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Sunday, June 03, 2007

oh my. Great expectations of this fantastic blog have very obviously fallen victim to what i generally refer to as "bush camp oblivion" - the total lack of attentiveness to anything associated with the 'real world', including blogging

Well, lack of blogging or not, here i am, back in the 'real world'. It is now almost midnight, and i'm now sitting in the luxury of a real bed, in a real house, far, far away from planting camp. My best friend is getting married this weekend, and so i find myself in a total mind-bender of a whirlwind switch from rather-scruffy to quite cleaned up (including a fresh pedicure!). My folks did me the huge favor of driving out to camp just to drive me here/home/the Fraser Valley the next morning. It was fun to give them a mini camp tour this morning. Since they had come out to camp last year (for the first time ever), and happened to see the most ghetto camp setup i had ever had, they were duly impressed with the ammenities in our Christian Valley camp....i believe my dad referred to it as 'rustic bahamas resort quality'. Not bad for planting camp.

Last night as i was chatting with my folks in my trailer, i told them about all the comments/stares i get when i shop in Kelowna. It is so funny...Kelowna is such a preppy little city, and i guess that they're not used to forestry-camp grocery orders like in towns such as Williams Lake or Dawson Creek, or especially Prince George. Mostly, it's the elderly people that comment - the others just stare, as if i had bananas growing out of my ears or something. Among some of my favorite commens:
          -from a little old lady, upon seeing my heaped Costco cart: "You need a man to push that!"
          -from numerous little old ladies and gentlemen: "i wouldn't want to feed your family!"
        ...and my personal favorite dialogue -
             Middle Aged Woman in Costco: "Wow. How many kids do you have?"
             Me: "Twenty-five"
             MACW: blank stare
             Me: "Naw, i cook for treeplanters. They're a hungry folk....this is just one stop in my day, and they'll go through this in the next 5 days."
             MACW: "Aahhh. Yeah, I know. I've got 3 teenagers. Two are in college"
             Me: blank stare. "Oh, yeah.." Silent walk away to go pick up 24 more loaves of sandwich bread.

Ah yes, watch out Kelowna - here comes the one-woman shopping circus.

OK. Now, for sleep. Crossing my fingers for a good blogging session tomorrow, before the wedding.

Saturday, April 28, 2007

Formal Introductions

Hey! So i was thinking that perhaps i should give a little context to start of this blog, so here goes:
My name is Jessica, and i cook for treeplanters. If you're not familiar with treeplanting, there are a couple of really good websites that help to explain the industry/subculture. As i seem to love this job, i am back in it this year for my eighth season. There are so many things that make it such a fantastic job, but one of the things in particular is the collection of stories that has come out of spending over 22 months living in close quarters, in remote places with people who work their asses off every day, party like no one else on the days off, occasionally live in perpetual dirtiness (and not care), and so on, and so forth.
This year, i've started on with a new company again, and so even though so much of the job is now routine and comfortable, there is a certain freshness to the days that comes with meeting so many new people, getting used to a new location, and stuff like that. i'm used to working up in central/northern BC (William's Lake/Quesnel/Prince George/Smithers/Fort Nelson/etc) or northern Alberta (Whitecourt/Hinton). This time around, i'm working in southern BC, south of Kelowna and east of Osoyoos, in a place called Christian Valley. That might seem incidental, but when you live outdoors, the change of territory has so much significance. More on that later! It's also been the earliest start that i've ever had; instead of starting in the beginning of May, we were already going 2 weeks ago (i think i got to camp on April 12th or so to start setting up). Mostly, that means it's cold at night. Again, significant.
My camp has about 25 people or so. The first couple of shifts, there were planters from other contracts coming to get some early work in with us, but i think from here on in, we'll settle into our regular crews for the rest of the season. Since it's a small camp, as planting camps go, i'm working by myself. This means long days, and i spend about 1 1/3 of my 'days off' actually working (shopping, food prep, etc). i'm not exactly sure when i'm going to get chances to write, but blog-wise, i'm hoping to post once a week, on Friday night or Saturday morning when i'm in Kelowna.
On that note, see ya next week!
So there was this time...

...that the mud was so deep that we built these scrap-wood train-tracks all over camp to keep people from sinking in when they walked around, and we never swept the kitchen - - we shovelled it. And then, when the mud got too much to shovel, we put tree-boxes on top of it, and then later got a whole bunch of people to help scrape/shovel the whole mess out the door.....
...i had these friends that became my 'coffee crew'. We all had our specific bags of favorite roasts, and fresh ground our beans every morning before brewing up our custom pots. French pressed, moka-espresso brewed, turkish style.... After 12 hour days of work, we would stay up every night until 12 or 1am and hang out in the kitchen, sitting on the counters and telling stories, and conjuring up crazy ideas, and knitting, and of course, drinking coffee. After which, we would crash in our tents, sleep a couple hours, and all get up to work our asses off again the next day...

...this dining tent started blowing over and over in a field. i looked out my kitchen window and laughed, until i realized that it was rolling towards the Horsefly river. There happened to be one planter in camp, and the two of us ran out and pretty much tackled the 40-foot long box-kite of a tent. We each grabbed something on an end, and started reefing the tent as hard as we could, until we managed to get enough momentum to roll it back to where it was supposed to be. We probably rolled that tent about 120 meters. i don't remember if anyone ever noticed that anything was different that night...
i wish the stories sounded as crazy in blog-form as they actually were. It's the pictures in my memories that seem so bizarre, even after the oddness of treeplanting life has become rather normal.

next week, always next week...i plan on writing about camp this year, but my already sleep-deprived brain can't pull anything descriptive together. That said, i've finally found myself in one of the great companies that only gets rumored about in northern planting camps. life is sweet here - but telling you why will wait till next week. see ya next friday