The Treeplanter’s Tale, Part One

Shortly after the plane rose and Duncan fell into his somatoform slumbers, our poet was followed into this passive state by the innocent Zulecken, who always fell asleep, like a carefree child, whenever he rode in any moving vehicle, including, much to his embarrassment when he was at one time entertaining a romantic interest in Montreal, horse and buggy. The young but exhausted Gaston, who was relieved to find that his strategy with Duncan had indeed succeeded, after the Frenchman had ventured so far as to poke the imposing poet’s unresponsive shoulder around the back of his seat, took only a few minutes longer to fall asleep himself. The extra preparations heaped upon him the night before by Duncan and Zulecken had robbed him of all but two hours’ rest, and so even the uncomfortable Air Canadia seat was for him a sufficient bed, and the weird institutional space of the airplane an adequate bedroom. Fortunately for their fellow passengers, none of our heroes was given to snoring, though Zulecken, whose hat had fallen to his side and hung there suspended by its string from his neck, had by virtue of bodily neccessity occupied both armrests of his aisle seat, and his gentle girth thus prevented his anxious window-seated neighbour any chance at a polite skirting for the inevitable trip to the toilet.

Clark, however, was unable to take similar advantage of the opportunity for a nap. For beneath the accommodating mask of his simultaneously pleasant and impassive countenance, our hero was - anxious. Though Clark had secured Zulecken’s endorsement of his superior authority for the project, the argument afterwards with Duncan left no doubt in Clark’s mind that the poet would refuse to submit, or cooperate, in the same way. The matter was far from being merely theoretical, for Clark had still not solved the divisive problem introduced by the presence of others in his project. The most pressing issue was still the planned opening ceremony, when they would dip their toes in the Atlantic, which would take place immediately upon their arrival in St John’s, and would mark the formal commencement of their symbolic journey across the land. The Canadian Literature professor had, indeed, become obsessed with the order and manner in which the three collaborators would baptize themselves in the great ocean where Canada’s first settlers had landed; for this order would constitute the relative symbolic importance of each in the ensuing project, and the ceremony had thus become a synechdoche for the establishment of the entire project. Or so it seemed to Clark, for so would any sophisticated reader have interpreted such an episode, were it to take place in a novel.

It was a vexing problem, and resolving it would require fine diplomatic dexterity. Clark was well aware of Duncan’s penchant for attracting the spotlight - his behaviour at the meeting in Macdonald Hall, and unprecedented hijacking of Clark’s bandwagon, were proof enough of that. Clark considered simply announcing the order, and imperiously allocating the second position to Duncan, but knew that Duncan would certainly understand what was at stake in that announcement and demand priority. With a man like Duncan, Clark understood, straightforward belligerence could not be overcome by the offering of belligerence in turn, as their learned but heated disagreement over the merits of Horowitz’s dullness had shown. Perhaps some form of light deception would work, he wondered - but the honest Clark knew he had no gift for it, and besides, if he did once go down that path, he would always know that his quest for Canadian identity had begun with something like a lie, which would, in a sense, corrupt his noble national endeavour forever, and in spirit.

As he turned in his aisle seat to gaze over his neighbour’s knees and out of the airplane’s window into the passing Ontario sky, the troubled professor noticed that the young man sitting next to him appeared to be studying him intently. Perhaps in his late twenties, with a boyish face, the young man was dressed casually, rather like a student, in black leather shoes, khaki pants, and a t-shirt that showed off his powerful, athletic frame. After a brief, awkward moment, the young man smiled pleasantly and asked: “Pardon me, but are you Professor Gordon Donald Clark?”

This was a somewhat surprising and very gratifying question for the humble professor, especially given his present state of self-doubt. Though he was well-known in his own circles, and had even had some media attention, most of those circles were limited to those who had an academic interest in Canadian Literature, and most of that attention took place either on the campus or on the state-run radio, rather than on television. Thus, while it was not unprecedented, it was nevertheless quite rare for him to be recognized by the random public. It happened occasionally that he ran into a former student, though if that were the case, he thought, the young man would have been unlikely to have asked him the question regarding his identity with such uncertainty. “Yes, I am,” Clark replied, blushing slightly, and he asked, paradoxically but characteristically, in a rather ingratiating manner: “Have we met before? If so, I’m sorry I didn’t recognize - “

“No need to apologize, professor,” the young man replied confidently. “I studied English Literature as an undergraduate and took a course in Canadian Literature, so of course I’ve read some of your work and I thought I’d recognized you from a photograph at the back of one your books that I read years ago.”

“You must have an excellent memory,” said Clark, instinctively hiding his gratification under a compliment to this stranger. “And what is your name?” he asked, in the tone of a serious but accommodating professor to an interested and ingratiating student.

“Bjorn Janson.”

“Ah,” replied Clark, registering in his voice and on his face his recognition of the unique ethnicity of the name, “and where were you studying for your degree?”

“The University of Saskatchewan.”

“Oh, yes,” said Clark, somewhat embarrassed and at a loss for a reply. “It’s a - uh - it’s a very good university.”

Janson eyed Clark silently, with a serious look that may have been a sign of wounded pride, or a deliberate approximation of such in order to further irritate Clark’s backhanded embarrassment.

“Yes - and - are you still in the field?” asked Clark, averting his eyes.

“The field?”

“Canadian Literature.”

“No,” replied Janson, who Clark began to suspect was suppressing a smile. “I never really took to it. I went into law.”

“In Saskatchewan?”

“No, Harvard.”

“Ah - well, ah good for you,” said Clark, genuinely pleased for the young man, and pleased that he could move on from their awkward moment. “It must have been very interesting, and such a change from Saskatchewan.”

Janson turned his head away for a brief moment, as though he were looking for something out the window, before he turned back and said: “Yeah I guess so. Would have been more interesting at Yale though.”

“Indeed?”

“Yeah. I always believed Harvard was the best place to be for law, but after I got there I discovered quickly and to my shame that when you’re actually in the halls of power that kind of belief in the best just betrays hopelessly provincial ignorance. Anyways, I only found out after I got there that everybody knows Harvard’s where you go if you don’t have the brains or the background for Yale or if you’re just an asshole who wants to make a shitload of money or get ahead in US party politics. If you’re really interested in the law from an ethical and philosophical perspective you go to Yale. Given the direction I wanted to go Harvard’s turned into a kind of a stain on my rep.”

Clark, genuinely surprised at this revelation, widened his eyes slightly and retreated his gaze. “What direction is that?”

“Academic.”

“So you”re doing a PhD?”

“Yup.”

“At Harvard?”

Janson’s eyes narrowed, but as he studied Clark’s honest countenance, they relaxed almost immediately, and he broke into an unforced smile.

“No, Cambridge.”

“Well!” replied Clark, now more than a little embarrassed by his earlier embarrassment. “Which college?” he asked, with a knowing look that was meant to reclaim the natural authority he felt he had somehow lost so far in their conversation. As Clark knew, this was the question that one always asked after an Oxbridge man identified himself as such.

“Gonville and Caius,” the young man sighed in reply, in a slightly unhappy tone, as he lowered his head, and his gaze.

Surprised by this response, Clark said: “But surely you must be very proud! It is one of Cambridge’s most renowned colleges - “

“I thought so too and I guess it’s true but when I got there I realized that it’s also the most boring college in Cambridge, populated for the most part by dim Tories and the sort of foreigners who are attracted to them so lots of people from Ontario which kind of compounds the problem. Its nickname amongst other Cambridge students is Grumble and Beans.”

“Ah,” said Clark, somewhat shocked and a little confused by the young man’s quick and direct speech. “And - and what is the subject of your doctorate?”

“It’s about how a society’s understanding of legal principles and its corresponding laws are affected by that society’s changing understanding of natural law and so nature itself. Naturally enough it’s in the field of environmental law.”

“That’s a very excellent idea, Bjorn,” replied Clark, genuinely impressed.

“Actually it’s my work that brings me to St. John’s - there’s a conference there focusing on international law and the sea - fishing and shipping rights and all that.”

“I find it rather surprising that a young man from the prairies would find himself involved with the law of the sea.”

“I’m not surprised. Anyways, my inspiration came from my summers treeplanting in BC when I was an undergraduate.”

“Ah - you treeplanted - I’ve heard about that but never first-hand - most of my students get internships in offices in Toronto and Ottawa over the summer,” Clark replied, then quickly cleared his throat and asked: “What is treeplanting exactly?”

Janson, politely ignoring Clark’s presumptuous awkwardness, answered: “Well, it’s lots of things, at least to me. It plays a very important role in the lives of those who undertake it - it’s sort of a uniquely Canadian rite of passage, you might say.”

This, of course, changed Clark’s interest in the conversation not only in degree but also in kind. He sat up straight and turned more fully to face Janson. “That is very interesting to me, young man. In fact, my colleagues and I - you may have heard of the poet Hugh Duncan? - and perhaps Professor Zulecken, the famous Toro- the famous Canadian publisher?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard of Duncan. A master sopoforician in my opinion. Haven’t heard of Zulecken though - what is Canadian Studies anyway?”

“Well, uh it’s like Canadian Literature, but they also - in any case perhaps we should leave that topic for a later discussion. As I was saying, your description of treeplanting as “a uniquely Canadian rite of passage” - which I must say was very well put, young man, very well put - that description is particularly interesting to me, as my colleagues and I are at this very moment embarking on the first stage of a journey across Canada in order to discover and document real Canadian identity.”

Janson replied with a look that was at once honestly curious and amused.

“And so you see the opportunity to investigate “a uniquely Canadian rite of passage” is of particular importance to me - for what it would say about who we are when we are young and how we become men, I mean grown-ups, that is, when we emerge into adulthood - uh, for what it would say in particular about that transition in relation to our engagement with the land, and of course with respect to the stewardship and maintenance of our great birthright and responsibility, the environment - “

“I think I understand what you’re after. Are you writing a book or something?”

“Well, yes, we will be compiling the results of our research into a text to be named after our project, which I should mention is being generously funded, and which is to be called: “Our Home and Narrative Land: Real Canadian Stories and Real Canadian Identity”.”

“Right.”

“And, young man, seeing that you have given such a - a relevant and interesting description of the meaning of treeplanting in the context of Canadian identity, and seeing that here on this plane we have an excellent opportunity to discuss what you meant, I would like to ask you formally, if you would like to discuss this “rite of passage” with me, so that I may include an account of it in my research?”

Janson looked hard into Clark’s eyes, slightly disrupting the latter’s excitement. Then the young man adopted a serious expression and turned to stare out of the window.

“I can’t tell you,” Clark went on, worried that he might lose this remarkable fish that had so unexpectedly landed on his hook, “how pleased I am that at the very beginning of our journey, even before we have reached our first destination, that we should have had the great good luck - or perhaps great good fate - to have encountered not only a young man with real Canadian experience, but also one who has been trained in the field of Canadian Literature, and is therefore familiar with the history and nature of our national storytelling, our distinct cultural narratology - “

At this point, Janson turned back to face Clark and said: “Well, Professor, I will tell you about my experiences treeplanting, but it may take some time, and I can’t promise a very coherent account. What I can tell you is what I saw and did in my own way, and to some extent what it meant to me - “

“Excellent, young man, excellent. What an exceptional opportunity!”

“And I suppose we’re stuck with each other on this flight anyway.”

“No need to be modest, young man, I assure you I find your company very stimulating. May I - do you mind if I retrieve my notebook?”

“Not at all.”

Clark reached into a pocket inside his coat and, with a slight flourish, brought out a brand new notebook bound in red leather. It was one of twelve which he had bought for the purpose of recording the events of his journey. He carefully opened the notebook to the first white page, and then poised above it a shining new red pen, which he had simultaneously retrieved from his pants pocket. He turned to Janson with an excited look. This was an important moment for his project, and he made no effort to hide his anticipation.

“Well,” Janson began, his eyes fixed on Clark’s pen, “my treeplanting experience began the day after I finished exams at the end of my first year at university. The only person I had ever spoken to about treeplanting was a friend of mine’s older sister, who I thought was about the coolest thing since - anyway, she had all these great stories, and she was editing a local independent music magazine, and one day she snuck me and my friend into a bar when we were still under age. She was probably only 21 at the time but I thought of her as older and I suppose I thought everything she did was part of a better life than I’d lived so far. I was already a little drunk after my second shot of tequila when she started talking about treeplanting. She said it was really hard but that you got to work outside in the mountains every day and live in a tent in a camp, and that as a rookie planter in your first two-month season you could make over five thousand dollars. To me, that was a lot of money, and the mountains part sounded fantastic. I had always loved the mountains and the forests, but had never had - “

“I can only imagine how wonderful the mountains and forests must appear to someone who grew up on a prairie farm,” Clark interjected approvingly, gazing into the imaginary distance, his pen pausing.

“Actually I grew up in Regina.”

“But weren’t your parents farmers? I naturally assumed - “

“No, my mom was a human rights lawyer and my dad was a cultural studies professor.”

Clark, somewhat confused, and sensing angrily that on some obscure level he ought to feel ashamed of something he didn’t fully understand or really feel guilty for, poised his red pen again as an indication that he expected Janson to continue his tale.

After a brief pause and again giving the impression that he was barely suppressing a smile, Janson continued. “So, I’d never had any real experience in the bush, even though I found it very attractive. Did you get that?”

“Just a second - yes,” replied Clark, writing furiously.

