I'm sitting in the Vancouver airport, trying to quickly inhale a draught and a couple shots before a flight to Montreal, which boards in fourteen minutes. I was going to do a quick Facebook status update, something generic like "today was hectic" and then I figured that something that generic didn't tell a story. And since I'm a fast typist, and bored, let me tell you about a random day in the life of Scooter, in excruciating detail ...
Background: I just finished a tree planting contract in Alberta yesterday. So today was my "in transit" day on my way back to the East Coast. The past week was interesting - 80 km/hr winds, crazy ranchers, pre-daylight safety meetings every morning, eating gas station salads for a week, and I may have even run into KD Lang in town.
4am: Up early to hit the road from Consort, Alberta (beside the Saskatchewan border). Side note about Consort - you know how some towns have creative and uplifting slogans like "our people are our best asset"? Consort's is "really rural." No kidding, it's on the sign coming into town, which also says that the town's population is 679. I didn't see that many people though.
6am: Quick stop at a Tim Hortons. Tried their soup with bun. The bun was amazing. I went up to ask how much it would cost to buy another. Fifty cents. I was tempted to buy twelve, to see if I'd get a baker's dozen, but I only had $5.00 in change left. Besides, the last thing that I needed for today was a distended belly. The steering wheel on my truck wasn't adjustable.
7am: Had to pull over to put pants on. I was driving the 5-ton, and the heater was broken, and a couple hours of seeing my own breath in the cab was too much to take. Mental note: always wear pants in October before the sun comes up.
9am: Just past Calgary, heading to a nursery to drop off the truckload of flat garbage tree boxes for recycling. That took about 45 minutes. The nursery probably didn't recycle them, probably just burned them for heat, but who am I to be hypocritical?
2pm: Saw a coyote, and shortly afterwards, two wolves.
3pm: Saw what I think might have been a blue heron, but not positive.
4pm: Lots of domestic llamas and alpacas on the farms that I've been driving by.
4:15pm: Saw three brilliant white mountain goats. Those things are pretty odd-looking (although not as odd as an alpaca, come to think of it). Weather getting nasty - I hope they don't blow off the cliff.
4:30pm: Blizzard in the Rockies. Snow sucks in early October.
5pm: Just before Jasper, saw about eighteen elk. I also saw a retarded tourist, decked out in full camo gear, taking photos of the elk with a tripod and a telephoto lens that was also camo'd, who was taking his pictures from BEHIND a big white suburban. Idiot! Does he not realize that the camo gear does not help if there is already a two ton white gas-guzzler hiding him? I was tempted to pull over and go stampede the elk off into the bushes, or some other tom-foolery, but I was on a tight schedule.
8pm: Arrived in Prince George, had a few minutes to drop off my truck at the office and empty the quad and all of my other gear out of it, then bolted for the airport.
8:44pm: Arrived at check-in, one minute before my flight started to board. And by the way, there was a time change in there, so this was actually about sixteen hours on the road so far. Cutting it close, but really, they even let me check my back-pack, so I guess I still had several minutes to spare before I would have missed the flight.
By the way, I wasn't alone in this whirlwind tour. There were seven of us in a convoy of five trucks making the voyage - myself, Jackie, Nate, Kyla, Al, Matt, and Dana.
Anyway, I'd like to embellish this post with a lot more of the fun details along the way, but I have one minute to finish my drinks and run to gate C38 for boarding.
PS: God bless YVR - best airport in the world for free internet, lots of sushi shops, and one of the cleanest airports that I've ever been in.
PPS: Next stop, Montreal, then Moncton. Trying to make it to Sackville by Saturday afternoon so I don't miss my cooking shift at the Olive Branch at supper, and then my bartending shift at the Pub on Saturday night. Can't miss the Pub on a Saturday night! Kati, if you read this, please have a "voldka-bomb" (or four?) ready at 11pm ...
Showing posts with label crazy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crazy. Show all posts
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Friday, April 27, 2007
Back to Work in British Columbia
I’m back at work on Canada’s west coast. I run a camp of tree planters every summer, which is a rather strange and adventurous career path. What does this mean for me? Well, I supervise a camp with about sixty-some employees, including two cooks, five foremen, a couple of quality control people, and fifty-odd tree planters. During the next three and a half months, my camp will plant between five and six million trees.
