“Is he calling the cops? I don’t even think this is that illegal. I mean you can’t even tell where the boundaries are . . . Yeah, he’s almost definitely calling the cops. We should probably g- why am I not wearing shoes?” I realised about here that I was talking to myself. Megan was still asleep, blissfully unaware that she was about to wake up in a stranger’s backyard.
This was mid-September. To explain how I got to this point, I need to back up a few months. I had worked my first season as a tree-planter the summer before. Around March I had lost my job as a fund-raiser and didn’t have a lot of other work prospects. As a twenty-three year old aspiring writer and musician pursuing a philosophy degree, the closest thing I could claim to an employable skill was a reckless disregard for my own well-being. That was when I found out about tree-planting. The planting industry is always seeking eager young go-getters with little concern for their health and safety and a lack of familiarity with Canadian labour laws. A quick Google search will turn up hundreds of pages telling you what a horrible, nightmarish, mentally and physically taxing job it is. On the other hand you get to spend three months living in the woods with a bunch of hippies. The fact that this latter point counted as a plus in my mind probably goes a long way towards explaining my lack of other job opportunities.
I also couldn’t afford rent for May and the planting camp offered a marginally more socially acceptable form of homelessness. Up to a certain age you can pass off the kind of life I lead as ‘adventurous’. Eventually though, if your permanent living space for a good chunk of the year folds into a bag, you just become a vagrant. I’m really hoping that line still lies far in my future.
Anyway, the thing to take away from this is that for three months I lived in a place where I was not subject to even the most basic social norms. When you live and work with the same people twenty-four hours a day, certain boundaries fall away. Tree-planters have a reputation for being a fairly reckless bunch, but you really need to consider the conditions you’re living in out there. All the contracts were in B.C. and Alberta, so I was half a country away from anyone who’s opinion of my behavior I particularly cared about. It poured rain nearly every day that season, so a prison cell would really have been a welcome respite from sleeping outdoors, and the only possessions I had for anyone to take away were a beat-up pawn shop guitar and my tent. Given the circumstances I think even the minimal amount of respect our camp paid to the laws and customs of the towns we visited was admirable.
The first sign of how out of touch with civilization I would become was on a day off about six weeks into the season. I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflective glass of the truck window as I was about to walk into a restaurant: face streaked with mud, unwashed hair sticking wildly out in all directions, and the beginnings of a scraggly beard. I took a look at myself and without a hint of irony thought: “Man, I look ridiculous without my top hat on.”
There’s no easy way to explain the state of mind I was in by that point. In camp, all filters between brain and mouth gradually erode and the stresses of the job lead to a strangely bi-polar mindset where you can go from absolute misery to nearly delirious happiness in a span of minutes. I think part of this is the mind trying to distance itself from pain. At moments when every digit is numb from cold and the rain and mud has penetrated through to your very soul your vision blurs and the landscape takes on a strange oneiric quality while your brain tries to make sense of what is happening. This can’t be real you tell yourself. You can not possibly be working through a two hour long hailstorm in the middle of July scrambling up a steep hill to plant trees for ten cents each. No sane person would do this. It has to be some kind of bizarre lucid dream. And so the pain fades away. It’s not real. And then the laughter starts. The mad, delirious laughter as you realize it’s all some crazed dream . . . Really, planting does some strange things to you.
There’s no easy way to explain the state of mind I was in by that point. In camp, all filters between brain and mouth gradually erode and the stresses of the job lead to a strangely bi-polar mindset where you can go from absolute misery to nearly delirious happiness in a span of minutes. I think part of this is the mind trying to distance itself from pain. At moments when every digit is numb from cold and the rain and mud has penetrated through to your very soul your vision blurs and the landscape takes on a strange oneiric quality while your brain tries to make sense of what is happening. This can’t be real you tell yourself. You can not possibly be working through a two hour long hailstorm in the middle of July scrambling up a steep hill to plant trees for ten cents each. No sane person would do this. It has to be some kind of bizarre lucid dream. And so the pain fades away. It’s not real. And then the laughter starts. The mad, delirious laughter as you realize it’s all some crazed dream . . . Really, planting does some strange things to you.
