Dirt Work (2 page)

Perusal of this list quickly reveals that life attached to a location does not require forty acres and a herd of heirloom goats, or a kayak and four months without human contact. The questions that nature triggers are persistent and subtle, and they arise in any place: when does the sun rise? When does it set? Which birds come in spring, and leave in fall? How much does it rain in July? November? Which plants are edible? Is it cold for this time of year? Will a tomato grow in the windowsill? Is the pond frozen enough to cross, or should we walk around? Through questions and tasks and endless figuring, authenticity sneaks up on you, and perhaps by unnoticed accrual is the only way it can, because authenticity comes not from trying, but from being. Witness my first months of trailwork: I longed to be a “real traildog,” but mostly, I felt like a poser. Once I had become a real traildog, I didn't think about it anymore.

Of course, only someone who's never done any would say that grunt work alone is path to a fulfilled existence. Days made up solely of hard labor or mindless chores create a different kind of deadness, even as they invite another kind of meaning. We need our minds to organize our actions, to set up scaffolding for our choices, even as we need our bodies to enact them. In my experience, this is why a deep education is one of both head and hands. Over the past twenty years of my life, books have taught me some things, people have taught me many things, and tools have taught me everything else. I mean this as neither romantic nor prescriptive. It just means that
touch
and
work
are part of what I had to learn.

Back on the porch of Frida's, the guys are shaking their heads. “You talk too much,” Max might say. “Have another beer.” I flip him the bird, Socrates quick to my tongue:
Dude,
the unexamined life is not worth living.
But Max is right. The over-examined one isn't, either, and every road has its potholes. A life on the land sometimes sucks. You get soaked, your feet hurt. What you have to carry is too heavy, where you need to go is too far. Moose eat the garden. It rains for a month straight. The corners aren't square. Exhausted, you lose your temper. There's no one to fix it but you.

An authentic life is often held out as utopia, but I hope I am clear: I don't believe in idylls, not iconic men and women made better by proximity to “nature.” Life in the woods has its charms and its burdens, like any life; a rural, even wild existence holds no redemption inherent. If dirt does not damn us, it doesn't save us, either. Wherever we end up, we are human once we get there, as vulnerable to unease and envy on talus slopes as on Broadway corners. And yet. I have a bias, because my life in the woods changed me. Work changed my trajectory, my days, changed the shape of my hands.

Take my friends on the porch. If Max and Justin and Gabe held out their hands for your scrutiny (which they won't), you'd see labor's imprint: knobby joints, chapped knuckles. A purple thumbnail, taut tendons in the wrists, the tan that extends to midbicep and stops where a filthy T-shirt begins. Despite the common wilderness maxim, passage on land cannot possibly
leave no trace,
because just as we mark the world when we live in it, so the world marks us. A place—a certain sky, the feel of walking on one type of ground, the unfurl of seasons—stakes its claim, makes itself familiar, which is sometimes to say, known. And work always marks a body. Mine has small muscles on skinny limbs, two broken fingers permanently crooked, callous-shod feet, legs that can eat up the miles. Carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists, two hernia surgeries, joints that feel older than I am. Also, work marks the spirit. Foresight and patience not innate in me have taken root, fixed by impermanence—erosion, aging. I look for new clouds in an old sky.

To paraphrase another beloved American nature writer, two roads diverged, and I, I left school for work in Montana and Alaska and got myself an education anyway. I learned from men and from women, jobs botched and jobs done right. I learned to move fast sometimes and slow others, to watch closely, to measure twice, cut once. I saw how place becomes as much part of you as idea or experience; how inner shifts happen knee-deep in a hole. And inner shifts predict outer ones. A strong body can usher in mental clarity. Noticing how the world works keeps you open to it. When working side by side with someone, trust can arise; tasks cultivate community.

Community means admitting straight up that this book is my story of a certain kind of work, but the story of this work does not belong to me. I share it with people and plants; the tools, animals, ridges, and rivers I've come to know; the details, both sensory and intangible, that this life enfolds. Most of all, with the people, who would not speak like this themselves. I'm breaking ranks with the gang here, writing about work instead of doing it. I worry about this; no story can move from barstool to bookstore without some essence lost.