“So pretty much there in that bar I decided I was going to go planting. The next day, after I peeled my hungover ass out of bed at the crack of two I went to the summer jobs office on campus and applied for a planting job. I got a couple of interviews. The first one went pretty badly - I’d never had a job before, and the interviewer was one of those ignorant shits who thinks if you haven’t grown up on a farm getting fat on a tractor or spent your summers in high school in a Dairy Queen kitchen filling your pasty face with acne then you probably have a bad work ethic - anyway the second guy who interviewed me, a veteran planting foreman named Shaun, was about 21 and so also seemed older to me, but we got along well enough I guess that he decided to take a chance on me.

“So the day after I finished my exams I got up early and went over to Shaun’s house to go treeplanting. The most important thing to note at this point is that for me it was a big dive off a very deep end - I had no real idea of what I was going to be doing and where I was going to be doing it and who I would be doing it with. It was the beginning of my first real adventure in life, the first time, as something other than a child, that I was going to be in a totally new situation with no one around who had any idea about me or my history or my personality. In effect it was the first situation in my adult life where I had to establish my identity like that and would at the same time see how my identity would be established from a blank slate. With the exception of my first hand job, it was the most exciting moment of my life to that point.”

At this, Clark’s pen faltered for a moment, but he quickly decided to push on and ignore his interviewee’s bawdy insensitivity.

“In the house were about twenty strangers to me, mostly in their very early 20s, plus my new boss Shaun who I’d met only the once at the interview. After a short five minute speech to the crew Shaun said it was time for us all to divide up into groups and get going. Before I really knew what was happening he put me in a group of four others and we were outside beside a big rusty beat up old blue van throwing our things inside, then getting inside ourselves, and then we were on our way. There were no seat belts on the seats in the back, and I remember that added a sense of recklessness to the whole endeavour. I didn’t even know where we were going, except that it was somewhere in BC, and it wasn’t until I asked how long it would take that the driver mentioned our destination was a place called Prince George, which I’d never heard of, and that we were going to have to stop in Jasper for the night before making it to PG by the middle of the next day.”

“Ah yes,” interjected Clark, more out of a need to rest his already aching hand, perhaps, than from any sense that he had anything relevant to contribute. “Jasper, such a beautiful place, with such a remarkable role in the history of the settling of the West -“

“And the STD capital of Canada.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah there’s a big community of young folks who head out there every year to work in the hotels and restaurants or whatever and party and man they spread it around. You don’t double bag it you’re putting your life in someone else’s - “

“I - I think I understand,” Clark cut in quickly. “Please go on with your story.”

“I would get to know three of my four companions pretty well as we planted together over the next couple of months. The first guy I talked to, the driver, was a guy named Stan Kowalski, sort of a weird guy with eyes wide apart whose driving skills matched to the quality of his van. He didn’t talk much but when he did it always seemed a little paranoid. He was older than the rest of us - like 38 - so we ended up calling him Grandpa. We weren’t very nice to him but he was the sort of person no one’s very nice to.

“The second guy I talked to was named Sidney Feinberg. He managed to snag shotgun - “

Clark’s eyes widened. “A shotgun! In the van! I knew Westerners liked guns, but - well, being a - ahem, a city boy, I imagine you were unfamiliar with such things, and you must have been, uh rather intimidated by the presence of such a dangerous weapon, and among strangers, no less - “

Janson’s eyes widened slightly. “‘Shotgun’ is slang for the front passenger seat.”

Clark took a moment to process this, and sensed that he had some dignity to retrieve. Instinctively, he fell back on his established professional linguistic expertise and asked, in a slightly imperious tone: “I see. Is that slang peculiar to the Saskatchewan dialect?”

“No. Though we do have some slang, now that you mention it. What other people call “hoodies” we call “bunny hugs”, I assume because when you put your hands in the pockets of a hoodie they’re sort of in the position a bunny characteristically holds its paws. We also have a slang for procrastination which we call ‘fucking the dog.’”

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah ‘fucking the dog’ and its variant “screwing the pooch” are used to invoke a sense of time wasted. Hence, for example, ‘Last Saturday I didn’t do anything, just sat on my couch all day watching Simpsons reruns and screwing the pooch,’ or ‘I fucked the dog all day at work yesterday.’”

“I see.”

“Anyway this Sidney guy was one of those guys who wears his farm boy upbringing like it’s some kind of special achievement badge, and did not by any means regard himself as a dog-fucker. He immediately discovered that I was a university kid, and I guess to him that marked me as believing I belonged to a better class than regular people, which of course suited his desire to be a working class hero, since to be a hero of course you need a villain - anyways, he then discovered in turn that I was from the city, which of course is a relative term in Saskatchewan, and proceeded to tell me that having grown up on a farm he knew all about hard work and that I was going to have a pretty hard time doing manual labour. I found him a little intimidating, as I had always been a little intimidated by farm kids, who constantly talk about how hard working they are. It didn’t seem to bother his sense of himself as a hard worker that he was only nineteen and already had a big gut going, but I just thought it takes all kinds to make the world, you know.

“The third guy in the van, who was sitting in the middle row of seats with me, was a guy named Jeff Zahorchak. He had a strangely slack jaw and a generally slack appearance - when he wasn’t planting he always wore these ragged surfing shoes - and though he was generally easy going he had a serious streak of paranoia, deeper even than Grandpa’s. Which, I soon came to understand, was the result of a long and serious drug habit of one kind or another. He seemed like an interesting guy but he didn’t really talk much.

“The fourth guy, seated behind me, was diminutive and bespectacled and seemed entirely out of place. His name was Price Vincent I shit you not and he even looked like he had cruel parents. He just sat in the back and didn’t say anything unless he was expressing some kind of worry or discomfort.

“Talk on the drive to Jasper was mostly punctuated by hard-to-believe but somehow convincing stories about how difficult treeplanting was and how something like twenty percent of rookie planters didn’t make it past the first week. Feinberg went on at length telling a series of stories he’d heard on the playground - “

“The playground?” interjected a puzzled, and slightly worried, Clark. “Was he a teacher?”

“No that’s just a way of referring to things you hear as you go about your life that aren’t necessarily very believable and usually have a - colourful quality.”

“Ah, I see,” replied Clark, carefully noting down Janson’s explanation. “Is that more Saskatchewan slang?”

“No I just made it up. As I was saying, Feinberg had heard a bunch of stories about planting from someone or other and had no compunction about repeating them to the rest of us, sort of in the manner of the big fat oafs you see all the time at Tim Horton’s, you know the kind who always sort of holds his head back offensively as though he’s preparing for a confrontation, and who holds forth though as he were some kind of authority when what he’s saying makes Calvin’s dad seem more accurate than the Encyclopaedia Britannica - “

“Excuse me, I’m sorry to interrupt you once again so soon, but, may I just ask, who is Calvin’s dad?”

“Just a reference to the father in Calvin and Hobbes who would answer his son’s questions about the way the natural world works with absurdities. Feinberg’s stories were designed to be intimidating and essentially to make him look tough, as though somehow the telling of another’s failure were evidence that he had himself succeeded, or as though he somehow partook of the courage of those whose heroic actions he described - another fat oaf trademark. The first one he told was about a city boy who always got really good grades but had never had a job and who went treeplanting and couldn’t handle the work. That was a pretty obvious shot at me but I just ignored it - Saskatchewan people love to pretend that hard work is some kind of exceptional achievement and exclusive to the kind of people who like to waste their lives on stupid cars and snowmobiles and ATVs and that sort of garbage - “

“It sounds like you have some resentments about your upbringing in Saskatchewan.”

“Yeah there are lots of ways that Canadians keep each other down and each province seems to have its own characteristic ways of limiting its own people. In Saskatchewan, the biggest threat is the kind of loser who invokes “the real world”. Kids get totally poisoned by an affectation of practicality, a, I guess a vain pragmatism, that is used in every instance to impose limits on them. In Saskatchewan people confuse negativity with pragmatism and pretend to know all about “the real world” when what all they really know is the tiny projected world of a narrow-minded bullying thug who insists that his own local environment just happens to be a model for the whole world - “

“Ah, yes, I think I see, but uh perhaps we’re getting a little sidetracked….” Clark interjected politely, increasingly aware that his interviewee possessed more than average resources of irascibility and bile, and might even be slightly unbalanced.

“Sorry, you’re right, thanks for that - I have a tendency to go off on ranting digressions. Ah, right - Feinberg’s, I think his second story was about a bear attack.”

“A bear attack!”

“Yeah I found out later that treeplanters pretty rarely suffer from bear attacks and there are other, greater but less romantic dangers involved in the work, but I didn’t know that at the time and the bear thing - well I can’t say it sounded scary actually. I was eighteen years old and the fact is I found the idea that there was a risk of bear attacks - appealing. In Feinberg’s story, some guy was getting into a van with the rest of his crew in the morning before they drove to the clear cut or cut block where they were planting, when he realized he’d left his shovel or something back at his tent. He went back for it and was bending over to open the zipper on his tent when WHACK! a fucking bear smacked him down from behind and he went sprawling, stunned and shocked. I guess that’s how bear attacks often happen - you don’t see or hear the thing coming and it just knocks you down with a swipe from its paw. Before the guy knows what’s happening, he’s in the dirt, winded, and with a bear gnawing on his skull, no kidding.”

Clark’s face lost some colour, but he continued bravely noting down the details of this terrible story, shaking his head in some dismay at the breezy manner in which Janson spoke of such horrible things. “How old was the young man who was being mauled?”

“I think nineteen or twenty. So there he is getting chewed on and the bear eventually lets go. It probably only had hold of him for a few seconds but to the guy of course it felt like forever, and the guy gets up and tries to run, when WHACK! the bear swipes at him again and down he goes. As Feinberg put it, “I guess the bear didn’t like the taste of his head, A-HAW-HAW-HAW, because this time it started chewing the poor fuck’s arm!” Yeah, he talked kind of like that. The same thing happened again, with the bear chewing and letting go, the guy getting up for a brief run and then getting knocked down and gnawed again. After some time some of the planters on the guy’s crew got pissed he was taking so long to get his shovel and taking up their time - planters get paid for every tree they plant and they usually have it down to a science how much money they lose for every minute in the day that’s wasted, I mean they know exactly how many trees they need to plant to pay for a beer, or the rent, or whatever - anyway they went to look for him, and then of course they saw the bear.”

“And what did they do next? Was there a park warden they could go to for help?”

“Well they weren’t exactly working in a fucking Windsor car factory. There were no authorities to appeal or defer responsibility to. Working in the bush is dangerous and if something happens you have to deal with it on your own. The more institutionalized you are, the more likely you are to place responsibility in the hands of some authority figure, and then resent them for the responsibility they have over you even though you gave it to them in the first place, the worse a planter you’ll be, and the greater a danger and a burden you’ll be to others. Working in the mountains, out in nature, you get a very different attitude toward the world from the kind you get from factory people - “

+awk+[Correctly worried that this was the beginning of another rant, and genuinely interested in hearing the fate of the poor mauled planter, Clark asked that Janson continue with his story.]

“Sorry - anyways, the other planters on this guy’s crew saw what was happening, and they started yelling at the bear and picked up some logs or shovels or whatever was lying around and went up and began bashing away at the bear.”

“Indeed!”

“So the bear lets go of the guy and the guy gets up and runs off, and the bear just goes and whacks him down and starts chewing again, and the planters go up and bash away at the bear again, still yelling.”

“But weren’t they afraid that the bear would turn around and attack them?”

“You know what? I honestly doubt it. They were doing what they thought was right and getting that bear out of there was the only thing that mattered to them at the time. So finally the bear gets up, I’d guess more tired of the yelling than anything else, and runs off.”

“How injured was the young man?”

“Interestingly enough, according to the story he came out pretty well. I guess there was a chopper nearby that they got on the radio while they were giving the guy first aid, and they must have been near a town, but anyway he just lost some blood and had a bunch of stitches on his skull and arms, but he was otherwise fine and I think back at work in a month.”

“Incredible!”

“Yeah, though Feinberg followed that story with one about what he’d heard was the worst living threat to planters: riggers.”

“Riggers? Is a rigger some sort of animal?”

Janson smiled. “A lot of people would say yes. They’re guys who work on oil rigs.”

“I see,” said Clark.

“According to Feinberg’s source, planters and riggers were sort of natural enemies and prone to fighting each other. The stereotypes, which have a basis in a fair amount of fact, point up the contrast between the two: whereas planters have a pretty high concentration of college kids, riggers, at least back in those days, were mostly determined not to go anywhere near anything as ridiculous as a university; planters are lean and athletic, while riggers are big and brag about how much they can bench; planters are polite and riggers are rough; planters grow dreads and riggers get crew cuts; planters smoke weed and riggers snort coke; planters, basically, are hippies and riggers are jocks.”

“I think I understand,” said Clark, getting in on the game. “Planters listen to Gordon Lightfoot, while riggers listen to BTO.”

“What’s BTO?”

“Surely,” said Clark, honestly surprised and somewhat disappointed that his attempt at a pop-culture reference had failed to hit the mark with the young man, “you’ve heard of Bachman Turner Overdrive, the great Canadian rock band?”

“It sort of rings a bell….”

“They are one of our most celebrated bands. They have won at least four Junos.”

For a moment Clark thought Janson was rolling his eyes, but then realized the young man was probably searching his memory.

“You must have heard the song ‘Takin’ Care of Business’?”

“The one that’s in so many commercials?”