Although the planters usually work a rotating six-day schedule all summer (five days on, one day off), I don’t get that luxury, nor do most of my foremen. I work about 110 days straight, getting up between 5am and 6am, and working until midnight or 1am. I’m responsible for pretty much everything imaginable, from hiring and firing, to overseeing the cooks and making sure that everyone is fed, to scheduling deliveries of food and water, to maintaining a group of up to a dozen trucks, to picking up propane and fuel for the camp, and most importantly, I oversee the safety program to try to make sure everyone stays alive for the summer. Here are some interesting facts:
- My cooks will use about 15,000 eggs this summer. It is not uncommon for some planters to consume six to eight thousand calories per day, and still lose weight. Most of us walk at least twenty kilometers in a typical day, going up and down hills and through swamps and over slash and other obstacles.
- We work in conditions ranging from light snow to temperatures over 35 degrees Celsius. Over the years, I have learned not only to tolerate, but to actually enjoy working in the rain (well, most of the time).
- On a typical spread-out contract, my crews may be planting throughout a region that covers well over twenty-five hundred square kilometers. I have to know exactly where every single person is working at any given time.
- We typically work in central and northern BC and Alberta, although I have worked in Alaska, the Northwest Territories, and Saskatchewan on rare occasions.
- The trucks in my camp will drive a combined total of nearly a quarter million kilometers this summer. I often drive an average of well over four hundred kilometers per day, a significant portion of which is on dirt logging roads.
- Our vehicles will probably burn well over thirty thousand liters of fuel in three months. I have to bring a lot of that fuel into our camp from town, a couple barrels or tidy-tanks at a time. I’ve come to love the smell of diesel in the morning.
- It is common to run into bears, deer, and moose on a daily basis. Occasionally, I’ve run into elk, caribou, lynx, bobcats, and wolves. I don’t mind the wildlife – humans cause more problems than most animals.
- I do not expect to touch another drop of alcohol until mid-August. My responsibilities as a camp supervisor are intense, and I am literally on-call 24 hours per day. I have to be in suitable condition to deal with any kind of problem, no matter how minor or major, at any time of day. I like to say that my job description could be summed up as “putting out fires.”
- I expect to lose about twenty pounds in my first twenty days of work. And if you know me, you’ll realize that I don’t have much to spare. Some of my employees, who plant full-time and don’t spend as much time driving around as I do, will lose much more than that.
I mentioned that overseeing our safety program is one of my main responsibilities. I actually think of it as my most important responsibility, by far. Thankfully, the entire industry has become much more safety-conscious in the past decade. Unfortunately, I have had several planters in my camp who have been killed in the past, which was a really tough experience for everyone in the camp. I’ve had a 23-year-old girl die in my arms. I’ve had planters who have been stabbed and/or thrown in jail, and once I had to take a knife away from a very angry (and very large) man who wanted to stab one of my other planters. I’ve been attacked by an enormous dog on the Alaska highway. I’ve had someone try to steal my truck at night, despite the fact that I was sleeping in the back seat. I’ve tried to “hide” from the police in Fort Nelson (a town with four streets), while driving around in a bright pink hearse. I’ve slept with a rifle under the stars. I’ve ridden to work in helicopters hundreds of times, sometimes in machines without doors or seats. I’ve had employees who have been doctors, lawyers and engineers, and I’ve had employees who have been hippies, convicts, and practicing witches. The former are more manageable, but the latter are more fun to work with. I’ve seen people have mental breakdowns that would make Ken Kesey proud, and I’ve had employees who thought that clothing was optional in the workplace. In short, I’ve seen a lot of crazy things over the years, and I really need to sit down and write a book about it all someday.
I have a tree planting website, www.replant.ca, which sometimes gets as many as a thousand visitors per day from all over Canada and the world. Go to the “Diaries” section on that site, and you’ll see some pretty detailed stories of things that have happened to me and my employees in the past six years or so, since I started keeping regular records. Here’s the link: http://www.replant.ca/diaries.html
Tree planting is one of the strangest, most difficult, and yet most rewarding jobs in the world. I have seen varsity football players sitting on a stump crying, because the job was so much harder than they expected. I’ve also seen 105 pound girls, eating supper with a tired smile, laughing because the job is so much easier than they expected. New planters worry about being able to handle the physical aspects of the job. What they don’t realize is that the mental hardships are what makes most people quit.
Lots of people ask me why I keep doing it, so I tell them that it’s for the money. The job IS incredibly lucrative, but that’s not the real reason. I do it because it gets me into amazing physical shape. I do it because I love working with nature. I do it because I like to be the best at everything I do. And I do it just because I can, while so many other people can’t handle it. I hate my job in a hundred different ways, and I want to quit at least once a week, but as soon as the summer is over, I can’t wait for the next season to begin. And sadly, if you never work as a tree planter, you will never truly be able to understand why.