I have to try, though, in part because of some arrogance in me, a writer's insistent urge to explain what's significant, a storyteller's itch for the oral tradition, preserved. I want to honor this world, show you its value. The mule packers coiling ropes in the barn, the shop mechanic, lip thick with chew—they much prefer their status below the radar, I know. I'm spurning an unwritten rule, a cherished code of laborers. Our work speaks for us. We don't draw attention to ourselves, and most of all, we don't draw attention to each other. I mean it as a love song, not a secret told. I hope they'll forgive me. The tools, I know, won't hold a grudge. They don't scorn or withhold approval, just as they do not praise, or extend it. They neither crave recognition nor shun it. A shovel, an axe, teaches its usefulness by its use.

This book is built of six chapters that trace my education by way of trailwork, my passage, by way of place, from onlooker to participant in a very specific world. Each chapter begins with a profile of a tool associated with the trailwork in that chapter's region. I've structured the book around these tools for several reasons, not least because their histories, their quirks, and their uses are worth knowing about. Also, tools have taught me plenty, free of judgment, and I mean to pay them due by hanging the book's framework on their pegs. If my experience is the lens through which this story is told, tools are the artifacts that ground it, and its most central characters—my curriculum, my classmates, and my teachers, all.

It's easy to see a tool as a prop used to enact intent, an object subordinate to intellect. In many ways, this pragmatic view is part of a tool's appeal—elegance and worth stem from its material purpose; metaphor is unnecessary. But there's depth in our relationship, too, which deserves notice. Because we invent, finesse, and tinker with them, feel pride—or chagrin—at what we do with them, tools are also receptacles for self. As extensions of our limbs, tools are like pieces of our bodies that we can lay down.

From my first day on the job, tools have met me as a student and made me into a learner. Axes, saws, rock bars, and sledges taught my body how to swing and sharpen and carry and stow, and they taught my mind that over time, in a place you open yourself to, competence will come. There are always things to do, to get better at, to keep learning, and to teach. For any of us, freedom arises from education. For me, that freedom is in transcending dichotomies of
body
and
mind,
think
and
do,
watching apprenticeship and expertise braid between my own two hands.

This book is not meant to be a memoir or a how-to manual, not a wilderness treatise or a polemic on how anyone should live. It's meant to be the story of a few wild places, people who work in them, and how I came to be at home there. No matter which porch we rest on at the end of a day, I believe that the surprising turns our lives take can bring us to our unexpected selves. I believe in a wildness imbedded in the places and the habits of our days, which needs investing in. And I trust the shedful of tools we can use to this end: axe and query, saw and open hand. Some tools are dirty, the edges dull, but I want to choose one anyway. This is where work begins, after all, with the task, the tool, and the doing: pick it up, swing it, breathe, swing again. First, learning motions. Strength will come.

What We Carry

Backpack: 25–40 cubic liters

Water: 2 quarts minimum, up to 1 gallon

Layers: 2 more than you wear to stay warm standing still

Gloves: 2 pairs (1 leather, 1 fleece)

Lunch: 3,000–4,000 calories, plus a morning and afternoon snack

Miscellany: Matches, knife, cord, duct tape, flagging, bandana

First Aid: Ibuprofen, Band-Aids, ibuprofen, moleskin, tweezers, ibuprofen

Tools: Axe, pulaski, shovel, chainsaw, clinometer

Fuel: 1 gallon gas, 1 quart bar oil per saw

Hats: 1 baseball, 1 toque

Attitude: Don't quit, complain, lag, or brag. Pretend nothing hurts.

Expectations: Fix it; bust ass; do it fast; know it all, or learn it quick.

