Here is another excerpt from my forthcoming ebook Screefing: A Tree-Planter's Reflection, due out this month. Rather than posting an isolated piece, I thought it might be better to put up a sequence, so that anyone who is interested can get a sense of how the book flows. This excerpt covers the three main genres I use: short prose, poetry, and journal entry. Enjoy.
Looking
Out of
seedlings, I crouch on the edge of a white birch stand as the daylong rain
slides down my back along the inside of my rain suit. It’s mid-afternoon, and
I’m the last one on the block, alone and idle until Andy comes back with
another load of trees. I cough, sniffle, huddle down lower in no hurry to move.
Slipping off my glove and setting it beside me, I let my hands fall slack at my
sides, touch the cool brown of last year’s leaves, spread my fingers wide, and
press down into the damp.
I’d like to
think I feel something big—the pulse of the land, the slow movement of life
through time—but really it’s just dead leaves and water. Feels good on my
fingers, loosens them up from the long clutch of work.
A rumble in my
gut, and a wet cough spits phlegm into the rain.
I have to admit
that behind the promise of good money and the warnings of hard labour and
monotony, I came here looking for something spiritual. Something godlike even,
even if that is too big a word.
Something I’d maybe understand but still be self-conscious about discussing
with most of my friends. I don’t know. Something bigger than life the way the
sky is bigger than the rock-solid earth. Bigger than sound, bigger than rain.
Forgetting my
hands, my eyes wander out across the debris I’ve been working through. The
hundred crooked shades of brown are spotted yellow-green, bright in the heavy
grey, and my own pale rows of jackpine are almost invisible. A chipmunk perches
on a dripping twig, listens, then runs down.
Low over the
hill on the far side of the block, a narrow gap opens in the clouds, letting in
nothing but light.
Limen
Silence breathes wind. Out
of this quiet, anything
can be born—
Stone Man
People back
home like to babble about Mother Nature, Earth Mother, Earth Goddess—how kind
and giving and fertile she is. But they’ve never been on the shield-rock, and
they don’t know Stone Man.
Maybe he’s a
bastard son. His beard is made of dried up moss, and his feet are as big as
boulders. At night sometimes he walks through camp grumbling like a pack of
hungry bears, and on hot days when the water-jugs run dry in the middle of the
afternoon he pisses in the streams so that anyone who drinks from them gets the
shits.
It’s Stone Man
got to Chi on the Elliot Lake plant, I think now after it’s over. Snuck into
his head in the morning and turned his blood to sand and his heart to gravel.
And it’s Stone Man got to Joe. Kept grabbing at the heels of those stupid
cowboy boots he wore until his knees hurt all day long and he woke up in the
mornings stiff and squeaky. And I know he got to Martha. Stuck a rock up where
she was screefing and shattered half the bones in her foot.
Once, he almost
got to me. I was standing on the rock-flats looking for anyplace with enough
soil to stick a tree in, and just stopped. No one else anywhere near. No one
moving at all but me, and I wasn't really moving anymore. No sound but the wind
and the flies. Only there was a voice in the rock whispering into my feet,
quiet and low, sneaking up the muscles in my legs and wrapping itself around my
stomach with a heavy feeling like sinking to the ground.
So I sank to
the ground.
Stayed there I
don’t know how long, and when I got up again the sun had moved and Mark was
honking the horn to call it a day. I think it was the horn scared Stone Man
away, or at least startled him a bit.
Tuesday, May 12:
This morning there was snow on the ground and on the
tents. Had to break through inch-thick ice on the wash-bins to do the breakfast
dishes, and by the time I finished scrubbing, my hands ached up to the elbows
and I could barely carry my cup back to the cook tent. By noon, though, it was
hot and still: bugs were bad. Wrapped my bandanna around my head to keep the
black flies out of my ears.
Adam broke a thousand. First one to get there. Says
the beer was warm.
After supper, I took a walk down to the swamp on the
far side of the dunes behind camp. My feet sank into the earth until my work
boots were covered in thick water and algae. Tried to think—about anything—but
there was nothing in my head. Or nothing that would stay. Walked back up past
the cook tent and didn’t talk to anyone.
Later. Don’t know what time. We’ve had bears snuffling
around camp, and they just left. One had its snout up to my tent, a few inches
from my face. I could look up and see its head silhouetted in moonlight on the
sagging canvas, and hear every breath it took. I remembered being told that
bears are most apt to get nasty if you startle them, but if you let them know
you’re there—as long as there’s no food in your tent—they won’t bother you. So,
very gently, I started to shift my legs and breathe a little louder. The bear
kept sniffing, so I shifted a little more and sang a few bars of “Row Row Row
your Boat.” After the second or third merrily-merrily, the bear bumped its nose
against the canvas, pushing in until it touched my forehead and I could feel
the thick amoral strength of the living world pressing with claws and teeth and
hunger and everything but thought. Warm, damp breath snorted out against my
skin, neither faster nor slower than when I’d started to sing. I kept singing.
The bear kept sniffing. I’d like to say that we were communicating in some
fashionably psychic spirit-of-nature kind of way, but I was just trying to stay
alive, and the bear was just hovering between the biochemical signals for “eat”
and “don’t eat.”
Eventually, the sniffing stopped, the canvas pulled
back, and the shadow went away.
A little after that—I’m not sure how long—I stopped
singing.
