Stupid Things.

The chapters will continue, but for this blog, I decided to take a quick break and go for a trip down memory lane to remember one of the most spectacularly stupid things I've ever done...

And now, for something completely different:








The Romantic Poet, William Wordsworth, had the idea that each of us has spots of time, memories so important that they stay with us and inform who we are. I’ve always liked that idea, it seems, well, romantic. What follows is one of my moments. It’s important to me as a person because it is me at my most stupid.

My hair!, My once-beautiful, hair!

When I was young, carefree, and still had a full head of hair, I decided that I’d spend the summer tree planting. We could really stop the story there, but it’s the second stupid thing that happened while I was tree planting that really had an impact.

When people think of planting trees they might think of a well-tended garden or maybe even planting an orchard. Tree planting in British Columbia, where I grew up, is a much different beast. A lot of the industry in BC used to, and still does, revolve around forestry. In practise, that means something called, clearcutting. At the time of my story, clearcutting involved staking out a block of land roughly 45 football fields in size, cutting down every tree inside that block, then bringing in heavy machinery to pull out the stumps and anything else that might still be alive. What you’re left with is a churned-up, muddy, bug-infested, and often swampy, hellscape. I’ve heard that other, more gentle forms of harvesting have become common since my days on the cut-block, but that was what it was like back in the carefree days of the mid-90s.


To these sites of devastation, crews of tree planters, most of them university students, would arrive every summer to replace the trees that had been harvested. It was hot, physically demanding work. Beyond just the labour of being bent-over planting trees all day, you were also weighed down by a body harness with insulated pouches filled with tree seedlings.

This is what I assume happens when a tree murders
a billionaire's parents in a darkened alley.

The idea was to load in as many seedlings as you could and still do your job without damaging them. We didn’t do this because we were manly men with something to prove, some of the best planters were women, we did it because we were paid by the tree. The cut blocks were filled with seedlings from back to front and getting to the back tree line would sometimes take twenty minutes of hiking over rough ground. Hiking back to your cache with empty bags was wasting time you could be spending planting trees. I would begin each morning with between fifty to seventy pounds of trees in my pouches. If you want to lose weight in a hurry, I can’t recommend tree planting highly enough.

In harness on the cut block. Summer, 1998.

Anyway, to the point of this story. It was the middle of the planting season and I’d finished with my first round of trees. I was resting by my cache and thinking about loading up my pouches again. Now, this was the interior of British Columbia up near a place called Williston Lake. In the middle of summer, the flies there aren’t so much an irritant as they are a misplaced Plague of Egypt. I actually grew my first beard back then to try and keep the black flies away. It didn’t work, it just hid the blood. At the end of the day, there would still be red running down my neck and staining my tee shirt from where the black flies managed to burrow in and claim their pound of flesh.

Black flies are bad, but horseflies will take literal chunks out of your flesh. I’m not joking when I say they will happily bite through several layers of clothing to get at your meaty centre. To make matters worse, once they have your scent they don’t give up. They were my constant nemesis that summer, I even had a memorable kendo-style standoff with one, but that’s another story. The afternoon in question, I had two or three horse flies on my trail and they followed me back to my cache.

This is what a total asshole looks like. It even
has douchy sunglasses.

While I was resting, I noticed that the little pack of flies I’d collected had been attracted to the empty, waxed boxes that our seedlings were delivered in. They gathered on the boxes like they were trading recipes for my tasty, tasty, flesh. I did the obvious thing that anyone would do when they were in no hurry to get back to work. I began to throw rocks at them.

It started small, just marble sized rocks to send them buzzing away. It took only seconds for them to return to their spots. Did I mention they’re tenacious? Honestly, I don’t know what it was about those boxes, but they were like horsefly crack. I didn’t manage to hit any of them with the small stuff, so I graduated to larger and larger rocks. Five minutes later, I was tossing rounded fist-sized chunks of granite at the empty boxes, and that was when the horse flies struck back.

One of them, probably pissed with the constant barrage of stones, buzzed up to me and landed directly on my lips. A horsefly is a big insect, and the lips are a very sensitive area. I can remember the feeling of its legs gripping onto my face like wires. Most people would be startled and brush the fly away. Most people didn’t have two-pound rocks in their hand, though. On reflex, I brought my hand up to swat away the horsefly. The hand with the nice big rock in it. You can guess what happened.

There wasn’t too much blood, and thankfully I kept my teeth, but it remains as one of the most stupidly memorable things I’ve ever done.



Credit for the clear cut image goes out to Andrew Mitchell http://www.greenbccommunities.com/2012/05/clear-cutting-what-does-eye-see.html