Eating Dirt by Charlotte Gill

Author:Charlotte Gill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nat014000, Nature/Ecosystems & Habitats / Forests & Rainforests
ISBN: 9781553657934
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2011-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

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at the END of the REACH

THE MONTH OF May, in the coastal rainforest, is a time of lushness and warmth before the heat of summer sets in. I trade my synthetic thermals for men’s cotton business shirts. K.T. breaks out his wide-brim hat. The clear-cuts are sultry with humidity. The afternoons are mad with robins and chickadee song and woodpeckers hammering the hell out of snags. The conifers let go their pollen, and it drifts above the treetops in clouds of Martian green. In the evenings we hear the haunting call of the Swainson’s thrush—an upward spiral of beckoning notes that echo out in an old forest like the sound of a sad flute in a cathedral.

We leave Port McNeill behind. We travel south, across the Strait of Georgia to the mainland. Three road trips and two ferries later we arrive at the Sunshine Coast, though “sunshine” is a relative term in the rainforest. This is a peninsula of voluptuous land, separated from the rest of British Columbia by a pocket of ocean called Sechelt Inlet. We must take a boat to get here, though it lies on the mainland, since mountains divide it from the province’s highway system. Some of us recall the scenery from The Beachcombers, a show about log salvage operators, which was filmed here in the seventies and eighties and still holds the record for the longest-lived drama on Canadian TV.

We roll aboard our new home, a ninety-eight-foot offshore landing craft called the Lasqueti Daughters, a barge with a hull the shade of carbon paper. Its three white decks stack upon one another at the stern in diminishing layers, like the tiers of a wedding cake. The foredeck is an open cargo area surfaced with rough planking, a prow that ratchets down onto the shore like a jaw. We walk aboard, shouldering a month’s worth of luggage, and let the boat swallow us.

We’re yapped at by a little snaggle-toothed dog who looks like he’s wearing a sable coat with a copious ruff. The Daughters is loaded with people and duffel bags and plastic tubs. Then three battered, mud-smeared trucks wedge in, as if with a shoehorn, leaving just enough room between their side mirrors to fit a folded newspaper. With so little space to spare, if we want to walk from bow to stern we’ve got to climb over the trucks: up bumpers, boxes, and cabs and down over hoods. But mostly we are crammed with white tree boxes, piled everywhere, ten feet high. We have to shimmy sideways between the waxy, white rows as if pushing ourselves through a tight maze carved out of snow.

It is a miracle the boat floats. Overstuffed hockey bags. Cartons of cigarettes. Ziploc bags full of B.C.’s other cash crop—fuzzy buds, crystallized with resin. Digital music collections. Laptops. DVDs. Flats of beer. Spare shovels. Books. Magazines. Musical instruments. New spring wardrobes of quick-dry pants and pastel cotton shirts plucked indiscriminately from thrift store racks. We have this feeling, upon

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