Well troops, sorry about the long long time
off the radar. Bush livin’ has left me a little pressed for time and energy, I
tell you what. So, how to even begin to fill you in on the last four months in
the bush, and the plans for the road ahead; given that I’m within a month of
leaving Canada and heading on that long-time-coming southbound adventure?
It’s been a
serious experience, living in a tent for the last four months. The first two
months of my time out here in the Ontario bush were spent planting trees. It’s
a seriously hard way to earn coin, at 8.5 cents a tree, but it is what it is.
All the more reason to stick more of spruce trees in the muck, anyways. There
was definitely a competitive side to it as well, it even felt more like a
professional sport than a job at times: the van rides on the way to the block
every morning with the crew; everyone going through their morning rituals,
pulling on boots, duct-taping everything. After work, numbers were called out.
The emphasis on numbers brought in a real sense of competition. Everyone has
someone they wanted to beat on a daily basis, not in the least ourselves and
our old P.B.’s. In the end, I wound up doing pretty well at it. I planted 68000
trees, with a personal best of 3400 in one day.
Camp
life was great, too. By the end of it we had become a pretty tight-knit little
family/community. Every weekend we’d have our booze nights around the campfire,
shit would go down, everybody had a time. We were well fed, and all of us would
go through the same shit every day, which made life a little easier. At times,
it was hell out here, though. Between the bugs and the exertion of the job
itself and the pushing everything to the limit and the isolation of the bush,
shit oftentimes got pretty rough. Especially the time it rained for eight days
without break. By about day 4 of that spell, everything that everybody owned
was soaked, people were sleeping in puddles in their tents (myself included),
everybody was cold and miserable. And then, on the eight day, the rain turned
to snow. Quite a few people left after that. And that was the end of may. No
more than three days later it began to get hot. The snow that brought the
summer on. Only in Canada.
I
had plenty of wildlife encounters, as well. Bear cubs, wolf cubs, a cougar,
many bears, a few moose, I caught a salamander in a swamp, owls and rabbits,
etc. By far the best animal encounter for me was on my birthday. Immediately
following a rowdy “Happy Birthday to You”, a huge moose ran out onto the road
in front of the van and just stared pegging it u the road in front of us,
running away from us along the road. It was crazy.
After planting
finished up at the end of June, those of us who were staying on to do thinning
(less than half of us) had a week off to do whatever we wanted before going
back out to the bush for some more punishment. I went with my buddies Marek and
Artur to Montreal. It was pretty much a bender, Montreal is great. The Jazzfest
was on, Canada day was on – although it was pretty much hijacked by the
Spanish, after their Eurocup win. But, after a five days of drinking, dancing,
pigs on spits (food!), and just great times with great people in a great city,
it was time to get on back to the bush.
Our next job was
thinning. This basically consisted of going out into older planting pieces with
a big brushcutter saw and mowing down the competition surrounding the existing
crop trees. A substantially more dangerous line of work than planting ( a
German guy named Mike had a bad fall and chopped two of his fingers off), but
actually pretty fun once you got in the swing of it – charging around and
dropping poplars and balsams left, right, and centre. The pay was a little
better than planting, too. Paid this time by the hectare cleared.
And so, after two
months of that shenanigans, the time has come to get on the road again. I am
now on my way across to Kelowna to catch up with Mikie, who I’ve not seen in
four months, and hopefully doing a couple of weeks work to buffer out the hip
pocket before beginning the long and dusty trail down south. I’ve said my
goodbyes to Calgary, my little home away from home, and I’m just about to the
end of my solo road for some time. I’m really looking forward to seeing my bro
and doing some gin-soaked brainstorming about the whole thing because, as yet,
we’re rather short on plans of action and whatnot, but these things will open
up as it comes. The butterflies of movement are well and truly back in
business. Party on, Wayne.
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