Here is an excerpt from my forthcoming ebook, Screefing: A Tree Planter's Reflection. The work, which recounts my experiences planting trees in Northern Ontario, consists of short prose pieces, journal entries, poems, and letters. My intention was to paint a picture not just of the job itself, or even of the landscape, which remains a part of me to this day. Rather, I hope to have also offered a psychological and spiritual meditation that transcends the mere details of economic relationships and aching backs. The book is due out later this month. Enjoy.

Prologue

“Like a fuckin’ war zone.”

Andy is one of our two foremen. He’s driving the van, slouched and scrawny, fingers on the pale blue steering wheel in a loose-fingered, tobacco-stained grip. We’re an hour out of Chapleau, thirteen hours out of Toronto. At Iron Bridge, I remember, we turned north off the Trans-Canada onto an unpaved road officially called a highway with a sign that said Chapleau 224. Now, we’re bumping along a dirt logging road, crammed in shoulder to shoulder.

“A fuckin’ war zone,” Andy says again.

Outside, past the scrub that lines the road, the world is broken bones—shattered slivers of the northern forest stabbing up roots and branches at a red sky sliding into sunset, and no leaves visible anywhere. Not that this is the first clearcut we’ve passed. They came and went at intervals since not long after Iron Bridge, over flats or up the sides of stump-stubbled hills. But this is no small cut. It offers no boundary in any direction: a silence that tears your eyes and stabs your lungs with the broken ends of sticks.

Sometime from someplace.

We enter as we leave.