AXE

History
   One of the oldest tools for shaping life in the woods, an axe is a metal head mounted to a handle. This blend of simple machines—lever, wedge—traces as far back as 6000 BCE. Its predecessors include an edged horn or antler (Mesolithic period), a stone shaped for cutting (Neolithic period), and a honed metal blade (Iron Age). Axes migrated with people: up the Silk Road, over the Bering Strait. By the turn of the twentieth century, Oakland, Maine, billed itself as “the axe capital of the world.”

Warning
   A sharp blade (or bit) reflects its user, indicating a careful steward who knows that a tool is only as useful as its condition is good. A sheath (or scabbard) prevents the bit from snagging nylon pack cloth, slicing leather gloves or the hide of a pack mule, or laying open uncalloused skin. A sharp blade is an asset and a liability. On a fire crew, a woman put an axe through her kneecap, slicing to bone. A friend splitting kindling with a hatchet severed his thumb above the knuckle. An axe can leave a mark.

Etymology
   Ax, or axe—lucky for Scrabble players, both are correct. The word “axe” may originate from Latin,
ascia
, or Greek
, axine
, or from Old English,
eax
or
aex,
all meaning “cutting tool.” (The Dutch word for axe is
bijl
— Americanized to “byl,” it's my last name. Perhaps my ancestors were woodsmen?)

History
   The handle of an axe (also the haft, or helve) was seen as an extension of the user's hand, the cutting edge called the fingernail. Metalsmiths forged axe heads and the swinger crafted an ash or hickory handle to suit his grip. Families retained handle patterns over decades, like a cattle brand, connecting tool to user. The handle's distinction enabled the easy return of a borrowed or lost tool to the proper owner; counterfeiting a clan's handle pattern showed serious disrespect. Artistic fancy was not uncommon, even to ascetic Puritans—scrolled lines, decorative details. Bible texts have been found engraved on antique tools, a nod to the spiritual realm. A relationship to a tool often resulted in a pet name—an axe called Jack, a hoe called Tom.

Varieties
   A felling axe has a fine blade that cuts across wood grain, the double bit with two blades, a single bit with one; the butt (or poll) is used for pounding in wedges. A splitting axe's thicker blade cuts with the grain—imagine chopping firewood rounds. Other relatives: hatchet, maul, broad axe, adze, pulaski, tomahawk.

Mythology
   In Greece, Sweden, Japan, and Brazil, the axe symbolizes a thunderbolt. When buried in the ground, it wards off lightning. Want to prevent a hailstorm? Throw an axe. Protect your crops against inclement weather? Hide an axe in the field. If you meet Hermes and tell him the truth, he'll reward you with a golden axe. Little Red Riding Hood's woodcutter used one on the wolf, as did Jack on his beanstalk. To keep away witches, bury an axe upright under your house. If it's a male heir you're after, keep an axe under the bed.

Scenario
   Say there's a large tree to cut, miles from a road. An axe is the simplest tool that will do the job. Lighter than a midsize chainsaw by a good twelve pounds, an axe cannot run out of gas, throw its chain, or kick back. An axe is slower, and when efficiency is required, or volume, you'll wish for the fumy grace of a chainsaw. But as a backup for the saw, or if you have miles to walk and might not need to cut at all, an axe is the most stowable choice. Anyone who thinks an axe is quiet has never had to chop through an old-growth larch. Work is noisy, with or without gas.

Chapter 1. North Fork: River

(Where I went in search of wildness)

Reba and I arrive at the barn by 6:50 a.m. It's my first month as a laborer on a Glacier National Park trail crew, and my leader and I are headed into a ten-day hitch on the north shore of Logging Lake. To get there, we'll need the packers. I'm green as spring, but I sense to stay out of the way. A cowboy in a black hat busts out of the barn door and I press my back and palms flat into the side of the truck.

Yer late, where's yer rig, pull up over here, it's blockin' the truck, gaddam it, ain't even 8 an' we're fucked six ways from Sunday! What is she new, stay outta the way, Reba grab me them ropes, start mannyin' up, I wanna be outta here in twenny.
His boot steps scuff up dust, just like in a western. My eyes track his body: across the lot, in the barn door, out to the paddock, through the fence gate, up the ramp of the stock truck. Somehow he's loose and cricked up at the same time.
How in the name a hell should I know, ask Sheldon. Where's her hair? Looks like a gaddam guy. Hire all these wimmen, don't make no sense.
I'd hoped for invisibility, but my buzz cut caught his eye, so Reba tries to introduce us.
Give a shit what her name is, get outta the way, I want yer help I'll tell ya. Don't pet them critters, kick the hell outta ya, damn well should.

