Eating Dirt - A Book by Charlotte Gill

I just finally finished reading "Eating Dirt," which is a book that I've wanted to get my hands on for the past few months. The book is written by a tree planter, although it doesn't focus entirely on planting. There's also a lot of background on the logging industry in general, and some background on tree physiology and historical biology, with both local and global perspectives.

Charlotte Gill, the author, has planted for over twenty years. She started in Ontario, but moved out west and now works eight or nine months each year, predominantly planting coastal projects (the professional part of the industry), plus a bit of southern Interior work in the summer months.




Here's an excerpt from a review by Quill & Quire:

"A thoroughly Canadian story, Eating Dirt is not out of place alongside other classic memoirs of the bush by Susanna Moodie or Farley Mowat."

There were a few things in the book that really caught my attention. For instance, she was talking about the amount of ground that a million trees covers. When this is quantified in acres or hectares, it somehow seems less impressive than her way of illustrating: one million trees covers five hundred city blocks in Manhattan. My own camp usually plants around five million trees a year. I didn't really think about how much ground we cover until I thought of it as 2500 city blocks.

Another interesting fact is that when you're in a full forest canopy and you look up, it probably looks like the branches of adjoining trees are all intertwined above you. But they aren't. The trees are able to somehow sense their neighbours and the branch tips almost always stays a few centimetres away from each other. Of course there are occasional exceptions, but natural avoidance is generally the case. Charlotte mentions a lot of facts about trees and nature that seasoned planters take for granted, but non-planting readers would probably be surprised at.

Charlotte also talks about the number of calories a planter consumes in a day: around five thousand. If anything, I think this is an under-estimate. It's hard to count calories accurately in a bush camp, because most planters just load up without measuring portions, and shovel the food in as quickly as possible. But I've always been curious about caloric intake, so one day this past season (during a stretch when I was planting, not supervising), when we were working out of town, I actually measured what I ate. A normal person would be shocked. Here's the list:

Breakfast: 785 calories

3 yogurt cups = 240 calories
4 cinnamon buns with butter = estimated 500 calories
Bowl of strawberries = 45 calories

During Day, While Planting: 4,620 calories

5 pepperoni sticks = 400 calories
10 granola bars = 1600 calories
About 1/3rd block (150g) of marbled cheddar = 600 calories
Approximately 14 bottles (500ml) of water = 0 calories
Six bottles of Gatorade (591ml) = 780 calories
One large bottle of Clamato juice = 880 calories
Two Red Rain energy drinks = 360 calories

Dinner: 2,640 calories

Two Uncle Ben’s Bistro Express Rices at 250grams each = 800 calories
¾ bag of cheese perogies = 1260 calories
4 pepperoni sticks = 320 calories
2 gatorades = 260 calories
Couple glasses of water = 0 calories

Total for the day: 8,045 calories
(and about a dozen litres of fluids)

A lot of planters who work hard for 8-10 hours per day can eat this much food, day after day, and still lose a significant amount of weight as the season progresses. Back when I planted full-time, before I was a supervisor, I typically lost about 25 pounds in the first 6-7 weeks, and if you know me, you'll know that I don't have that much to lose in the first place. By the way, I tried to change my diet a bit from day to day when I was planting - on other days I had a lot less meat and more vegetables, and pastas were always a staple when I had a kitchenette.

Another thing that I really liked about this book is something pretty personal - I'm actually working on a planting book of my own (well, actually, two books). And there isn't a lot of overlap between what Charlotte has said and what I'm working on. That's a bit of a relief.

Tree planting is a job that most people would hate. For actual tree planters, it's more of a love/hate relationship. For people who've never done it, this book is a great insight into one of the strangest industries in Canada. Check it out if you can. Here's a link to order a copy from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.ca/Eating-Dirt-Charlotte-Gill/dp/1553659775


And while you're waiting for your copy of the book to arrive in the mail, here's a link to a lot of tree planting photo galleries that I've taken over the past ten years. Each of the photos on this page is actually a link: click on it, and you'll be taken to a page with dozens of other photos. In all, there are several thousand photos that I've put online:

http://www.replant.ca/photos.html



Edit, February 14th: Eating Dirt just won the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/02/14/gill-tree-planting-non-fiction-prize.html