“Well, uh, I suppose it is, but, well, you know, many Beatles songs are also in commercials - “

“When did that song come out?”

“1975?”

“Oh.”

“They also did ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’.”

“Right, the one they always play during breaks at high school volleyball games. Any other hits?”

“Well, I suppose, not really,” said Clark, a little confused and even a little offended, “but, you must understand, they - the band made a great contribution - they are very - the lead singer, a man named Randy Bachman, was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, no less, young man, in recognition of his great contribution to Canadian culture, and he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Dauphin, and was even given The Governor General’s Performing Arts Award, our foremost distinction for excellence in the, ah, performing arts, in 2002.”

“Well, those are very impressive honours.”

“I should think so! The award has placed him in the company of many of our greatest performers, such as Buffy St-Marie, and Bruce Cockburn, and - and Michel Pagliaro, no less!”

“Who?”

“You’ve never heard of Pag, Quebec’s first true rock star? He is a key figure in the evolution of pop music in Canada - “

“Perhaps I could get back to - “

“Sorry, of course,” replied Clark, a little worked up. He once again poised his pen for writing, having been waving it about to accentuate his own mild rant. “I just find it shocking that you haven’t heard of Canada’s most celebrated and award-winning performers.”

“I guess I should pay more attention to the CBC or something. Anyway, Feinberg made these rigger guys sound pretty tough. He said you’d usually come across them in towns, at the bar, and that they had no compunction about beating up hippie planters. His story was simple: he said he’d heard that once on their days off a bunch of planters had been beaten up so badly by some riggers that they couldn’t even finish out the season.”

“I say - “

“That’s when Grandpa started telling a story he’d heard from a veteran planter about a planting contract he and his crew had done in a mountain town called McBride. Apparently all the planters in the crew of about 20 or so were experienced and thought they knew how to handle whatever the bush could throw at them. But the first morning when they got to their block a couple of dozen kilometres outside McBride they immediately noticed something different about the place. The area they were supposed to plant was made up of steep, rocky ravines, covered in slash - the bits of trees and bushes and other detritus left over from the logging process - and sharp, vicious, break-your-ankle schnarb - “

“Schnarb?”

“It’s a planting word used to refer to dense growth and general crap you have to climb over and push through in order to get where you’re going on a cut block - a clear cut, where you plant. So, anyway, as soon as these veterans got out of the van, they were totally covered in mosquitoes. They were so bad you could hear the hum all day long, and if you stopped for a second, you would literally be covered in them. I’ve actually seen that kind of thing, and it’s no exaggeration. And that’s not to mention the black flies. Then it turned out, when they start planting, that the ground was really rocky, so they were constantly banging their shovels into rocks, exacerbating the tendonitis that is a common planter’s ailment. Then they saw tracks for a grizzly, which didn’t make things better, and its spectre hung over everything they did the whole time they were there. They found fresh tracks around the cut block almost every morning. Anyway, since they were experienced, they could tell right away this was going to be a horrible place to plant, and while a normal planting work day lasts about twelve hours, not including travel, these guys decided from the start to work fourteen or fifteen hours a day so they could get out of there quicker. But after only a day or two it started to rain hard, and it didn’t let up much for a month. Which was how long it took them to finish planting the godawful place - even though the contract was only supposed to last a week, and they were paid accordingly. That meant half the season was over - and after all that suffering a lot of them actually owed their planting company money, since daily camp costs are docked from your pay.”

“I say.”

“You said it. But I have to say, after all of those stories, I was honestly just more excited about the whole thing. I wanted an adventure and I’d never heard any stories like these - and I was headed right for a life that might provide them. The risks, the effort, these strange people, everything appealed to something deep inside me, something in my character that I had always suspected was there but had never had a chance to test. And now, travelling along with strangers in a shitty van to god knows where, I was going to get my chance.

“That night we stopped in Jasper, met up with the rest of the crew and crammed as many people as we could into some hotel rooms, which turned out to be standard planter procedure. Then we went for pizza together and were regaled with even more planting tales, mostly from our foreman Shaun and from the other veterans on the crew.

“I had another little moment which meant a great deal to me: I bought my first legal beer - the drinking age in Alberta being eighteen, not nineteen like in Saskatchewan. The experience was especially meaningful to me as I came from a family that didn’t drink at all and so it may even have been the first time I ever had a beer with a meal - as simple as it sounds it was an important moment in my life. As I was sipping from that simple nectar talisman of my flowering adulthood - “

Clark paused his pen and looked up at Janson appreciatively. “‘Nectar talisman’ - that is an impressive image, young man. I shall have to repeat it for Duncan - would you object if he used it in a poem commemorating our journey?”

“Not at all,” replied Janson inattentively, his eyes bright and distant. “It was then that I noticed a girl sitting at our table and obviously part of our crew who for whatever reason I hadn’t noticed when we met in the morning at Shaun’s house. She was - she was totally bald and the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, with long, well-defined arms, and an athletic build, full lips, and wonderful green eyes that had a look in them that sent an electric charge through my spine. She was completely unaware of my existence, of course, but I expected nothing else, and just sat there stunned with that sort of awe for beauty that seems to be the special province of young men.”

“And were many of the women you met treeplanting, uh, bald?”

“No, she was the only one who shaved her head completely, but in the company of planters she didn’t stand out at all, for being bald, anyway. Most of the girls who go planting are not, well, they’re the kind of girls who just kind of do what they want. There were lots of people, women and men alike, who had real dreads, for example - “

“What do you mean by “real” dreads?” Clark asked, somewhat pleased with himself for his casual adoption of the young man’s slang.

“I mean as opposed to the fucking vanity dreads that are so - ok - real dreads come from working in the dirt outdoors and serve a real purpose, related to hard work carried out in the natural elements. Vanity dreads are a perverse attempt to appropriate - “

“Ahem, yes, well, you were saying about Jasper…?”

“Ok - anyways - so I’d noticed this girl, but since at that age I thought that expressing any interest whatsoever in a woman was some kind of violation I was doing my best not to look at her, and thankfully Shaun gave me an opportunity to rest my eyes elsewhere by beginning to tell a new planting story from his own and vicarious experiences. I was fast discovering that telling stories was sort of a planter tradition - probably borne out of the fact that they spend so much time together, travelling and waiting, and sitting around campfires or meal tables in mess tents with no TV or whatever - “

“Aha - this is wonderful - a truly Canadian tradition of storytelling!”

“Maybe, if you include in your definition of “Canadian” activity that is not carried out or taken up under the aegis of some kind of nationalist program governed by a granting council devoted to cultural insularity and nepotism. The kind of weak bullshit that’s promoted by the fucking losers at the arts councils and taken up by the CBC or the various state-appointed mandarins of what counts as Canadian culture, that’s not the kind of thing planters are doing when they’re telling stories, and unlike the fucking CRTC they don’t care if the person telling the story is Canadian or not, like some kind of twisted ethnic profiling to protect and conserve that even the BNP or the Front Nationale don’t dare to dream of - “

At this point Clark, who had never heard this kind of talk before, and whose gentle sensibility led him to be genuinely shocked, cut in: “But surely Canadian culture requires protection by the state from the foreign influences that would dominate - “

“It’s fucking xenophobia. Literally. But because it’s carried out in the name of Canada, which in our discourse is not supposed to be xenophobic, we can’t even admit the fact that our cultural protectionism, which we say we endorse in order to protect our culture from the corruption of foreign influence, is in fact meant to shield the purity of some ersatz simulacrum of a Canadian culture from the corruption of difference, or dissent, which all gets taken up under the concept of ‘foreign’. In other words, if you dissent, you’re not Canadian. And then instead of a culture, we get a nationalist program, and instead of difference, we get identity. We all know any artist who doesn’t conform is represented as not truly Canadian.”

“But - “

“I mean, it’s no fucking joke, its fucking real. I once knew a girl who was applying to do her MFA at a Canadian university, and the board she applied to actually told her to her face that she should abandon her planned project and replace it with work on “something to do with the land” - because she was native. And though that’s bad enough to earn a special place in hell, these moron profs actually thought their vicious suggestion was an expression of racial sensitivity. I mean seriously, this was meant to be taken as a left-wing thing to do - anyways, substitute for that girl all would-be artists in Canada, substitute the subject of landscape for “truly Canadian” content, and those profs for the exclusive claim upon the arts held by the all the fucking arts councils, and you might begin to understand what’s happened to “the arts” in Canada. And if you want to understand what kind of people in Canada call themselves artists, think about the kind of person who would have accepted the profs’s suggestion and internalized it.” At this, Janson stopped, breathing heavily, clearly very worked up, even clenching his hands into fists, unconsciously. “Did you know the pricks at the CRTC actually talk about placing restrictions on our access to foreign content on the internet - “

“But what about supporting Canadian artists? Surely they need the support of the government in order to - “

“Fuck that shit. All those laws and that wasted funding do is support a class of untalented boring halfwits who drive away interesting people by denigrating any work that’s done outside the confines of the government institutions that dole out arts grants, and let me say it here that they do it with money that would be better spent feeding the poor and getting old people out of poverty. People are not going to stop writing and singing just because - ok - anyways, so what you end up with is mindless drone culture soldiers who believe that anything done outside the state is evil, and so you end up with all the weirdnesses of a police state, but in the arts. I mean for example the truth is that no one really gives a single flying fuck about Anne Murray, of all fucking people, but if you watch the CBC you’d think she’s - “

That final line crossed by the irascible young man was one line too far for the professor. Indeed, inside, Clark was fuming and confused, finding it difficult to believe that Janson could possibly have meant what he said. But then the professor reflected upon the fact that, of course, he had not vetted his interviewee beforehand, and had indeed known nothing whatever about him, when he had engaged with him - he had studied no CV, read no reference letters, seen no grades, had heard no opinion from a friend or colleague, and the young man had not been judged to be acceptable by an appointed panel or jury; the young man and his story, to put it precisely, had not been, as they say on the crime shows, processed, and so his opinions could not be relied upon to be appropriate for his project.

But then Clark confronted the fact that this was precisely the kind of unexpected result he should expect, now that he was out in the world collecting stories, and that hearing unfamiliar opinions, sometimes with no content besides an intention to provoke him, was an inevitability, given the nature of his expedition; it was in fact in the very nature of his project. This uncertainty of the public, he realized, he simply had to accept, if he were not to abandon his narrative altogether, and return to his office, and his old, familiar, books.

Thus girded by his hope and by his duty to carry out truly unprecedented research, Clark decided that the opportunity to include Janson’s stories in Our Home and Narrative Land was too important to let the young man’s extreme opinions get in the way of having them recorded. Clark could always leave anything offensive out of his account of the encounter when he eventually compiled his notes into the planned book.

His own anger successfully suppressed, the patient professor politely held his pen aloft as he eyed the young man sternly. At least, he hoped, perhaps in the future he would not encounter such idolatrous anger, which must surely be unique to this strange young scholar.

“Ah, you were saying, about Shaun’s stories….”

“Sorry,” replied Janson, himself rather red in the face. “It’s just that I grew up thinking all artists were assholes possessing at best something less than mediocre intelligence and a sense of self-importance that varies inversely with their talent, a sense of relevance that varies inversely with the - the critical depth and courage of their work, and it wasn’t until I left Canada that I realized it was just Canadian artists that were exclusively like that and so then I set about trying to understand why, because it’s such an incredibly important part of a robust culture, of a good culture, to have artists who are… who are not….” He stared out of the plane sadly. “It’s a terrible thing, to do that, to say that someone carrying out state-sanctioned projects, whose writing will inevitably reflect the writing they did when they submitted the right grant applications written in the right way, to say that these people carrying out state policies are the only real artists precisely because they are effectively civil servants, precisely because they exclude from culture anything that is contrary to the state’s ministry…. It’s so fucking weak…. I mean, artists are supposed to be critics of society, public critics, not public servants, they should be as was said of Milton of the devil’s party, and in Canada the “arts community” has become so complacent that they have actually come to believe that you must be in the pay of the state in order to be a social radical. Just think about that. We’re so pathetic, such laughingstocks, when people pay us any attention, which is rare, because what we do is so - dull. We’ve sucked the blood out of cultural discourse, we’ve turned our writing into the literary equivalent of a night on the town in Ottawa, we’ve driven so many people with important things to say, things we need to hear, this fucking weak hypocritical bullshit has driven so many away, it’s taken all the arts and twisted them into some kind of callow, unctuous hypocrisy….” Pausing, Janson stared out the window, scowling at the white fluffy clouds passing thoughtlessly below him.

After some time, Janson cleared his throat and continued with his tale, much to the relief of the professor, who feared he may have lost hold of his subject.

“Anyways, Shaun told one story that kind of freaked me out. It was about the worst first day of planting he had ever heard of. This girl, I think she had come all the way from Quebec, had come treeplanting because she’d heard it was good money, but she hadn’t really been told anything else about what it was like, and though she wasn’t lazy or incompetent she was basically unprepared for the experience. But as Shaun said, pretty much nobody would have persevered after what she endured that first day.