Leaving the barn forty-five minutes later is pure relief. Reba sees my stricken face. She grins and guns the F-350 out of the lot, a rooster tail of gravel splayed behind. “Don't worry about it. He's always like that,” she says, drumming her fingers on the wheel. We drive north. At the trailhead, we'll hike six miles in, joining another crew at a cabin on Logging Lake to work for ten days on trails projects. I don't exactly know what it means to “build turnpike.”

“That's okay,” says Reba. She's spunky and freckled, bounces more than walks. “You'll have ten days to figure it out.”

Day one, I figured out that I didn't pack enough food. (Reba said this was a common rookie mistake and I could eat canned goods from the cabin stash if necessary.) Day two, I figured out that white gas for the Coleman stove was different than chainsaw mix. By day three, I figured out that it was better to stand back and watch than ask a lot of questions; I'd get answers eventually, and was much less annoying. Day four, I figured out that a whole hitch of good weather is unlikely. Day five, I figured out that traildogs don't like to be mistaken for rangers. By day six, I figured out that Abby, the project leader, was a chocoholic whose mood improved drastically after she ate sweets. On day seven, I figured out that every person on the crew knew more than someone about something, and less than someone about something else. Day eight, I figured out that no matter how I stuffed myself at dinner, I was always starving by breakfast. By day nine, I figured out that I wouldn't be run out of the woods with a scarlet “I” on my back (idiot, incompetent, imbecile, or inept, take your pick).

And sure enough, ten days in, when the packers showed up to haul us out, I had figured out what “build turnpike” meant. We dropped trees and peeled off the bark (to prevent rot), dragged logs out of the woods with the impressive tool called the Swede hook. While the sawyer did log joinery, the crew dug massive lateral ditches to drain the water alongside the trail, and shoveled out troughs for the logs. Building, we notched and spiked the logs together and filled the box with large rocks, smaller rocks, then gravel dug from upended root wads or hauled from the creek bed in metal buckets and canvas miner's bags. The result was a humped turnpike, the logs, so carefully measured and joined, now buried, and previously muddy tread elevated into a swath of navigable trail. An eyesore the day we finished, all hacked roots and dead plants and displaced dirt, by the next season the turnpike would blend in so completely that only a trained eye would notice the site as altered. By the end of ten days, I learned that “turnpike” is one of many words on trails at once noun and verb, the functional meaning “to fix.”

On the last day's work, I was impressed by the bulk of the finished project. Standing at one end and looking down hundreds of feet of trail, I thought, oddly, of the carpeted aisle that movie stars travel when they mince toward the stage to accept their Oscars. I imagined myself clumping the length of it in my no-longer-shiny leather work boots to receive the “Traildog of the Hitch” award.

A laughable fantasy, as I had done little skilled labor on the project. Too timid and lurching to be trusted with the chainsaw, too unpracticed for carpentry, I was by far the skinniest, least-muscled of the bunch. I learned fast that in lieu of skills, you become useful by taking initiative and staying busy, which thanks in part to my father's lifelong injunctions, came easy to me. To become one of the gang, I'd step up to the shittiest jobs. For eight days, I carried fill from creek and borrow pit—tripping across sidehills through alder and devil's club, metal buckets passed to the next gloved hand, fire-line style. Other folks switched out, took turns felling a tree, prepping sills, spiking logs, but I—content to labor where I couldn't screw up—I dug, lifted, and carried yards of fill, so many loads that the outside of my legs from midthigh to midcalf were purpled with bruises from the buckets, and my new government-issue gloves had a permanent groove bisecting the palm from the metal handle.

