In an old photo, my sister and I pose on the back of my neighbour's logging truck. We’re about seven. It was a big stretch for my little arms and a few warm-up jumps to get up onto that steel dinosaur. My hair grazed against freshly sliced cedar meat. Loose bark and a few sticks hung in the gaps between logs. It’s my favourite smell; fallen trees, gasoline and dirt. Loaded in the truck are only six giants, fallen by my father.
Growing up in the ’90s with a tree faller dad meant long summer ‘camping’ trips deep into the Kootenays via forest service road. We’d stop for black bears and slow down over parts of the road where the creeks had spilled onto until reaching the site to make camp. The site was where the grey-brown earth road stops to make way for the freshly built banks lined with willows and blackberry bushes.
Up from the banks, the trees tower. Some trunks would take four of me with my arms wrapped around to reach. Looking up, they just disappear. The vastness would have to stop eventually. I imagined treetops where the branches have gotten smaller and smaller until one needle is left. It basks in the sun; one stretched out finger hair of cedar taking in the view. These quiet titans are experts at taking in the scenery. They hold the memories of changing river paths, the birds falling, and the fires raging. They’ve seen the snowpacks differ yearly, the elk migrations change routes, and the pine beetles take lives. Until a fluorescent yellow excavator comes tearing up the forest floor below them, vibrating the earth around their roots and shaking their last needle up in the sky. This alien pushes the growth away, making a path for the trucks. Gasoline has leaked into a puddle on the road. The chromatic swirls on the water only partially hide the reflection of the newly exposed wall of trees on the road bank.
When my dad would come home from a long stint and unpack his work gear, that distinct smell - sawdust and oil - was a comfort. Dad was finally home. It meant we were going on a big grocery shopping trip soon—the kind where we hit every aisle. My mom sends one of the siblings to grab something on the other end of the store that we forgot while we deliberate over what flavour of ice cream we should get. It meant mom could pay the bills and we would stop hearing her worry about having the power cut off. I was getting a new backpack for school, maybe a lunch box too. We were gifted some relief in a house plagued with poverty.
I grew up on these fallen trees. Sometimes it was playing make-believe on their cracked branches, building fairy forts. My older sister would help lift my twin and me up the banks into the clear-cut to pick berries. At the same time, my brother would be pointing his BB gun into the edge of the woods where the block stopped. He was hunting squirrels until we thought we heard cougars and would run back to the safety of Big Blue, our camping bus. Other times, growth came from having something to eat other than the last resorts in the pantry. At night, once tucked in with fresh pajamas, my parents slept soundly to a lullaby: the sound of heat rustling through the floor vents. They are my saviours, my soldiers, these fallen trees.
As a child, I never mourned the cedars, the larch, and the fir. But now, looking at that photo with my white-blonde hair brushed up against that mammoth tree trunk, I wonder. How many rings are there? How many years did this tree grow just to get sacrificed? How much of that tree would be wasted? May it be from the unused parts left in the woods or the pieces shaved away in the mill and lost in the yard to become dust pushed into the earth from machines in the sky moving from pile to pile, tree to tree. They now reside in a mass graveyard before going to production to feed another family. They look like piles of toothpicks in the lumber yard from the highway as you drive by. They’ve gone grey and horizontal—rows and rows of uniform timber. Once my dad stepped into his block in the forest and started his saw, it wrote their story. Startled birds scatter and the deer halt at the foreign sound.
I unroll my window from the highway to take a whiff. It still smells so good - trees and dirt and gas and all.