“It began early in the morning, still nighttime but technically the morning of her first day planting. Apparently she had some trouble setting up her tent the night before, and in the night it collapsed on her. She’d already been a bit nervous about being in the bush and surrounded by all these weird strangers, and let me tell you most mums wouldn’t want their daughters hanging around some of those guys unless she was one tough fucking customer and went with a couple of friends, but anyway, so her tent collapses in the middle of the night, and she wakes up with a start, in the dark on the cold side of an unfamiliar mountain, with everything falling down around her. She starts flailing around and yelling, thinking probably that there must be a bear or a rapist or something attacking her, and anyway since it’s dark and she’s thrashing around in her sleeping bag she just gets wrapped up more in the thin synthetic fabric of her tent, and even starts to roll down the gentle slope towards this nearby creek a little. Of course the other planters with their tents around all get up - or at least some of them bothered to - and they’re pissed off a bit because they’ve lost some sleep already, but when they find out there’s no problem and the girl just freaked out and couldn’t even put up a tent properly, they helped her and didn’t say anything but they were obviously a little disgusted.

“As a result by the first morning of the season’s planting the girl was sort of infamous in the camp and already universally disliked. It didn’t make any difference that there was no good reason for it. Since many of the other planters hadn’t met each other before and weren’t the kinds who would normally get along with each other out in the world, her incident had become an available topic for discussion that united strangers even before she woke up. Which as it turned out was late, either because she didn’t hear her alarm or because it didn’t go off, but in any case someone had to go get her when everyone was already gathering by the big rollagon to prepare for the day - “

“What’s a ‘rollagon’?”

“It’s a planter word for generally a big industrial truck that can take many forms, like with treads or wheels, covered or uncovered, whatever, that’s used to carry planters and equipment to their cut blocks.

“So anyway, this girl, she’s late and doubly embarrassed now and hurrying and of course it’s too late for her to go to the mess tent and make a lunch for later in the day like everyone else had already done, let alone eat any breakfast. So she rushes over to the staging area with everyone staring at her, and the asshole camp supervisor has already gathered all the crews together, like 60 people, to tell them the details about their work on this contract, and the hardhearted fucker points her out when she arrives and says being late isn’t fucking acceptable from any of his fucking planters and if anyone’s late twice they’re fired since being late holds everybody else up and fucks the whole operation.”

“On that note,” interjected Clark, looking around somewhat worriedly and hushing his voice as he leaned over to Janson, “I have noticed that you have been using the, uh the f-word in your, uh, speech, and I was wondering if you could, perhaps uh, tone it down, for the sake of our fellow passengers on this journey.”

Janson simply stared at him with hard eyes and said nothing, which prompted Clark to explain himself further.

“I mean, I must say that, as a Professor of Literature, of course I myself have no problem with the, the ribald, the profane, in fact I once wrote an essay on the use of profanity in dialogue and the characterization of immigrant Irish maids in the contemporary Maritime historical novel, so I, so I am something of an expert in these matters. But, but I do think it is important that we not offend our fellow passengers, who are on this journey with us, and if they were to pay attention could hear every word we say, and may not, well you know, they might not appreciate….”

Janson continued to stare, making Clark feel more and more uncomfortable.

“I mean, of course, I can always edit the profanity out of your tale when my research is finally published, as it will be unnecessary to include such provocative uh phraseology in order to give an accurate account….”

“It’s absolutely necessary for me to include the fucks in order to give an accurate account of my experience.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, let me give you an example. If I had formulated my last phrase in planterspeak, I would have said: “Fuck, it’s absolutely fucking necessary to include the fucks in order to give a fucking accurate account of my fucking experience, fuck”.”

“I - I don’t understand,” replied Clark, as he nervously looked a furtive apology at the unlistening audience of his fellow passengers.

“When planters talk to each other when they’re in the bush, “fuck” is like the capital letter, comma and period of every sentence. Hence, for example, “Fuck, when do you think the fucking rollie’s going to get here, fuck,” or ‘Fuck, I can’t wait for fucking dinner tonight, fuck the fucking cook told me we’re having fucking meatballs, fuck.’”

“But, granting for the moment that, uh, ‘planters’ really do speak in such a shocking, a shocking manner, surely this language, all of this profanity is being used to provoke some kind of response, rather than for the purposes of genuine communication. It sounds rather, well, petulant, rather puerile to me, to force that kind of language on people just to shock them.”

“Forgive me professor, but their speech isn’t directed at people like you, and certainly isn’t meant to be written down and formally assessed. It is neither intended to be nor is it in fact in any way shocking to planters. After a while you don’t even hear the “fuck” anymore, any more than you might remark a glottal touch or the standard pauses we insert in our speech like “er” or “uh” or whatever. You might say that after a while the fucks become such a normal part of life they become invisible.”

“I just can’t believe that it - that - that “fuck” can just become part of a language like that,” replied the incredulous Clark bravely.

Janson’s eyes softened and withdrew from the professor somewhat, now expressing a mixture of his earlier sadness along with a sort of aggressive resignation. “Forgive me, professor,” he replied, adopting something closer to the tone of a lawyer, “but if you’re not going to believe me because what I say doesn’t match what you already believe, if you’re going to reject my representations of the world as provocative fictions, then little purpose will be served in the two of us continuing our conversation, nor, if I may, will any purpose be served in your continuing on with your project at all.”

“But, Mr. Janson, I assure you I did not mean to imply that you were lying, I was merely - “

“I think, sir, that rather than meaning anything, what you were doing was simply taking an opportunity to - “

“Look, young man,” replied Clark, quite honestly apologetic, “I’m honestly very sorry if I gave you any offense. I - “

“Taking offense is the first defense of a man with no argument. I did not take offense, I was in fact trying to show you that - “

“Please,” replied Clark earnestly, and now somewhat confused about the subject of their conflict, “I truly wish to hear your story. I will promise to put myself more in the role of the anthropologist - I am not accustomed, as you know, to actually hearing people tell me their own stories, what I do is - well, you will have to forgive me if I let my inner voice come out as though no one were listening, as though there were no one’s feelings - “

At this Janson threw back his head and laughed, clapping the professor on the knee. “Well said, professor, and I must admit that I am far more guilty of that particular sin than I suspect you are yourself. Shall I continue with my story? I’ll try to keep my voice down when what I’m saying may be a violation of our presumed cultural airline propriety.”

“That would be excellent, young man, excellent,” replied Clark, truly relieved. “You were saying, about this poor girl….”

“Yeah - ok, so anyway, after the tent thing and being late, now she was doubly humiliated and what’s worse, at this point, none of the veterans were inclined to help her out with any little observations or show her any sympathy, and they treated her like she was already gone, not worth wasting time getting to know, and all the rookies saw this and since they wanted to impress the veterans, they reacted with similar disapprobation. So anyway she of course notices or at least senses all of this and I guess in the way people who believe others suspect them of incompetence seem to be driven by their self-consciousness to make more and more mistakes, more and more things kept going wrong for her. I’m not sure I can remember all the details of Shaun’s story, but half way to the block she actually fell off the back of the rollagon somehow - “

“No! But how could something like that happen?”

“Well when you’re planting people don’t generally follow health and safety rules, in fact the whole idea that you should treat the bush like it’s a regulated space and your work like it’s a regulated activity feels to your average planter a lot like the army so people kind of naturally do whatever and you can get situations where for example you have planters sitting on top of boxes of trees in the bed of a moving truck - “

“Boxes of trees?”

“Yeah, the trees or seedlings that you plant come in cardboard boxes and you need to get them to the block one way or another. Anyways I’ve seen entire crews cram into the bed of a truck on top of all sorts of shit, clinging to the sides, sometimes even with the tailgate down, and then speeding down or up muddy cut lines trying to get to or from wherever the fuck - “

“That sounds very dangerous!”

“Yeah, so I imagine something like that was happening when this girl fell off the rollie. So, of course she’s got some kind of bump or bruise and to her further embarrassment and the general ill-will of everyone they have to shout to the rollie driver to stop, and he stops and gets out furious and shouts at the girl for being a fucking idiot while she sort of hobbles back to the truck. Now that was shitty enough, but even worse, when she fell off her water container fell off with her and broke open - “

“Water container?”

“Yeah when you go out to the block every day you have to bring your own water with you. If you lose it like this girl did, it doesn’t just mean a thirsty day, it means potential dehydration which is pretty bad in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, and/or it means you have to borrow from somebody else’s limited water supply. The main point of all this is that in the bush when you’re working you realize that the foundation of everything is always already you - if you don’t take care of yourself you are confronted with the fact that it’s not your or indignation or magic little elves or historical forces or some system that takes up your slack, it’s other people - “

“Yes, well, and so, this poor girl….”

“Anyway, so the girl gets back on the rollagon, waterless and friendless and probably feeling like a buck fifty-two at this point - “

“A buck fifty-two? I don’t - “

“As opposed to feeling like a million bucks. Anyways so they finally make it to the block and get off the rollie, unload the trees and get ready to plant or in the case of the rookies get ready to learn how to plant. I guess things at that point went as well as they could for the girl but learning how to plant is pretty tough especially when you realize that once you’ve learned how to plant the whole thing just gets harder because then you understand how hard the job really is. So that may have had her down in the middle of the day when she stopped to eat lunch, of course by herself since no one would talk to her - and so I guess she went off into the bush past the treeline a bit and she gets approached by a big moose - “

“A moose!” replied Clark, his eyes gazing with happy wonder into the middle distance, envisioning the gentle, majestic animal in a leafy glade, encountering the unhappy girl. “What a remarkable event, what an exceptional, if I may, omen, to encounter a real Canadian moose in the Canadian wild….”

Janson laughed. “Well if it was an omen it was more of the Gregory Peck kind because this moose was fucking pissed. I’m not sure exactly what happened but it freaked the hell out of her and she started to run back to the block and the moose chased her until she tripped and fell down in a slash pile, then it ran over her, luckily missing her with its heavy fucking hoofs, then turned and, according to the other planters, looked right at her with a moose version of an angry glare and then roared at her or whatever mooses do, and then dug at the ground with its huge antlers or whatever and then roared again and ran off into the bush, leaving the girl behind shaking on the ground.”

Clark was shocked. “But I’ve always thought that moose were such mild, gentle creatures, a symbol of our - “

“You ever seen a real one?”

Clark immediately adopted a rather irate expression and opened his mouth to reply that of course he had seen a real moose, but upon reflection, he realized that, although he felt a strong sense of familiarity with the iconic animal, he had, in fact, never seen a real one, only representations of them. “Well, you know, come to think of it, I suppose I haven’t,” he said somewhat aggressively, as though Janson, for having asked the question, were somehow to blame for the truth, and followed up by pointing out that the plural of moose is not mooses but moose.

“I know,” replied Janson smiling, “I was just being funny. So anyway now the girl’s thirsty and a bit scraped and bruised from the chase and the fall and like quintupally humiliated.

“And then she did what a lot of first-week planters do: she gave up. It’s sort of hard to explain how difficult it is for some people. It’s not just the really hard work, the danger, the uncertainty, all the fucking snafus and strangers that really gets people down, I think, that really shuts them down; it’s not even the fact that there’s no TV or phone or whatever; it’s the reality that they know all day long that when they go to bed at night there’s no bathroom, there’s no light switch, there’s no bed, no blankets. There’s no apparatus to do the work for you that you need, whether it’s technology or other people or the police or the department of making things right and fair or anything.”

“And this girl was one of those, I suppose, who need - “

“Actually the way Shaun told the story he didn’t leap to any kind of judgment like that. What he said was she actually seemed like she was pretty tough - even getting out there and giving it a shot is a sign of something - but that she just had such a terrible day she may have just decided that fate or whatever was against her and she should just accept the signs from nature that she was meant to be doing something else.”

“So what happened to her?”

“Well she just sat there on that slash pile for the rest of the day, pretty much ignored except for when a couple of curious or sympathetic planters realized she really had sat down there for the long term, and when she said she was done doing this shit her foreman came over and tried to pep-talk her but to no avail. Then she spent the next couple of days waiting around in camp while everyone else went planting, I think they maybe gave her some work to do to cover her camp costs, waiting for the day when someone would be heading into town for something, and finally it happened and off she went.

“So, anyway, there we were sitting around the table at this pizza shop in Jasper, and Shaun and some of the veterans spent the next hour or so telling more horror stories like that and laughing their asses off, like about the time one of them took too much speed on the job and just ran around all day but didn’t get all that much planting done, and how another time another guy smoked way too much weed and spent like an hour planting one tree, and me and all the other new rookie planters were sitting there just trying to look brave and absorb it all, but maybe I’m projecting that last part - I was soaking it all up like a sponge that had been raised in a desert and was getting its first taste of water. I wasn’t the least bit self-conscious about any of this either - I was just totally absorbed in the stories, in the way they were told, in the beer I bought, in the stories about drugs, and of course trying not to look at the beautiful girl, whose name I later learned was Alabama - “

Janson turned to stare out of the window, where the morning sun was beaming sharply above the clouds, which were taking on something like the appearance of a corduroy road, thought Clark.

“And were drugs such a prominent part of treeplanting?” Clark asked, lowering his voice slightly and casting his eyes about in a vaguely nervous manner.

“Well, yes and no. So anyway I spent that night sleeping on the floor in this motel room with three other people on the floor and four others sharing the two double beds - I think that night we divvied up the sleeping spaces by just drawing straws or something, for real - and the next morning, very early on, I was back in the van with Grandpa and fat Sidney and dopey Jeff and the still creepy diminutive Price Vincent. Somehow, after only one minor breakdown, we made it to PG by the early afternoon in that old deathtrap.