I have probably built miles of turnpike since then. By watching closely and asking questions, I learned what to do, and in time could tell someone else how to do it. The parts I love best are choosing a tree for stringers and dropping it from sky to ground, the first twenty minutes of peeling off bark, and marking and notching the joints. Still, my proudest turnpike is that first one, when, invisible and naïve, I devoted myself to the least-skilled, most-backbreaking labor, and at the end of the week, staring down that length of corridor, I could not name a better thing I'd ever done.

The North Fork of the Flathead is a greenish river, swift in some places and slow in others, forming the western boundary of Glacier National Park. It flows south out of Canada's Kootenai Mountains into northwest Montana, running the international border as if a blinking yellow light, and then farther south through airy meadows and scorched forest, the craggy silhouette of the Northern Rockies' Livingston Range often just in view. The North Fork converges with the Middle Fork of the Flathead about forty miles south of the Canadian border, just upstream of the Blankenship Bridge. West Glacier sits a mile away, the town that houses the park's headquarters.

The North Fork originates in hundreds of feeder creeks that tear down the slopes of the Rockies, creeks flowing from the Forest Service land to the west (Fish, Hay, Camas) and the Park to the east (Kintla, Bowman, Kishenehn, Quartz, Logging, Akokala, Dutch). Topography knows no park boundaries, and on whichever land they began, the creeks end in the North Fork. It's a formidable river and a friendly one at the same time, so cold and clear in some spots you're swimming in tinted air; in others fast and muddy, kicking up silt and stones, jamming logs in narrow canyons until they resemble structures joisted from the force of water.

The North Fork is also the district in Glacier National Park whose trails and bridges and travelers must contend with one or another of the river's tributaries. It's an area of a couple hundred thousand acres—one-hundred-plus miles of trail; a few tire-puncturing roads; scattered cabins and fire lookouts—a wide sweep bordered by the river to the west, the Continental Divide to the east. The North Fork district is dominated and defined by the North Fork River, so when someone says, “I was up the North Fork today,” you can only guess whether they mean the region or the river by proximity to a truck or canoe.

Besides the river and its creeks, the North Fork is home to twentysome lakes, a couple of wolf packs, shaggy grizzlies, osprey, fireweed, marmots, old-growth larch groves, snowy passes, and the occasional
Calypso bulbosa
, the fairy slipper orchid. The fairy slipper is purplish-pink and lilylike, a weighty blossom on a bowed stem that looks like a tiny, fancy shoe.
Calypso
is Greek for “concealed,” and true to name, the lily grows low to the ground, often obscured by larger undergrowth or fallen needles; a special orchid, it's not exactly rare, but a sighting feels precious. Like many inhabitants of the North Fork, it's often looked for, and easy to miss. It seems that only in the absence of seeking do senses clear enough to see: lily, wolf, falling star.

Behind the North Fork ranger station sits the trail maintenance shop, a small room in a nondescript outbuilding. It's tidy, mostly because there's not much in it to make a mess—just enough essentials to be sure you won't run stuck, but no excess, no rusted coffee cans full of odd-size bolts, no broken axe handles, hanks of twine too small to use, too big to throw away. It's nothing like the main shop near headquarters, with a work bench and drill press; extra gloves and earplugs and six kinds of tape; a shed full of tents, coolers, tarps; ten Stihl power brushers hanging from a plywood ceiling rack like a fleet of orange-and-white Storm Troopers. Because this auxiliary shop is thirty miles from the main trails headquarters, everything here gets used up, repaired on site, or taken down to headquarters if it needs fixed. This shop supports the North Fork trail crew, four or five people instead of the entire west-side crew, and it has that kind of intimacy, the way a room feels different than a house. Gas stains on the floor, wet sawyer's chaps clipped on nails to dry, five pulaskis hanging by their heads in the rack where they belong. It smells like wood chips and bar oil, someone's drying T-shirt, and the thick perfume of mules.