After three months of this life, we were let loose again into the world without warning. I’d imagine the feeling was something akin to what drove the old man to suicide in the Shawshank Redemption. Tree-planting is a strange experience because it somehow offers a tremendous sense of freedom within a strictly regulated routine. For three months you wake up at the same time, your meals are waiting for you, you’re in the truck at the same time, you perform the same motions for ten hours and then you’re back in camp for dinner at the same time. Even your days off are structured around a few key chores that need to be done (Laundry, shower, food), and then suddenly at the end of the season, you’re free. No schedule, no obligations. For someone who was already pretty bad at planning, this sudden lack of structure was nearly disastrous.
I had nowhere to be and nothing to do until the end of August, when I needed to be back in Ontario for my best friend's wedding. I hitched a ride to Kamloops, hoping to go from there to Kelowna and find a job cherry picking. Originally I had been planning on going to Calgary, but the ride West was leaving faster and had better music. It would take me surprisingly long to remember that this was not how people made decisions in the real world.
When I arrived in Kamloops I had one very important thing to take care of before heading to Kelowna. I had to be fitted for a tuxedo for the wedding. I knew there was a Moore’s in Kamloops, but I had no idea where it was, so I asked to be dropped off at the Greyhound station. I then found out that the store was on the top of a very large hill overlooking said station. I paid for a locker to stow my dufflebag in, but I couldn’t fit my guitar into it. Now, the planting season had just ended. I hadn’t showered in a few days, hadn’t shaved or cut my hair in much longer, and the cleanest clothes I owned by that point were still covered in a semi-permanent layer of dirt. The guitar case I carried was also fairly beaten and battered. It was early August, and it was a hot day in Kamloops. If you’re not familiar with the area, Kamloops is basically a desert. Because I am great at making decisions, I started up the hill to Moore’s with no water. It was a steep hill. It took me about a half hour along a winding road to reach the top, by which time I was covered in sweat and completely dehydrated. I stumbled into Moore’s disoriented and confused. One of their salespeople immediately ran over to me. I half expected him to tell me that vagrants were not welcome in their establishment. Instead, he asked about my guitar, what kind it was and what kind of music I played. This was the first time in three months I had been on my own out in civilisation, and I felt like I was being accosted as the man talked to me and tried to help me around the store. It may have just been my fragile state of mind at the time, but he really seemed to be almost aggressively friendly.
“What kind of guitar is that? You know I play a bit myself. How long have you been at it?”
“Um, uh – I need to be fitted for a suit. My friend is getting married.”
“Oh, ok. . . Well, you’ll want to talk to the woman in back there about that. What kind of music do you play though? Are you from around here or just passing through? I always like meeting other musicians in the area”
“Just, uh – well, I mean, I just need this suit. His wedding is pretty soon and - well, you know, maybe some water too, would be great. I just climbed a really steep hill.”
I don’t know if the Moore’s in Kamloops caters to a different sort of clientele than I had imagined or if they’re just incredibly well-trained in maintaining a professional demeanour, but nothing about my dishevelled appearance or incoherent babbling even made the guy bat an eyelash. He just calmly directed me to the back of the store, like a very kindly version of the stone-faced guards outside Buckingham Palace. Nothing could phase him. He kept pressing about the guitar and what kind of music I played. I mumbled something about the Rolling Stones and he set off on a long diatribe about Keith Richards while I stared wild-eyed around the store, trying to orient myself amid all these clean people with their expensive clothes. They wouldn’t last a day out in the woods.
I finally made my way to the desk at the back where I managed to stammer out that the thing was I really just needed to be fitted for a tux for my friend’s wedding, which was happening back in Ontario but I was one of the groomsmen and the groom had arranged for my measurements to be sent back to the store there and yes, I’d had a confirmation number or something of the sort at some point but it had been stored in my phone and the thing was I had just spent three months living out in the woods and at some point in there my phone had stopped working, but I had a name and was fairly sure about the date of the wedding and yes, I knew it was pretty important, especially being in the wedding party and all that I really should at least know the date, but I was a bit out of sorts at the moment, again having just spent three months more or less off the grid and could we please just get this over with? The woman at the desk was surprisingly patient with me. After she’d finished with the measurements she suggested that I should maybe get something to eat if I could. They could always make some last minute adjustments to the suit if I put on a bit more weight in the coming weeks. She also mentioned that I should probably get some sleep.
