The book selected for this week's Interrobang treatment is “Eating Dirt” by Charlotte Gill. Published in partnership with the David Suzuki Foundation, by Greystone Books, an imprint of Douglas & McIntyre, this is a BC book to the core. It’s about tree planting, forestry, and a whole lot more.

Eating Dirt is a book that should make you tired. As a reader you spend 244 pages humping around the BC bush with the tree planting tribe, from a wet snowy early spring on the soggy coast to the hot, dry, buggy summer in the interior… and then back to the coast for a cold, wet, stormy autumn. You’re taken up steep slopes, clambering through the slash, you’re hunched over and grimy, slamming saplings into the ground day after day after day. You feel the dirt under your fingernails and you’re lured into an almost overpowering need to quaff half a dozen beers when it’s the first day off in weeks—seeing civilization in the form of an ugly motel and a pub that looks like it’s been exposed to the elements for forty years. And you ache on endless kilometres of walking and hiking and climbing and sliding and falling and hacking a route through thousands of cut blocks in BC’s big forested—or deforested—landscapes. It’s painful, exhausting, filled with trials and triumphs, alliances and passing encounters in godforsaken, but somehow compelling and beautiful places. This book gives a whole new meaning to the term, “armchair traveller”.

But unlike its content, Eating Dirt is anything but difficult and tiring. It’s an easy, enjoyable read. The writing has a natural flow and progression, although it does take more than a few unexpected turns and there’s no sense of a strictly delineated plot, or at least not one that follows a formula. Eating Dirt is easy to read largely because it’s written in crisp, engaging prose that draws you in and then unflinchingly hurls you up mountains in thick fog, through clearcuts in caulk boots, out on seasick waves, and down almost-abandoned logging roads in battered “crummies”.

Gill tells the stories of the individuals she’s worked with over the years—pulling no punches—and at the same time unabashedly reveals her own personal story of what becomes, after she starts planting at young age (and keeps at it for a long time), almost an obsession, an addiction, if a slightly masochistic one. “By late spring,” she writes, describing her early days as a planter, “quite a few tree planters had quit, but I didn’t. I stayed until a billion blood cells had died and been reborn. Until my hands looked like rawhide and my breasts had melted away. By the time it got hot enough to put on a swimsuit, I had fuzzy, scabbed shins and a baked neck. When I glimpsed myself in mirrors, I saw a teenage boy in drag.”

As she wends her way through the forests, and through the years, matter-of-factly recounting brushes with bears, narrow escapes, and the stories and personalities of co-workers who last a day, a season, or a decade, she also tells the bigger story of the logging industry and the much, much bigger story of the forests themselves. Eating Dirt is a book that celebrates trees in all their ancient grandeur, telling the long tale of their evolution and their natural history, with an obvious focus on the types of trees indigenous to BC’s forest landscape—cedar, pine, spruce, hemlock. She looks at the complexity of forest ecosystems and finds strange beauty in clearcuts. It might seem contradictory, but it’s not—it makes sense when you read it. And as Gill writes at one point, “People have been planting trees as long as they’ve been cutting them down.”

This is a book that shines both because of its engrossing content and its clever, skilful delivery. Gill writes with sharp honesty and captivating creativity. In short, Eating Dirt is a great read, if a slightly grubby one.
 

Set list:

Radiohead - Treefingers

Nick Drake - Rain

Ohbijou - The Woods

Nico - Fairest of the Seasons

Feist - Caught a Long Wind

Dan Mangan - Pine for Cedars

MGMT - Kids

LCD Soundsystem - Never As Tired As When I'm Waking Up

Blitzen Trapper - The Tree (Adela Diane)

Jonsi & Alex - All the Big Trees

Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi - Season's Trees

Klaxons - Valley of the Calm Trees

Tom Waits - Cold, Cold Ground

Death Cab For Cutie - No Joy in Mudville

Coldcut - Timber

Gorillaz - Aspen Forest

The Beta Band - Dry the Rain

Mercury Rev - Black Forest (Lorelei)

The Beatles - Only a Northern Song

Rheostatics - Seven aka Northern Wish

Jon & Roy - It's Gonna Be Fine

Broken Social Scene - Pacific Theme

The Flaming Lips - Buggin'

Tom Waits - Bride of Rain Dog

Death Cab for Cutie - Little Fury Bugs

Nick Drake - Fly

Jon & Roy - Body's Warm

The Beatles - I'm So Tired

Sigur Ros - Se Lest

Young Galaxy - High and Goodbye

Sufjan Stevens - I Walked

Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi - Morning Fog

Brendan Canning - All the Best Wooden Toys Come

Broken Social Scene - Finish Your Collapse and Stay For Breakfast

Current Swell - The Digger

Plants and Animals - Sea Shanty

Los Campesinos! - The Black Bird / Dark Slope

Lightspeed Champion - A Bridge and Goodbye

Manitoba - I've Lived On a Dirt Road All My Life