I learned to swing an axe at the age of twenty-three. In my first weeks on trails, I learned lots of new things. How to run a chainsaw, eyes glued to the tip of the bar, alert for dreaded kickback. How to approach a mule without getting booted. Which tools you could grab anytime, which were kept under lock and key. By the time I'd been working for a week, it was hard to recall if I'd ever known how to do anything. Except hike. I could do that, walk miles carrying a daypack without complaint. So, hiking behind Reba one afternoon, I felt mildly adept. Our day's task finished and a couple hours before quitting time, we were going to chop out two downed trees near the Park Creek trailhead, skipping the chainsaw, which was back at the shop, in favor of the double-bit axe in the truck bed.

We came to the first downed tree a few hundred yards in, a spruce, its branches jutting out, barring passage. Reba unlashed the axe from her pack and unbuckled the leather sheath from the head. I stood back as she swung at the bases of limbs, hacking off enough of them to clear a section of trunk for chopping, a few feet off the trail. She turned to me. “Wanna try?” she asked, extending the axe by the head so the handle pointed at me.

I took it. It didn't occur to me to think, “I don't know how to chop.” I had split firewood rounds before (with a maul, I know now, though back then all the handled chopping tools looked the same), and compared with the specific and easy-to-confuse logistics required to start the chainsaw—
brake on, choke on, pull, pull, fire, off choke, pull, pull, fire, off brake, throttle—
the axe seemed too simple to require much instruction. (If you know how to swing an axe, you know that I am about to make a fool of myself.)

I stepped up to the trunk. I can't recall each motion, but I've since watched many people who don't know how to swing an axe try to swing an axe, and I know what I looked like. Axe head up next to my ear, arms awkwardly cocked with hands spread wide on the handle. Then, the downward motion we picture when we hear the word
chop,
a vertical blow akin to the board-breaking karate move. The blade hit the trunk straight on, bounced off lamely, just missing my shin. I tried this a few times, putting more muscle into it, until the pure ineffectuality of the whole thing stopped me short. I looked to Reba. She was laughing, not unkindly, the guffaw I'd hear many times over the next months. “Any tips?” I asked her.

“Watch.” She took the axe from me, squared her body to the tree, and, swinging the axe over her head, hands moving up, down the handle with each blow, she dispatched the tree in less than ten minutes. Karate-style, it would have taken me all day. Reba didn't explain the mechanics—she wasn't given to clear verbal instructions, instead gesturing,
like this,
and lighting into the task like a storm—but watching her, I could see that what she was doing made sense. Her swings had constant rhythm, the motion of the axe while not in contact with the tree as important as the chopping. The blade hit the wood at an angle, chiseling out pieces the way you'd whittle with a knife, and making clear the origin of the word “woodchips.” Reba swiveled the handle in her palms in midair so she used both bits of the head to chop on alternate sides, the width of the cut twice the diameter of the tree, leaving plenty of room for the angling cuts to meet in the middle and sever the trunk. My technique, I could see, was at best bludgeoning, more suited to driving a spike with a sledgehammer (the twelve-pound version of which would later make a different, equal fool of me). When Reba swung, it looked not exactly effortless, since her T-shirt was soaked with sweat and she stopped to catch her breath, but at least graceful. It seemed clear why you'd use that tool to do this job.

I watched Reba chop and tried to picture her somewhere else—at an office job, in front of a fourth-grade classroom—and I couldn't really do it. In clothes that filthy, with all those freckles and so much energy to burn, she belonged where she was, before that tree. She'd barely turned thirty. She'd just gotten married, and Rob, her husband, was a packer for the Forest Service. Tan and quick and light on her feet, she was at ease in the woods in a way I didn't even know how to describe. Before I started my trails job, back in Missoula spreading out maps and counting new pairs of socks, I wondered what my co-workers would be like. I guessed, as I usually do when joining a gang late, that they were much different than me. And they were, stronger, confident, knowledgeable. But Reba didn't fit my worries. She was a chatterbox, easy and open, and she told me stuff. The names of flowers, which truck couldn't go in reverse, don't ask the foreman questions until after morning briefing, how much she missed her husband when they were apart for a month. I was starting to know her. The axe was the bigger stranger.