“When we got there we had to ask directions a few times to find the office and the old house owned by this treeplanting company where we were supposed to meet up with everyone else on our crew. Predictably we were the last people to show up - between Grandpa and Jeff’s kind of kind but paranoid incompetence and Sidney’s oafish and totally unmerited self-confidence, based explicitly on his fabled farm boy’s sense of direction, and the whiny, bitter whingeing that came from Price Vincent, and between my natural ignorance of PG and my enjoyment of every observation and every situation regardless of its outcome, we were pretty lucky to make it there at all. The main thing I remember about driving into PG was how stunning the surroundings were, not only in themselves in that springtime but also in their promise for summer and fall and winter beauty - “

“Well put, very well put,” replied Clark, noting down that phrase carefully and shaking his hand to loosen the stiffening joints. “And was the town as beautiful as its surroundings?”

“Well I loved everything about it but at that point I was so taken with my adventure that I would have loved a hole in the ground. The other thing I remember of course is the smell - PG’s a mill town and you can smell the stink everywhere, until you get used to it, when it kind of disappears.

“So anyway we got to the company office and parked outside in the sharp sunlight and Shaun immediately came out of the office up to the van and told us to get the fuck inside right away, the big start-of-season meeting with the boss was starting inside in five minutes and we needed to sign some papers first. We hopped right to it and followed him inside and then I remember this big skinny pale straggly blonde haired grubby jean jacket liquor store type guy, who wasn’t introduced to me but I later learned was the lead crew supervisor for the company, came up to us and handed us these papers and pens and told us to sign and get into the back of the building “right fucking away”.

“We were a little taken aback and confused, as nothing had been explained to us, and we all sort of just looked at him and at the papers and shuffled around for a few seconds, until the supervisor looked at Shaun and said something like:

‘Fuck what the fuck kind of god-damn retards you fucking brought along with you Shaun, fuck?’

“Then he turned back to us and said:

‘Fuck you ain’t fucking signed yet fuck?’

“A little nervous now, I quickly read the papers - the other guys seemed to be following my lead on this for some reason - and saw that we were signing legal employment papers, including some for the WCB - “

“The WCB?”

“The Workers’ Compensation Board of BC. We needed to sign these papers to confirm that we’d taken a couple of safety courses and watched a bear video and such. Well, of course we hadn’t and I naively pointed that out to jean jacket, who looked at me like I was the dumbest guy he’d ever met, and of course I was behaving, maybe not stupidly, but, yeah, extremely naively.

‘Fuck, you want a fucking job, you sign the fucking papers, all of you fucks,’ he said, staring us down in turn, “or get out that fucking door and don’t ever come the fuck back, fuck.’

“I took a moment to consider the situation and although I honestly was afraid because I felt like I was doing something illegal by saying I had seen and done things I hadn’t, I just chose to take the risk and sign. The other guys did likewise, jean jacket grabbed the papers and muttered a few more fucks before he took off to somewhere in the back of the office, and Shaun, a little embarrassed, motioned for us to follow him through a door into the sort of warehouse or back room where the big meeting was happening.”

“Pardon me, but before you continue,” interjected Clark, going back a page in his rapidly filling notebook, “but what is a ‘bear video’?”

“Ha, yeah, that’s a pretty funny thing actually. One of the things I picked up on over the next few years when I came back to plant was that every year the useless idiots over at the WCB seemed to feel it was their duty to come out with a new bear safety video. The purpose of the videos is to help you keep safe in the event that you encounter a bear. Heaven forfend that they actually give you some stats or whatever, which would show not only that almost no planters ever get attacked by bears but also that the bear videos weren’t really necessary. Anyways, the funniest thing about the videos, besides the classically Canadian poor production value, was the fact that every year they said something different. One year the main thing would be “play dead”, the next year it would be “make noise and wave your arms”, the next year it would be more about protecting the bears than protecting the planters, which was pretty rich coming from the WCB, and then the next year the best advice would be to back off slowly and talk softly to - “

“Surely these changes reflected changes in the latest scientific -“

“Most likely the changes represented a need to show progress so the WCB people could advance their careers, or maybe a disinclination to cut an unnecessary service because that would diminish their departmental budget.”

“But what should you do when you see a bear in the woods?”

“In my experience? The most reasonable and reasonably repeated advice I’ve heard goes something like this: first and last, whatever you do, don’t run away. If it’s a black bear, wave your arms and make a shitload of noise and walk in its general direction at an angle away from it, keeping your head and your eyes down. If you meet a brown bear, you’re kind of fucked, so just use your judgment, though I know one guy who encountered one when he was walking alone in the bush after quitting right there on the block and walking back to camp, which was a really stupid thing to do but totally understandable if you knew the details of how his foreman fucked him - anyways this big brown bear walked up to him and sat down to look at him, and this guy just sang to it until it got up and ambled away.”

“Really! Bears do that?”

“Mostly we’re objects of curiosity to them, and sometimes fear, at least that’s what I think. I imagine when we’re planting the bears just sit inside the treeline looking out at us and wondering what the he’ll we’re doing, with weird white bulbs on our backs - the bags we keep the trees in - and bending over every few feet to stick our longer arm, the one with the shovel, in the ground….”

“And what are you supposed to do if you encounter a grizzly?”

“If you encounter a grizzly, what happens is up to the grizzly.”

“Did you ever encounter one?”

“Once, a couple of years later. Shaun and I were driving in his truck down a logging road back to camp and suddenly this grizzly came out of the bush ahead of us. We stopped for a look and then saw it was a big mama with a couple of cubs, so we started to move away rather than bother it further, when she just got up on her hind legs and let out this huge roar and came after the truck full speed. We had to get the speedometer above sixty k before we started to pull ahead of her, and we could hear her roaring over the stereo, even with the windows closed.

“So, anyway, me and Grandpa and Sidney and Jeff and Price Vincent followed Shaun into the back room and found it was kind of like a warehouse with a bunch of planters, like eighty or so in all shapes and sizes, mostly young but one or three old like trapper types, sitting on the concrete floor and facing a big corrugated steel garage door in the back. There were makeshift wooden shelves along the walls, all the way up to the ceiling, covered with all sorts of used and broken equipment - rusty old pickaxes - “

“Pickaxes?” our hero interjected with some surprise, now gazing out the window into his rich imagination. “Perhaps,” the professor mused, “perhaps they were left over from the days when there was a great gold rush in the Rockies, the remnants of an older, more enterprising age, when men would dig into the earth in search of their future, in this unforgiving but promising land….”

“Well I guess anything is possible. The pickaxes, I later learned, along with the rusty wooden-handled spades and regular axes which were also stacked along some of the shelves, were going to be doled out to every crew for firefighting.”

“Firefighting!”

“Yeah every crew when it goes out into the bush up north has to have some firefighting equipment like that. I never got final word on this from any authority but the word on the playground - “

“The - oh, yes.”

“Yeah, word on the playground was that if a fire started up north near where you were planting your whole crew could be conscripted, actually legally conscripted, to fight the fire, and so you might need to have some firefighting equipment at hand, and in any case if a fire started near you you wanted to be able to put it out somehow. So we always had to lug around all this rusty old shit wherever we went. The stories about firefighting up in the bush were pretty cool and pretty scary at the same time. Mostly when we encountered fire crews they were made up of tired-looking native guys in dirty red coveralls in dusty trucks and such. Sad part was there were always rumours in the towns amongst the white people that the native guys, if there weren’t enough fires to supply enough work for all of them for the summer, would make sure there was enough work one way or another - “

“Didn’t that strike you as rather - racist?” interjected Clark seriously, tilting his head back and arching his eyebrows.

“Asking me that question definitely strikes me as patronizing. Are you calling me racist for reporting the opinions - “

“But your voice, the way you said it, I couldn’t tell, it didn’t signal any disapproval, so naturally I assumed - “

“Jesus Christ, fucking Canadians,” said Janson under his breath, looking out the window again, and off into the distance. “No wonder I had to fucking leave to do any serious work.” He took a deep breath and turned back to Clark. “No, not naturally you assumed, but characteristically you took the opportunity to call me racist when the opportunity presented itself. I understand that even by objecting to what you’ve done, in Canadian discourse I will be implicating myself with what you were accusing me of, but Jesus god-damn - “ Janson clenched his fists on the armrests, the healthy veins visible on his planter’s arms, and turned away to look out the window again before he returned his penetrating gaze to Clark. “If you want to talk to someone who sneers every time they describe something they disagree with, well you’re going to be talking with people who confuse moral recrimination with research, and on your project here, you - “

“Well really now, there’s no reason to - “

“The problem is that you’re not interested at all in the vast steamy jungle of meanings you could find in my story. What you’re interested in doing is passing moral judgment on my character. In fact, that’s all you’re really interested in doing. You’ve substituted all the wonders of interpretation, of which moral judgment is just one of a multitude, for a puritanical inquisition, a narrow minded exercise in bible-thumping finger-pointing, and success is when you find a way to pin the scarlet letter on me. Well you know what? You’re a professor, not a priest, and you have no moral authority to “

“I assure you I - “

“You want me to tell this story - you want me to talk in the language of day-to-day life, and report what people say - but everything I say might be used to say I’m evil, so I’m supposed to hedge everything I say to protect myself against - you want me to self-censor in accordance with your own pronouncements, your shifting diktats, to subject myself to the hegemony of arbitrary, unwritten bans….” Here Janson paused, noticing the rather frightened but mostly confused look on the face of our hero, who was unused to such assaults on his authority, and his professional principles. “Ok, look, why don’t we move on and you think the situation over, it’s pretty important for your project here. You go out into the world and people talk like they fucking talk, and let me tell you they don’t police each other for language crimes like a bunch of crazy twisted born-agains who point out every sin - “

At this, Clark regained his composure and countered: “Well young man, now who’s being patronizing? Certainly you can’t be comparing - “

“You started it and that’s another one you might want to think about. So - anyways one thing I heard about was these heli-attack firefighters, real tough motherfuckers who have to go through this like Navy Seal-style training camp where you tie off one rappelling knot wrong in practice and you’re kicked out. Anyway, after a few weeks of intense training these guys then get put in choppers and just dropped in the middle of the bush to fight fires. No fucking shit. Planting’s pretty tough but nothing like that.”

“Did you ever have to fight fires when your were treeplanting?”

“No, though that jean jacket supervisor asshole one time he was throwing shit out of a rollagon at us when were setting up camp and he threw a big old metal firefighting water can on my head.”

“That must have hurt! Were you able to continue working?”

“Well I wouldn’t exactly call it working since we didn’t get paid for setting up camp. Well - back to my story - so we sat down with all the other planters in that big garage behind the office, facing the owner who was standing facing us, with her back to the old corrugated garage door. She was the toughest, bitterest, meanest, sour-faced old chain-smoking bitch I’ve ever seen, and she was just getting going with her speech - “

“Uh,” said Clark, who had noted down Janson’s words with some trepidation, wondering if he would ever be allowed to print such improper words, even in the name of research, of accurate anthropology, “ - and what was she saying?”

“I think there wasn’t really much of a reason for the speech besides to let us know she was not one to be fucked with, and I guarantee you we got the message. She told us that they didn’t tolerate low-number planters and anyone who didn’t plant well enough would be told fuck you and fired. She told us that anyone who planted low-quality trees would get fired and told in no uncertain terms to fuck right off if they complained. Later I would learn what that really meant. And then she told us they’d be on the lookout for overcounting all season long and anyone caught doing it would get charged for every tree they overcounted. Later I would learn what that really meant too - “

“I’m sorry, what’s ‘overcounting’? And what did she mean in both cases? For the record?”

“In the first case, with respect to quality - basically when a planting company wants to fire somebody, maybe because they feel they overhired or whatever, or maybe because they just don’t like the planter’s personality, they’ll get the checkers to find ways to pin the charge of poor planting on said sad planter. Like they might try and make it look to whoever they’ve got the planting contract from that all the bad planting that’s been reported so far is the fault of one planter or two, and say they’ve taken care of their quality problem by firing the guilty planter. And with overcounting - OK - at the end of every day planters tell their foreman how many trees they planted, and since they get paid for the number of trees they’ve planted, they sometimes claim they’ve planted more than they really have.”

“But how can the foreman know if they’re telling the truth or lying?”

“There’s usually no way to know for sure. Planters don’t usually get allocated specific boxes of trees - each of which will have the same number of trees in them, as long as they’re the same type of tree from the same grower - “

“Wait - you plant different types of trees?”

“Yeah, but maybe I should get to that later?”

“Yes, please continue,” Clark said, trying to be encouraging.

“OK. Planters don’t get their own tree boxes - usually the boxes are left by the foreman in caches, covered by tarps on the corner boundaries of a piece - each planter is allocated their own “piece” of land to plant - so, these caches are placed so they can be used by more than one planter. If your foreman really fucking hates you he can make you wait for trees by not replenishing your cache fast enough or by making you walk for your trees, which is a real piss off - there are a million ways foremen have for punishing planters they don’t like, and walking for trees is like one of the worst things…”

“Uh, you were saying?”

