism and spirituality are divinely connected. Treeplanting is a walking the land, and if you will excuse me the flight of fancy, it gives way to meditation. Clearly, you are right, there is little drama in the repetition of bending/planting ad infinitum. But are there ways that planting has directly informed your work, or perhaps your work ethic/process?

The treeplanting crew in The NS are exaggerations and composites of people I knew through the years up there, and, naturally, since I wrote them, they are also all me, all projection. Also, the wilderness frames this, and lends itself to personal explorations of feral behaviour. After a while, a crew comes to resemble a wolf pack loping around each other, trying to locate hierarchy, or reestablish hierarchy. We are animals after all.

I love your description of a day in the life of. It brought me right back into that work — the horror and the glory of it. I hope you do write about your bush experiences and I can’t wait to see your new project. I hope you haven’t cut too much of that 400 page manuscript…

If you’d like to talk about your next project, I’d love to hear about it.

Charlotte: You asked me about work ethic and I immediately thought of retired planters. Long after the money-making urgency of treeplanting is over, they come away with this tremendous capacity for work. Since you are a former treeplanter, I can ask you this: When you paint a room in your house, do you leave the trim for tomorrow or do you make a midnight run to Home Depot just so you can stay up until it’s done. If I ask you the longest distance you’ve ever driven in one shot, I’ll bet it was well over 12 hours and that you stopped only for gas. If you’re a writer this can be a tremendous asset, especially if you’re a bumbler, as I am. I may not crank out instant eloquence, but I can keep my ass in a chair for a very long time.

I’d never considered it before you mentioned it, but now I agree–treeplanting is a walkabout with no destination. I love the comedic possibilities. Imagine Chatwin’s travellers criss-crossing the landscape, only they’re paid by the trip–running instead of walking. With treeplanting there’s also the somewhat absurd and politically complicated notion of “farming” one of the most elegant but slow-growing organisms on earth.

I wonder if the feral behaviours you mentioned aren’t performed every day no matter where we live. People wave their tail feathers ubiquitously–only in cities the feathers cost more. In remote places there’s no denying the wilderness that surrounds a burning light bulb or the hum of a generator. The worst punishment a pack animal can face is to be ejected into that darkness. I think we feel it in our bones when we’re on the side of the road with a broken-down car in winter. Or when we’ve got nowhere to go at Christmas. A fear of oblivion that comes with being truly, deeply alone. It might be the fear, come to think of it. You know, the one that keeps therapists in business.

Rote activities force us to sit with our own fear and loathing. At the same time, the imagination is free to roam. Treeplanting is like stuffing envelopes on a Stairmaster. As I’m sure you know, the mental highs and lows peel away like the layers of an onion. After several hours a sort of Zen state is achieved. I think this is part of the reason why people find the job so addictive. Treeplanting’s meditation is an accidental byproduct of piecework and sometimes, dare I say it, greed. I don’t mean to sound cynical. Some form of hunger is in many ways necessary to do a job that’s so uncomfortable.

A long time ago, a friend played me a recording of a group of women singing a capella. In the background, weaving in and out of their voices, was this very complex syncopated drumming. Not drumming, thumping. My friend explained these were Mississippi postal workers in the days before franking machines, stamping huge volumes of mail. Ten years later, I’m still delighted by the memory of the sound. I find it fascinating and beautiful that humans can find spiritual flight (and music, too) in the humble drone of repetitive activity. Looping back to The NS, this is the stuff of fairy tale–spinning gold from flax, making something out of nothing.

I’m home from planting now. Not writing anything just yet–I’m waiting for my brainwaves to coalesce.

Kathryn: You shocked the hell out of me when you said, “If I ask you the longest distance you’ve ever driven in one shot, I’ll bet it was well over 12 hours and that you stopped only for gas.” I regularly imprison my family in the car and drive straight to Ottawa or Golden Valley, Ontario, no stops. A couple of years ago I had the great idea of driving through the night from Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia to Quebec City. I love being a passenger in a car, I like going fast (I have a ticket to prove it, too), I love the mindlessness of driving. Definitely Zen.

And as for the idea that humans find spiritual flight and music in the drone of repetition, yes, and narrative, too, I would have to say; story is borne of rhythm – its allure is in the telling as much as in what is told. Congratulations, Charlotte, on the well-deserved nomination of your short story collection Ladykiller for this year’s Governor General Award for Literature.

Charlotte: Thank you, Kathryn. I hope our paths cross sometime soon.

Charlotte Gill’s Ladykiller is a nominee for the 2005 Governor General’s Award for Literature (Fiction). In 2003 one of these seven stories, “Hush,” was a finalist for the McClelland and Stewart/Writers’ Trust of Canada Journey Prize.

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s latest book is The Nettle Spinner.