I really hadn’t anticipated a trip to Moore’s feeling like such a harrowing ordeal. I had been into small towns near camp a fair bit over the summer, but I was usually wrapped in a cocoon of at least three other equally dirty hippies and being on my own again, in society no less, felt a bit strange. This was just Kamloops. In a few weeks I had to return home to Toronto. In a roundabout way what I’m trying to explain here is that readjusting to life in the largest city in Canada after that first season was Difficult.
Megan was the only other person from the camp who lived anywhere near Toronto, and I immediately got in touch with her when I got back to the city. I needed to speak to someone who understood What It Was Like. She invited me to come with her to a keg party near her parent’s place in Etobicoke, a suburb just West of Toronto. You form a strangely close bond with people when you work as a tree-planter. A bond that sometimes makes other people think you’re crazy when you’re at parties and exchange litanies of bizarre injuries like claw hand and Christmas Toe as though you just came back from a war. As we became increasingly drunk and isolated from people who were sick of hearing us talk about schnarb* and j-roots*, we decided we needed to do something to re-create the feeling of planting life here in the city. We should go camping.
The Greater Toronto Area is home to roughly ten per cent of Canada’s population. As you might imagine there aren’t a lot of prime wilderness areas around here. We could just set up a tent in Megan’s backyard, but that would hardly feel like an adventure. There had to be at least a park somewhere, something with some green space. Megan remembered a park near her parent’s house that she said backed onto an empty lot where they had planned on building some new homes but that was currently vacant. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it was about as secluded as we could hope to get in the city.
We stumbled back to Megan’s house, got a tent, and trekked out. I still don’t know at what point in this process I lost my shoes. I still don’t know how we ended up where we did. To be honest all I really remember is finding an area where there were some trees around, getting the tent mostly set up (I don’t think we bothered with the fly or pegs) and immediately passing out.
I woke up the next morning feeling at home. Grateful as I was to have a warm bed and regular showers again I still really missed camp life. For a moment I was able to pretend that I was back in the mountains of Alberta, surrounded by all my planting friends. Sobriety has this awful, jarring way of returning you to reality though. As I rose and looked outside I realized we had set our tent up not in the wilderness we were dreaming about, or even in the relatively secluded city park or empty lot we thought we had settled for, but some guy’s backyard in the suburbs. He was standing in his driveway ten feet in front of me and he did not look impressed.
We locked eyes: me staring bleary-eyed and hung-over through the mesh top of the tent I had inadvertently set up on his property in the dead of night, he refreshed after an early-morning jog, standing outside his safe suburban home, calmly calling the authorities. It was like looking in a funhouse mirror, each of us reflecting what the other could have been, if only we had made a few different choices. “We’re not so different you and I”, I wanted to tell him. “In other circumstances, we may even have been friends.” As I stumbled barefoot out of the tent towards him though, squinting against the harsh sunlight, and he backed towards the door of his garage, ready to make a run for it, I realized this friendship was not meant to be. At six feet tall and only a hundred and fifty pounds, my appearance doesn’t generally inspire fear in people, but I guess I can’t blame the man for thinking the scraggly looking guy who had inexplicably set up camp in his backyard might be dangerous.
In our defense his house did back on to what at least appeared to be public property and he didn’t have a fence. The boundaries weren’t very clear. The large house and busy street should probably have tipped us off that we weren’t exactly isolated though. We dismantled the tent in front of an audience of Sunday morning church commuters stopped at the large intersection we had somehow missed.
Respectable Homeowner was still staring. All I could offer by way of explanation was a confused look and shrug that told him I was as baffled as he was about how this happened. “Strange sometimes the places you wake up right?” my look said, “happens to the best of us.” There was no sympathy in the glare he returned though. It was clear he had never been on the other side of this situation. I ambled past him barefoot, tent under my arm, doing my best to avoid eye contact.
I don’t think this is what most people my age have in mind when they talk about having to do a Sunday Morning Walk of Shame.
< word of encouragement to keep you from not keeping writing >
ReplyDeletemore ?