“OK, yeah, overcounting. So anyway there’s always overcounting, since even if you’re honest, if you’re unsure how many trees you’ve planted at the end of the day you don’t exactly lowball yourself. And though a good foreman can usually tell if someone’s overcounting - by watching the amount of trees he leaves at a group’s cache and how much they claim they’ve planted, or by watching a planter who seems slow but claims he’s planted as much as a faster planter, or if he’s been given a small piece and claims to have planted more trees than should have fit in that piece - but anyway that’s all pretty haphazard and none of it involves hard proof. Which means that at the end of the season, or the end of any contract within a season, there’s always quite a few overcounted trees, which the planting company is on the hook to pay the planters for. The company doesn’t want to pay for them of course and the only way they can avoid doing that is to blame planters for the overcounting and dock their pay. The easiest way to do that is to catch one guy red-handed and then pin all the overcounting on him, so you dock his pay - basically to zero, since he’s the goat for the whole contract’s worth of overcounting, for all the overcounters on all the crews involved - and he goes home after all that shitty work empty-handed. And since it’s basically just the company’s word against yours, they can pin this on pretty much anybody - another threat used to keep planters in line.”

“Are there any other ways of cheating?” asked Clark, somewhat shocked at these descriptions of dishonesty and manipulation on all side - and in an environmental activity at that!

“Yeah the main one is burying trees.”

“Burying trees!”

“It’s one of the ways of cheating that’s hardest to understand. I mean, to really bury enough trees to make it worthwhile, some people will actually take an entire box of trees off into the bush and dig a hole. But to do it properly takes about as much time as it takes to plant a box worth of trees anyway. And it’s easier to get caught than people think, I mean you have to leave your piece for the whole time and walk into and out of the bush and any of these things can be noticed.

“Well, anyway, so then the owner moved on in her speech to tell us that if we didn’t like any of what she was doing we could fucking shove it. She said that we were all going to have to pay union dues - “

“There was a treeplanting union? The way you described it I thought - “

“I’m sure you thought right. No, there was no treeplanting union, but the planting company had contracts that year with logging companies that had unions. The way it worked, that craggy old crook told us, was that the logging union wouldn’t let their companies contract out work to any workers who weren’t in their union. So that meant that all of us planters had to join the logging union if we wanted to put back in the ground what they took out. And that, of course, meant paying union dues.”

“I see - so you would have some protection against the depredations of the planting company after all.”

“You would have thought so but it turned out the main purpose of this talk was to disabuse us of any hope on that front. The union, which insisted that we pay it monthly dues from our labour, also had a rule that you couldn’t actually be a real member with any rights until you’d paid your dues for just over four months. Guess how long the full planting seasons, spring and summer, add up to each year?”

“Just under four months?”

“Precisely. Then the owner, just to take away any lingering hope we might be harbouring that we could get some use out of the union anyway, the owner tells us that she made a deal with the union reps that if any of us complained to them they’d use that four month clause as an excuse to ignore us.”

“But surely all that was quite illegal!”

“The union got what it wanted - our money - and the company got what it wanted - a promise the union would look the other way. Sure it was illegal, but even if we really wanted to do something, well, planters aren’t exactly the type to run to the cops or whatever when things don’t go their way.”

“And did you think of leaving? Of going home?”

“Not for a single solitary second. And besides, shortly after I sat down I realized Alabama was sitting just in front of me. Just being in her presence like that filled me with - it made the air electric, it made the moment - intense, I suppose, is maybe the best word. I noticed every movement, I noticed everything going on around me, everything was - heightened. I was totally overcome by my - well - and also in the manner of young men it was perhaps all the more captivating because I had never actually spoken to the girl yet and was nothing to her. And then she stretched, just a casual thing that people do all the time, but when she did it I felt like all the universe was stretching like a - like a lioness in heat - “

“You are a romantic!”

Janson blushed slightly and began contemplating his shoes. “Yes, I am most definitely a romantic.”

Clark, who was exceptionally sensitive to other people’s feelings, knew that he had set the young man’s mind down another obviously habitual path of contemplation, but one marked more by sadness and introspection than biliousness and irascibility. “I’m sorry if I - “

“That stretch, it sounds like an exaggeration, but it changed the universe for me, it changed my relationship to being, it changed me fundamentally. I suppose a psychoanalyst might say it was the moment I became sexualized or something. So - needless to say that Alabama was reason enough for me to stay, but as I said before I saw everything that happened, positive or negative, as contributing to the meaning and nature of this adventure, and all of this just encouraged me to stay with growing excitement.

“So, um - the owner went over a few more details regarding the company and the forthcoming spring season of planting and set us on our way. Shaun collected our crew in a corner and told us that we all needed to go buy our gear and then head out to a place called Nazko Station, where we would meet up before heading out to the planting camp, which was pretty deep in the bush. I got back in the van with Grandpa and the others and we followed someone else in the crew who had a car to this camping store that catered to planters. I had no idea what I needed - I’d brought with me a tent and a sleeping bag and a bunch of old family camping equipment, you know the kind you find in the basement in a pile of old junk that smells like Canadian Tire - “

“Excellent, an excellent observation, a great expression,” replied the excited Clark, carefully noting down the phrase. “It is an experience that is quintessentially Canadian - our great though unofficial natural - I mean national scent - “

Clark stopped himself, realizing that such an observation was likely to trigger a rant from the young man, but this time Janson appeared not to have heard him, having only turned his softened gaze again to the window, and out into the distant heights over the clouds.

“For some reason I remember every detail of that summer, every line and every moment, every little thing, as though every moment shone, as though I were somehow…. I even remember the face of the fat, bespectacled, very pleased owner of the camping store in PG, where we went to buy our gear, when he was walking up and down the cluttered aisles handing out free cans of warm no-name Coke to the planters. I had no idea what I needed and the owner and his staff and the veteran planters helped us all out - the owner and staff of course trying to encourage us to buy the most expensive and widest variety of stuff, and the veterans pointing out the deals and what was really necessary.”

“And as this is a record of Canadian life,” Clark said carefully, enjoying his growing sense of his role as investigative anthropologist, “perhaps you could tell me what you bought and its function in your ensuing labour - I assure you it is very important information, in a historico-materialist sense, to have an understanding, a description of the day-to-day, the peasant’s shoes in detail you know, uh and of course on the level of culture, poetically, the listing of a warrior’s accoutrements has precedents as great and ancient as the Homeric - “

“On their advice the most important item a rookie had to buy was his shovel. We would be plunging them into the ground thousands of times a day, we would be carrying them with us everywhere, their loss catastrophic - almost everything else could be improvised, but a shovel could not, and without it, you could plant nothing. There were tall staff handled shovels - I remember I saw Alabama buy one - that were supposed to be useful as walking staffs when you were going up and down steep ravines and such, and that were supposed to stave off tendonitis, since the force of the thrust into the earth would be dissipated and not brought up into the arm as it would be with the shorter D-handled shovels. The drawback, a veteran explained to me, was that unless you got really good with a staff shovel, you’d probably plant less trees than you would with a D-handle. For no particular reason, maybe just because I had seen that most veterans used them, I bought a D-handled shovel, one that came up about to my waist, with a plastic handle in the shape of a D attached to a wooden shaft, with a narrow spade blade at the bottom, which I had some guy in the back sharpen along with the shovels of the veterans.”

“Sharpening shovels! That’s rather like sharpening skates, a - “

Janson held out his right hand for Clark to inspect. “See this?” He made a fist and then, as he gently unclasped his fingers, his middle finger stayed locked in a closed position, until it eventually snapped out and extended with a click. “My middle finger locks in place when I close my hand into a fist. I think it’s some kind of bump on my tendon or something. I guess I’ll have that reminder of my work in my body for the rest of my life, all from that shovel. When you’re planting you can even get something we called “The Claw”, where even when you’re not holding a shovel your hand is naturally stuck in a sort of grasping position. Anyway I bought my shovel and later, like many other planters, I would write various phrases with a marker on it and my other equipment - “

“Wonderful! As I was saying, in the ancient literary traditions, and even in our current traditional literary traditions - I mean in traditional societies - but please go on.”

“Next on the agenda of necessary items was a set of planting bags. These have straps that go over your shoulder and three sort of bucket-shaped canvas bags with strings for closing them that go around your waist. We also had to buy these liners for the bags called silvisacs, that had reflective lining on the inside, reportedly to keep the trees cool and moist between the time we took them out of their boxes and put them in our bags and then planted them. And of course we had to buy a couple rolls each of bright ribboning tape, which was used to mark the boundaries of the piece of the cut block you were planting, amongst other things, and anyway had a million uses. It was also suggested that we buy gloves, usually these generic yellow plastic gardening gloves with a sort of sticky grip, which we were supposed to wear when we were planting. The reason was partly to protect our hands from rocks in the earth when we planted the trees, and from mosquitoes and getting blisters and scrapes and cuts and such, but most importantly to protect our hands from the pesticides the trees were supposed to be covered in. Funny thing, I haven’t thought about this in years, but a funny thing is you would get what we called “planter tan” from those gloves, where if you were wearing a t-shirt when you were planting you’d have your tan or burn extending from above your elbows to only three-quarters of the way down your forearm, and the rest would be almost totally untanned, so you’d have tanned forearms but untanned hands.

“Those were the key things we had to buy, but there were lots of other necessities - water containers, rain equipment, tarps for putting under the tent if you needed them, hats, mosquito repellent - that was always controversial - “

“Controversial?”

“Yes, well, dealing with mosquitoes is a huge part of planting and there are basically two camps in the debate - Deet versus natural products - about how best to deal with them. Every year there’d be a new fad amongst those who favoured natural products and methods for keeping mosquitoes away - lemon juice, eating or not eating bananas, whatever.”

“And what was your opinion about how to handle mosquitoes, the uh, the great and ancient bane of the Canadian forests?”

“Well, ok, first, there’s a spectrum of mosquito attractiveness, and every individual falls along it somewhere, from highly attractive to, well, I suppose perhaps even repulsive, and what works for you depends on where you fall along the spectrum. The main mistake people make in the debate - as is true in so many debates about far weightier matters - is being captivated by the idea that there’s only one right position, a belief grounded in the deeper belief that all people are essentially the same, that there is no other. The point is that different people need different solutions. I made a few attempts to try natural repellent but none worked for me: one time when I was trying some lemon salve or something I once counted a hundred mosquito bites on the back of one hand by the end of a single day, no kidding, and I’d managed to get them even though I’d worn gloves for most of the working day. The best mosquito protection for anyone is to stand next to me. So for me I needed the strongest stuff available, which meant Muskol with the highest level of Deet I could get.”

“Ah, yes,” replied Clark, noting down the name worriedly, his honest brow furrowing. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to, uh report the brand names in my, uh, report - I know what you’re saying is the way you speak about such things in day-to-day life but I - we would certainly want to avoid - we don’t want it to seem like a product placement - “

“Seriously, I’m telling you this story, explaining what you call the material conditions of a unique form of labour, and that’s what you’re thinking about, I mean - anyways, other people, though,” Janson continued, as he stared solemnly at the back of his right hand, absent-mindedly rubbing the long-faded bites with the fingers of his left, “just naturally have no need of any repellent at all since mosquitoes just stay away from them. Funny thing that. It’s sort of hard to read. Does it mean, if mosquitoes don’t bite you, that the bush is inviting you in and showing you kindness, or does it mean that the bush doesn’t want to take up your blood into its body, and that not biting you is the deepest sort of rejection? That blood after all will circulate through the mosquitoes into the birds and eventually all the way around the forest until a decomposing bear is turned into a tree… “

Clark found himself staring at the young man’s downcast face, a concerned look coming over his fatherly countenance, but he kept silent.

“Um - but I was also told that the most important thing we needed to buy was duct tape, and I followed a veteran’s instructions and bought two big rolls of it. I needed all of it that first week. When you’re out in the bush you don’t have access to any stores or anything and you can only be so prepared for contingencies, for things you need breaking or for new needs appearing, and duct tape sort of functions as a makeshift hardware store all unto itself. If your bags ripped, you fixed them with duct tape; if your pants ripped, you fixed them with duct tape; if you wanted to plant barehand, you used elaborate methods to tape up your hands so you wouldn’t get cut on the rocks as you thrust your hand into the hole you made in the earth with your shovel; if your tent ripped, if anything broke, if you cut yourself, duct tape could almost always be used in one way or another to solve the problem, at least for a time.

“Well, anyway, once we were kitted out we -“

“‘Kitted out?’ Is that a BC phrase? It sounds rather -“

“Sorry, that’s something I inadvertently picked up in England. Anyway I got back in the van with Grandpa and the gang - I remember we had to lend Jeff money for his gear, the poor stoner was totally broke, and though it felt a bit weird lending money to a stranger I actually enjoyed the act, though of course we were all the kinds of types for whom even fifty bucks was a lot of money - anyway we drove all the way to this Nazko Station, way out in the bush, or so it seemed to me anyway, and it was just a collection of funny makeshift practical buildings between the trees and the highway. One place was a big old diner slash gas station, where we were meeting up with everyone else before we went out into the bush proper in order to set up our tent camp.

“Inside, the place was typical of such places, bars in the north and in the bush I mean, but I didn’t know it at the time, since it was the first one I’d ever seen. It was like it was from another place but no place - if you haven’t been to a place like that, well you won’t know what I mean - sort of sparse and dark and warm at the same time, with cheap chairs and tables and a jukebox and such. I remember the place had a sort of reddish light and that there were bills - one dollar, two dollars, five dollars, all kinds, taped all over the wall behind the bar, and they only sold generic beer in bottles - for seven dollars a bottle, which was like twice the going rate in a city or even a town bar at the time. There were a bunch of sort of rough but pushover looking locals around - you know the kind who are obviously alcoholics who haven’t eaten a vegetable for years - they were looking at us from under their tractor hats or whatever they had on with that friendly and suspicious direct look of people who work and live in places like that, directing a contradictory sort of contempt and curiosity at strangers. Me and the guys saw the rest of our crew sitting around a table in the corner and went up to them.