Although the planters usually work a rotating six-day schedule all summer (five days on, one day off), I don’t get that luxury, nor do most of my foremen. I work about 110 days straight, getting up between 5am and 6am, and working until midnight or 1am. I’m responsible for pretty much everything imaginable, from hiring and firing, to overseeing the cooks and making sure that everyone is fed, to scheduling deliveries of food and water, to maintaining a group of up to a dozen trucks, to picking up propane and fuel for the camp, and most importantly, I oversee the safety program to try to make sure everyone stays alive for the summer. Here are some interesting facts:
- My cooks will use about 15,000 eggs this summer. It is not uncommon for some planters to consume six to eight thousand calories per day, and still lose weight. Most of us walk at least twenty kilometers in a typical day, going up and down hills and through swamps and over slash and other obstacles.
- We work in conditions ranging from light snow to temperatures over 35 degrees Celsius. Over the years, I have learned not only to tolerate, but to actually enjoy working in the rain (well, most of the time).
- On a typical spread-out contract, my crews may be planting throughout a region that covers well over twenty-five hundred square kilometers. I have to know exactly where every single person is working at any given time.
- We typically work in central and northern BC and Alberta, although I have worked in Alaska, the Northwest Territories, and Saskatchewan on rare occasions.
- The trucks in my camp will drive a combined total of nearly a quarter million kilometers this summer. I often drive an average of well over four hundred kilometers per day, a significant portion of which is on dirt logging roads.
- Our vehicles will probably burn well over thirty thousand liters of fuel in three months. I have to bring a lot of that fuel into our camp from town, a couple barrels or tidy-tanks at a time. I’ve come to love the smell of diesel in the morning.
- It is common to run into bears, deer, and moose on a daily basis. Occasionally, I’ve run into elk, caribou, lynx, bobcats, and wolves. I don’t mind the wildlife – humans cause more problems than most animals.
- I do not expect to touch another drop of alcohol until mid-August. My responsibilities as a camp supervisor are intense, and I am literally on-call 24 hours per day. I have to be in suitable condition to deal with any kind of problem, no matter how minor or major, at any time of day. I like to say that my job description could be summed up as “putting out fires.”
- I expect to lose about twenty pounds in my first twenty days of work. And if you know me, you’ll realize that I don’t have much to spare. Some of my employees, who plant full-time and don’t spend as much time driving around as I do, will lose much more than that.
I mentioned that overseeing our safety program is one of my main responsibilities. I actually think of it as my most important responsibility, by far. Thankfully, the entire industry has become much more safety-conscious in the past decade. Unfortunately, I have had several planters in my camp who have been killed in the past, which was a really tough experience for everyone in the camp. I’ve had a 23-year-old girl die in my arms. I’ve had planters who have been stabbed and/or thrown in jail, and once I had to take a knife away from a very angry (and very large) man who wanted to stab one of my other planters. I’ve been attacked by an enormous dog on the Alaska highway. I’ve had someone try to steal my truck at night, despite the fact that I was sleeping in the back seat. I’ve tried to “hide” from the police in Fort Nelson (a town with four streets), while driving around in a bright pink hearse. I’ve slept with a rifle under the stars. I’ve ridden to work in helicopters hundreds of times, sometimes in machines without doors or seats. I’ve had employees who have been doctors, lawyers and engineers, and I’ve had employees who have been hippies, convicts, and practicing witches. The former are more manageable, but the latter are more fun to work with. I’ve seen people have mental breakdowns that would make Ken Kesey proud, and I’ve had employees who thought that clothing was optional in the workplace. In short, I’ve seen a lot of crazy things over the years, and I really need to sit down and write a book about it all someday.
I have a tree planting website, www.replant.ca, which sometimes gets as many as a thousand visitors per day from all over Canada and the world. Go to the “Diaries” section on that site, and you’ll see some pretty detailed stories of things that have happened to me and my employees in the past six years or so, since I started keeping regular records. Here’s the link: http://www.replant.ca/diaries.html
Tree planting is one of the strangest, most difficult, and yet most rewarding jobs in the world. I have seen varsity football players sitting on a stump crying, because the job was so much harder than they expected. I’ve also seen 105 pound girls, eating supper with a tired smile, laughing because the job is so much easier than they expected. New planters worry about being able to handle the physical aspects of the job. What they don’t realize is that the mental hardships are what makes most people quit.
Lots of people ask me why I keep doing it, so I tell them that it’s for the money. The job IS incredibly lucrative, but that’s not the real reason. I do it because it gets me into amazing physical shape. I do it because I love working with nature. I do it because I like to be the best at everything I do. And I do it just because I can, while so many other people can’t handle it. I hate my job in a hundred different ways, and I want to quit at least once a week, but as soon as the summer is over, I can’t wait for the next season to begin. And sadly, if you never work as a tree planter, you will never truly be able to understand why.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)