“When we sat down Shaun got down to business and described how we were going to be driving to the camp down some logging roads and it was important that those of us in the rest of the trucks and vans and cars behind him stick close together, and that if he pulls over we pull over - “

“Why was it so important to pull over if he pulled over?”

“Well I didn’t know either and was pretty curious so I decided I wanted to ride along with Shaun to find out. The thing about logging roads is that they’re usually pretty narrow, just big enough for one logging truck to go up and down, and they’re not paved and sometimes in bad condition and really up and down and windy, and people who are used to driving on them barrel down them as fast as they can go. So in order to avoid accidents - which do happen pretty frequently anyway, especially if people are drinking, which they do pretty frequently - a guy in front of a group of vehicles or driving on his own has to have a radio and he has to call out the kilometre markers on the CB - “

“How does he know what, uh frequency to “call out” the uh….” asked Clark, trailing off and, we must admit, feeling a little out of his depth in the midst of Janson’s manual labour manner and vocabulary.

“I wondered the same thing and was told that if you look for it at the entrance to a logging road there’ll be a sign that says what frequency you should set your CB to. Anyway so the guy with the CB has to check for the yellow kilometre marker signs that are set up at every kilometre along the road and are used for navigating since there’s nothing else to go by, and what he calls out is not just “42” say if he’s at the 42 kilometre marker, since that doesn’t tell you which way he’s going - “

“So what - “

“So he calls out “42 empty” or “42 loaded” - “empty” if you’re going up the logging road from the highway, and “loaded” if you’re going down the logging road back towards the highway - “

“Is that,” asked Clark a little nervously, his pen poised humbly to note down the answer should he be in error, “because a logging truck going up the road to pick up trees will be empty, and one that has already picked up its load will be - “

Janson smiled. “Exactly, professor, that’s exactly it.

“Anyways I was curious about this CB thing so I went up to Shaun and asked if I could ride with him on the way to the camp. He said sure and brought me over to what would be our main crew vehicle for the season, one we’d all get to know very well, taking it with us to towns and camps from Golden to Fort St. John. We’d sit in there hotboxing and taking shelter from rain and snow and hail, we’d discover a smell like Kentucky Fried Chicken that stayed in the van for a week before we discovered a muskrat had crawled up and died in the engine where its body was cooking whenever we drove, we’d get stuck in that shitty van on muddy logging roads and cut lines and have to push and dig her out, and we’d even, one day when we had days off, we’d fear she’d been used to run over some teenagers - but I’ll tell that part later. The van, which Shaun had picked up at the company offices in PG, already had a name - Brown Betty. Shaun even got laid in the back of that old beater…”

The rather anxious Clark allowed Janson to trail off and turn away as he lapsed into another silent reverie, the professor taking the opportunity not to interrupt for clarification, but rather to go over his notes and mark places which would require further research and careful consideration. What indeed was this “hotboxing” the young man had mentioned in passing? Was it sexist - or perhaps even racist - that the van was called Brown Betty, and would his publishers prevent him from using the name? And if they didn’t, if they let him tell the story the way it was told to him, perhaps he himself would be accused of committing those crimes, by perpetuating them in print?

After all, he mused, texts do not just reflect reality directly and transparently; that naive assumption had been banished from literary scholarship in the early 20th century, ever since the radical revelations of de Saussure, and his invention of the philosophy of language, as anyone with a graduate degree in English from a Canadian university well knew. Rather, texts, it was now universally acknowledged, in fact create the very reality they describe, and so the study of novels and short stories is, in fact, the study of the very material forces that shape the world. It is for this reason that all literary works must be - or even ought to be, in fact, for it is a moral duty - analyzed by literary professionals to ensure that any elements in them that fail to a perpetuate the collective good of society are pointed out and critiqued where they are not expunged. Thus if a writer does not in advance purge his work of anything which he thinks might run afoul of those professionals, he is justly subject to accusations of various kinds of moral turpitude.

Again, given this reality, Clark thought that carrying out his project might prove far more problematic than he had first believed - for how could he justify purging Janson’s story of its immoral elements, but still present his project as a factual representation of the real Canada, of real Canadian identity? Of course the consensus amongst his colleagues was that projects of this kind should represent the world as it ought to be, in order to bring that better world about, which was one of the purposes for constructing departments and organizations for the study and representation of national identity in the first place….

Shaking his head in order to dispel such troubling abstractions, Clark began to consider a more immediate moral issue that had emerged from Janson’s story. Had the van really been used to run over some teenagers? The way Janson said this made it sound to the professor as though it had been used to do so on purpose, and Clark found himself increasingly self-aware of his growing sense of disturbance in response to this prairie boy’s way of referring to such horrible things with something approaching a truly committed nihilist’s insouciance. Would he be told of a crime - a crime more serious than the drug-taking of which he had already heard - and could he get in trouble with the law for having heard such stories and not having reported them directly to the police? It was unfamiliar territory to the careful professor. As, indeed, and literally, were strange places like this so-called Fort St. John - these were most decidedly terra incognita in the nation Clark knew from his reading of the nation’s most celebrated literature, the heady dramas of middle-class life in southern Ontario or the descendants of Irish and British immigrants on the Atlantic coast….

After a moment when both men were lost in their thoughts, Janson emerged half-way from his own reverie and continued: “So there I was sitting in the front passenger seat next to Shaun in big dusty old banged up Brown Betty, which was full of equipment and other members of our crew I hadn’t really had a chance to talk to yet, striking out off the highway and into the deep dark mysterious bush. After listening to Shaun do it a couple of times and watching how he handled the radio, I asked if I could do it and he let me call out the kilometre markers as we led our little convoy up this weird logging road in the glowing early twilight, going faster than I was comfortable with but that was sort of what the whole thing was about: letting go the air of timidity in which I had been raised and accepting the world with love rather than fear. Again I know it might seem like a small thing but everything I did shone with a special significance that summer and changed me utterly.

“Well - following us, there were like three crews in the group, plus the company trucks with gear and such, so it was a pretty big procession. It was a bit scary since lots of the vehicles weren’t meant for driving on logging roads - one guy was even driving a little red Fiero, if you can believe that - and besides many of the drivers had no idea how to drive on those roads anyway, and we all seemed to be going way too fast or way too slow for comfort by turns. I can still remember that winding road, fenced in by walls of evergreen trees we couldn’t see through on either side, the narrow rough brownish golden stony road winding left and right and up and down for mile after mile in the lengthening shadows cast by the trees, cars in front of us and cars behind, going we knew not where, nor towards what, in that rich light that comes on a sunny day when evening approaches and the light is still strong but at a sharper angle….”

Clark opened his mouth to make a remark but closed it and allowed Janson, who was falling further into reverie, to continue.

“At one point we went around a corner and startled a moose. The road at that point was on the side of a pretty steep incline so the poor big lug couldn’t get off it and just ran away in front of us. Since we couldn’t go anywhere either, we just had to follow the poor ungainly fellow - if you’d ever followed a running moose from behind, you’d know just how ungraceful the noble goofy creatures are.

“Well after a while the incline levelled off and the moose ran off the road, and sometime after we eventually pulled off the logging road into a wide space with some scrub grasses or something and a pretty wide creek running to one side of it beside the treeline. This was where we were going to set up camp, and Shaun made it clear we should get a move on if we wanted to be done before the light went down.

“I got out of the van and tried to figure out what was going on in the hurried chaos of all the other planters and such who had arrived right behind us, but all the crew veterans and camp staff seemed busy and like they knew what they were doing, while a bunch of us bright-eyed and a little worried rookies were standing around wondering what to do. I sort of stuck near my old van mates who had pulled up behind Brown Betty, though Grandpa who was wiser than us had disappeared completely, probably taking the initiative on his own to set up his tent. So not knowing exactly what to do we collected our gear from Grandpa’s van and put it in a pile near where we saw some of the other rookies from our crew were standing - “

“And was your Alabama there?”

“No, she was too resourceful too get caught in a dumb situation like that.”

“What do you mean? You were just waiting for instructions - “

“Anyway, after a couple of minutes, it was pretty funny looking back on it, who shows up but jean jacket, wearing said article of sartorial bizarrity, with a fierce look on his long face coming out from under his stringy blond government dairy hockey hair.

‘Fuck you fucking rookies what the fuck do think you’re fucking doing fuck,’ he said, pretty aggressively. “You, shit for brains,” he said, looking at Sidney, ‘and you other geniuses’ - he said, pointing at me, and Jeff, and Price, and one other guy from our crew I hadn’t talked to yet but I got to know later as Daniel Stehenland - ‘you fucking pick up those fucking shovels over there and follow me fuck. And as for the rest of you,’ he said to the rest of the rookies standing around, I think there were like a dozen or so, mostly from our crew, ‘you go empty the fucking reefer fuck.’”

“‘Reefer’? But isn’t that a word for - were you discovering that after all this wasn’t exactly the kind of planting operation you were, ah, expecting?” interjected the increasingly nervous Clark, again lowering his voice and looking around to make sure no one was overhearing their conversation, before returning his gaze to Janson with some qualified excitement.

“Me and the guys who were supposed to follow jean jacket kind of shifted on our feet waiting for him - since we knew what we were supposed to do next, we just had to follow him when he was ready, but the rest of the rookies looked really confused and sort of made half-motions to go off in various random directions to carry out this coded order. Disgusted by their hesitation, jean jacket stamped his foot impatiently, swore under his breath for once, and pointed to where a big semi-trailer container thing had been parked, with the trailer balanced on some wooden beams where the truck thing I guess is linked up when the trailer’s being hauled, and said, pronouncing each word very distinctly in a pretty withering way:

‘GO - TO - THE FUCKING - REFRIGERATED - FUCKING - TRAILER - AND UNLOAD - THE FUCKING - BOXES - OF TREES - YOU GODDAMN - FUCKING - MORONS - FUCK.’

“What an unpleasant man!”

“Yeah. Anyway, after the other rookies started heading off towards the reefer, jean jacket stalked off and we followed him, picking up some old rusty shovels he pointed at as he headed on towards a small stand of trees. When we got there he pointed at the ground and said “Dig a fucking hole here for the fucking latrine, like four feet deep at least, fuck” and then turned to stalk off without saying a word more. That came as a bit of a surprise to us, and me and the new guy Daniel exchanged a look, which at least on my part said, ‘Well this is what you get when you’re new,’ when Price Vincent suddenly spoke up in his whiny voice and said, ‘But I don’t understand, we’re not supposed - ‘

“Jean jacket stopped stalking off immediately and stood ominously for a few seconds, showing only his back to us, before he turned around with a menacing skinny finger outstretched. ‘Who fucking said that? Which one of you little fuckers?’

“There was a moment of stunned and a little scared silence - we were all nice middle-class boys after all and not used to being talked to that way - and it turned out Price Vincent was better at expressing indignation than he was at actually taking responsibility for anything, since he just stood there staring at the ground. I exchanged another look with the new guy, and looked up at jean jacket and spoke. ‘We’re just wondering if we’re going to get paid for any of this,’ I said politely but sort of carefully firmly, ‘we didn’t know we were going to have to - ‘

“So jean jacket widens his eyes and looks at me like I’m crazy and says: ‘You like taking shits when you have to take shits fucknuts?’

‘Yes,’ I said, staring back at him, and he sort of backed off a bit. One thing I found that summer with these kinds of guys was that simply using clear language and reasonable arguments was way more effective than getting pissed off at them. Then he looked me in the eyes and dropped any pretence of rationalization and replied:

‘Dig that fucking hole or you guys are on the first fucking truck back into town, fuck.’

“So it was dig a latrine or get fired before we planted our first trees, and me and Daniel and Sidney just put it down to hazing and picked up the shovels and started to dig. Not Price Vincent though: he sat down and, while we dug the hole that kept him his job and that he would shit in every night for the next two weeks - well the coward sat there and bitterly insinuated that we were cowards for giving in to the evil boss. It was at that moment that a prejudice I had, and had always suspected would be confirmed by experience, became a postjudice confirmed indeed by my experience.”

“And what was that prejudice?”

“There are two kinds of people in this world: those who work and take responsibility in accordance with a reasonable accommodation of contingency and those who don’t, but selfishly take advantage of the work and responsibility of the former.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Shit, sorry professor, I’m ranting again. Just to close that off - the Price Vincents of the world - well they’re the kind of people who shit in the holes other people dig for them, and then presume to judge the people who dug them.”

“I see.”

“Funny thing digging that hole was that farm boy Sidney had the hardest time and always wanted to take breaks. Daniel and I exchanged a look when he started complaining and Daniel told him that actually two of us could dig the hole faster than four of us could, which was not true in itself but was certainly true with respect to a situation where half your group is whining instead of working. Sidney and Price Vincent leapt up at the suggestion and took off towards where the camp was being set up. This gave me and Daniel a chance to share a laugh at the whole situation and get acquainted a bit. He was a couple of years older than me and was studying English at UBC - “

“Ah yes, a fine university, with a distinguished English department, many of the professors there were trained, uh, in, uh, Toronto - “

“Right. Over the course of the season I learned a lot from Daniel, who was way more experienced and worldly than me, though that wasn’t much of a feat, including the details of menstrual cycles, on which Daniel was something of an expert since his girlfriend in Vancouver didn’t want to use birth control, the ins and outs of acid and mushrooms, which were as alien and mysterious to me as the people who reportedly took them but whom I had never met…”

“And where was this Daniel from, for the record?”

“Why?”

“Well, in short, and pardon the rather clinical language, but it is important to us academics to get these things right, you understand - ah, yes, in short, the regional origin of a Canadian is an important facet of his identity, no, it is indeed the stone from which the jewel itself is cut - and, and an assessment of regional character is a crucial element of our project - “

“Right. Daniel was - I think he was from Winnipeg.”

“Aha! Excellent - so far there have been no Manitobans - “

“Right. But he’d grown up in India, and had only moved to Winnipeg when he was 16.”

“You don’t say! Was he - was he uh - well I hope it’s not awkward to ask, but, you know, for the sake of my research, it’s important that - I only say this because I have colleagues who think it’s, well, it’s um, it’s uh, how shall I put it, well, that it’s - well at least suspiciously, potentially - to ask about someone’s - um, was he uh of East Indian, um, extraction?” Clark finally blurted out, sweating a little and pointedly focusing on his pen as he held it against his notebook, for some reason, rather fiercely.

“Right, Canadians say ‘East Indian’, I’d forgot about that,” replied Janson, eyeing Clark. “Daniel was half - his father was white Canadian - “

“I see - “

” - and his mother was brown Indian, they met - “

“Well, young man, there’s no need to mention her colour - “

“Right. Anyway his story is pretty interesting in itself, he came on his mother’s side from a family of basically ethnic minority rebels from a lawless region of India near Nepal, and he came from that environment, where people poured molten lead into each other’s ears to carry out caste-based vengeance and where women were so horribly treated that there was a high rate of suicide from drinking pesticide - he went from that world to Canada, which gave him a perspective on things here I hadn’t encountered so personally before….

“Well anyway after we finished digging the latrine we went back to where we’d piled our stuff and saw that a lot of planters had put up their tents in one corner of the camp area, so we went over there too and started to set up our own tents. It was sort of funny seeing all the different tents and equipment people had - there were some who were obviously inexperienced campers who had all kinds of fancy equipment, but mostly unused, and there were others who like me had obviously just raided their parents’, or in some cases we suspected their grandparents’ garages, like Jeff for example who had an old canvas contraption that must have weighed eighty pounds and which he accidentally burned down later in the summer, and of course there were the really experienced bush people who laid down spruce branches under the tarps they spread out under their tents - “

“Where did they get the spruce branches from, may I ask?”

“We were in the bush, professor.”

“But did they - did they pick them up off the ground - “

“No, they cut them off the trees. They used them as natural bedding and insulation, keeping the ground underneath them soft and dry. Some of the really experienced guys actually used their planting shovels to dig little trenches around their tents as well, and - “

“But, weren’t there, laws, or, or something, against simply going up to trees and, and cutting off branches from them? And wasn’t that rather against the spirit of the whole endeavour? I mean - “

“The bush isn’t a park or a zoo, at least not to those who live and work in it. It’s not an institutionalized - well not unless people carry their institutionalization there with them. So in any case as it turns out me and Daniel were lucky we’d got there a bit later, so we could see how and where the veterans had set up their tents, and copy their tactics.

“After we were done setting up our tents, we went over to where a big white canvas mess tent had been set up.

“It was already getting dark outside, and cool, and the warmly lit mess tent, though it was of course just a big frame covered by some kind of synthetic tarp, was inviting - especially because there was no where else for us to go besides back to our cold, dark tents. The ground in the tent was firm and grassy - I remember finding it strange to be standing on dirt inside the only thing approaching a real inside there was for a hundred miles in any direction - though I didn’t appreciate it as much as I would have if I had known that over the course of the contract the ground would become a muddy soup from all the cork-boot traffic.”

“What are - “

“The big tent was crowded but comfty in the way of such places - long benches set up along long tables, the warmth from stoves and a big propane heater like a small jet engine and lights and smells from cooking mixing with the fresh cool air of mountain bush in the evening. Though I was still experiencing some of the same mixture of shyness and excitement I’d felt since I got into that shitty van just the day before, things were different now that I had Daniel as a pal, and I felt the same increase in confidence it is natural to feel when you can approach a situation as part of a group, however small or new or unfamiliar.

“Daniel and I got our food from the grumpy cook, who I would later learn was a green death chain-smoker and married to a fish-poacher who hung around the camp doing odd jobs and who was always offering unsolicited backhanded apologies for his bigoted and ignorant views, and we ate an awesome meal, like we would have every day on that contract: as much food as you could eat, and all hearty though cheap - mountains of potatoes, mashed or otherwise, neverending meat and steamed vegetables, or soup, or what have you.

As humble as the situation was, it was something of a miracle to me, like some kind of humble thousand and one nights fairy tale - I was still a teenager after all, with a teenager’s bottomless stomach, and that kind and quantity of food was exactly what I needed on a normal day, let alone after a full day of hard planting labour. The fact that I’d spent my high school years in a poor rural boarding school with no fridge of my own to raid, little money, no care packages from home - well that meant that I’d come to take being hungry for granted over the years, and seeing this kind of plenty dished out as a necessary matter of fact was I know just a detail but a meaningful one to me.”

“You - hold on for a moment please - what is this ‘green death’?”

“Craven menthol cigarettes, they had green on the package and some people said they were the most likely to give you cancer - a claim which green death smokers appropriated and converted into a point of pride.”

“But that’s terrible, to romanticize cancer - “

“People talk that way about death all the time. So, there we were - “

“Wait - and you say you went to a rural boarding school? Was this for - well of course you needn’t tell me if you don’t want to - but if I may, so I may understand your story in a more, a more, I suppose, autobiographical context - could you - was it a school for troubled uh boys, or was it perhaps a school for the, um rural elite?” stammered Clark, confused by his need to articulate what he privately considered to be one sad and one absurd possibility in the very same sentence.

Janson studied his hands with some intensity for a moment and turned to Clark to reply, his eyes focusing on the space just before Clark’s eyes. “No.”

Clark, expecting the young man to go on, wrote down the single word and poised his pen, waiting to write more. But Janson simply returned his gaze to his hands, and after a moment continued his tale.

“Well, so, anyway, Daniel and I couldn’t find a seat next to our crew, who were mostly eating with Shaun on a long table with no spaces left on the bench on either side, so we just sat amongst the crowd and got better acquainted. When we were getting up to go, I turned to look for wherever the place was to put away our dirty dishes and, shock of my life, I almost bumped into Alabama, who had been coming up to Daniel and me from behind. She had the most beautiful green eyes I’d ever seen and though she had large breasts she was clearly not wearing a bra under her plain blue t-shirt, and the way she filled out her dusty old army pants - anyways I almost dropped my tray and, trying hard to keep my eyes focused above her neckline, and believing that of course I was failing to do so and she knew that, and also knew that I knew that she knew that - in other words, torturing myself in the manner of all shy young men - well so there she was, smiling and looking down at me.

She said something like, ‘You’re on Shaun’s crew, right?’”

‘Yeah.’

‘We’re all heading out to the fire pit.’

“Cool.”

And with that she turned and went out the front of the cook tent into the night. I went over to Daniel, who had seen the whole thing.

‘Fuck she’s hot,’ he said approvingly, as he watched Alabama go.

‘Saw her first buddy,’ I said, trying to be guyish.

‘Don’t worry man - I got a girlfriend back home, she’s older, 21. She could probably teach that girl a thing or two I tell you - ‘”

“Ah,” interjected Clark, who turned over his notebook to look at his watch with a rather exaggerated gesture, “really, I hope you don’t take this concession to the practicalities of our situation as anything like a critique of your, of you, but I’m afraid that we will be landing at 11 and I have yet to hear many details of the practical materiality of the form of labour - “

“Of course, Professor Clark, but in order to understand planting you need to understand the lived experience - idealistic, reductive fantasies about “materiality” misrepresent - “

“Uh, ok,” the professor conceded uncomfortably, again giving way in spite of his misgivings to his interviewee’s particular desires, “please just continue as you see fit.”

“OK, so, we went out to find the fire, which wasn’t hard to do in the dark. There were about twenty people sitting around a big fire, chatting, swapping stories, in what like I said I was coming to understand was typical planter behaviour. I located Alabama on the other side of the fire from where I sat down on the mossy ground and again tried to avoid looking at her, at the same time as I was filled with the delicious - I guess I should say the heavy enervation of my delicious crush - and picked up on the main conversation that was happening on my side of the fire.

“Off to my right was an older guy - he was probably 28 - who turned out to be a camp supervisor. He was already balding and had a short blond beard and was wearing some kind of well-worn khaki poncho. I remember he could roll a Drum with one hand while driving a quad across a schnarby block with the other - pretty incredible actually. Anyways, I don’t remember what he was saying as much as I remember the look in his eyes, with the yellow fire glinting in them against the black backdrop of the night, a look at once of kind and inviting, careful and bold, but ultimately unconfident lust.

“I followed his gaze and there, a couple of people to his right, was sitting one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. She was tallish, thinnish, healthy and dusky, with beautiful brown hair twisted over one shoulder, a beautiful smile, and sexy in a way that somehow made it obvious she was from Quebec, and she was, I noticed as I peered at what was revealed by the light that flickered from the fire on her body, she was dressed in some plain blue jean overalls, which somehow just completed an earthy sensuality - “

“Sorry - but could you please tell me what, for the record, of course, what you mean when you say it was ‘clear she was from Quebec’?”

“Sure, I can try, but it’s not like some kind of worked-out intellectual theory, it’s just the sort of thing that’s manifest to those fully, I suppose the right thing to say is, embedded in Canadian cultural life.”

“But I don’t - “

“But, for the record, of course what I’m saying may involve various levels and forms of projection and stereotyping and is certainly based in unfalsifiable generalizations. And it may come from my own personal experience more than a broad cultural generalization should - but the fact is that cultures really do differ from each other, and Quebec women, and in particular Montreal women, are just recognizably different from the rest of Canadian women. I suppose there’s no polite way to say this, but most Canadian women - well - not to put too fine a point on it - have you noticed I’m hesitating so much - “

“Perhaps you should just say what you’re thinking, it can’t be any worse - “

“But it’s just so hard to do. It’s part of our condition, and as much as I fucking hate it - look, I just worry so much about the worst, most uncharitable aspersions that could be cast on me for anything I say - worrying that people will attribute to my words the worst and stupidest interpretations they can come up with, and then accuse me of their own stupidity - and so we’re always guarding against that uncharitability and casual, moralized puritanical slander - well, ok, here goes: the truth, at last, about Canadian women, is that, with the exception of French Canadian women, who are most certainly distinct - “

“I should mention,” interjected Clark, as the Stéphane Dionish flight attendant moved past them with a stainless steel cart and forgot to offer them peanuts, “that although I am, of course, very personally interested in hearing what you are about to say, that, well, I don’t believe that my, um, my publishers, will perceive what you say to be consonant with their program - “

“I should mention, um, fuck them and the dishonest milquetoast - “ Janson began, his face growing red and his hands balled into fists.

But before flying off into another rant, the young man’s eyes suddenly looked very sad to the astonished Clark. After a moment, and kindly, Clark asked: “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, but it pretends to be left.”

“What? I don’t understand - “

“Look, professor.” Janson attempted a smile, and spoke in a softer tone, lightly touching Clark’s arm. “This story is very important to me - it’s part of my life, the one life I’m ever going to have - and I think you’ve subjected it enough already. I know it’s not your fault, you don’t know - “

“I’m sorry, but you - I think you misunderstand the issues at stake - I don’t think - “

“I know. But look - can I ask you to please be content with what I’ve told you so far, and let me use the rest of my time on this flight to prepare for my conference?”

Clark was stunned by the suddenness of Janson’s retreat. Here he had encountered exactly the kind of thing he was looking for - a real Canadian tale - but the young man relating it had suddenly become alienated from him. He thought instinctively that he ought to try to resolve the situation somehow, but then he reflected that the young man, presumably in part because of his regional origins, had some sort of chip on his shoulder, and that was why he had become so contrary. Perhaps in time, the professor thought, such conditions will change, and all Canadians will finally be on the same page. But not yet, not yet, and it was perhaps best, as Janson himself had clearly concluded, for the both of them to move on.

Sadly, the professor nodded at Janson and said kindly, but with a reserved hint of stern superiority: “Again, young man, I’m sorry that you - that you have misunderstood me, but I do thank you for the narrative you have so kindly related for the sake of my project.”

A corner of Janson’s lip curled up in what was to Clark an inscrutable smile. “Good luck with that, professor.”

And with that, Janson, who had moments earlier been discussing some of the most important moments of his life, reached under the seat in front of him, pulled a laptop out of a laptop bag, opened it wide on his lap, and began reading in an evidently exclusive silence. Clark, still somewhat stunned and saddened by the abrupt transition in his circumstances, turned away from Janson and carefully stowed his precious red notebook back in his pocket.

Though our academic hero now found his situation somewhat awkward, sitting right there next to his subject after all that had happened between them, but now without talking, he soon found that he was himself very tired, and concluded he could use a nap before their arrival at St. John’s.

After a few minutes, he drifted off to sleep, hoping to awaken with a solution to his problem with Duncan and the fast-approaching toe-dipping ceremony by the sea, and dreaming of a forest’s worth of sexy, recognizably Quebecois fir trees, clothed in blue overalls, swinging their hips.