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Living and Working in the Woods

Writer's picture: Cliff DansaCliff Dansa

It was raining as I drove into Forks, which is a little redundant—it's always raining in Forks, Washington. There are only about 75 days a year on which it doesn't rain in Forks, a logging town that at that time had about 10,000 residents, located out on the northwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula. Largely as a result of all that rain, the area grows some of the biggest timber in the world. In the boom days of the logging industry in the late seventies, it had a reputation as a town where a guy could find a job if he needed one.


I'd already spent almost a week looking around Forks for a tree planting job and the best lead I'd had so far led me 50 miles down a winding road to a sawmill where I’d climbed a series of ladders to find the owner screwing tin on the roof in the pouring rain. "Nothing right now, check back in a couple months," he told me.


Now, I had what sounded like a good lead. A crew from Oregon was working out of the Far West Motel, which turned out to be a little one-story cinder block horseshoe on the edge of town. Parking my van in front of the office, I pulled a comb from the glove compartment, combed my hair, straightened the collar of my jacket, dashed through the rain to the office, and asked the desk clerk if he knew where the tree planters were staying.


"Number thirteen," he said gruffly and motioned across the parking lot. I ran through the rain, stood under the overhang of the roof, and stared at the red painted door with the number 13 on it. Straightening my collar one more time, I stood up straight, took a deep breath, and knocked on the door. “Come in,” bellowed a chorus of gravelly voices. I opened the door gingerly.


A cloud of marijuana smoke rolled out of the door and hit me square in the face. I peered in at a half dozen of the grimiest guys I had ever seen. They’d obviously just gotten off work; most of them were still in their work jeans which were covered with mud from about mid-calf down. Their shirts had the ground-in grunge and sweat look that comes from working all day in raingear. Copious quantities of hair and beard sprouted from every head. Everyone had a beer either in his hand or nearby as they sprawled about the tiny motel room watching a fight on television. A smoldering joint was casually being passed around the room.


"Are you guys the tree planters?" I asked shyly.


With the bellicose roar of a barroom drunk inviting a stranger to sit down for a beer, someone replied, "Yeah! You want a job?"

*****

Thus began my life as a tree planter. I planted trees for four seasons spread out over five years. During most of this time, I lived in a fourteen-foot canvas yurt with a woodstove and a dirt floor. I cut my wood by hand and carried my water in five-gallon buckets. When I was working, I lived in the woods, usually on some flat spot I managed to find beside some nondescript logging road. Civilization was something I visited once a week or so to buy groceries, do laundry, and perhaps take a shower, although I often showered with a siphon hose coming out of a five-gallon pot of hot water sitting on top of my Volkswagen van.


We moved constantly, following the seasons. For the last two years I planted trees I was never in the same town or location for longer than six weeks. It was hard physical work in all kinds of weather, climbing up and down clear cuts, digging in the earth, opening it up, and inserting new life.


This way of life was incredibly connected to the earth. For the first couple years, the money was pretty good, and summer was off-season. I could afford to do things like the trip to Ireland where I started to explore playing music with the streams. When I came back from Ireland, it was quite natural to continue to explore playing music for the nature spirits. I took this on as a practice whenever I had some free time and the weather was agreeable (which it often wasn’t). Often, I didn’t have to go more than a few feet from where I was camped to find a suitable spot. I played the whistle, I played guitar, I played concertina, I sang, I danced. When the weather was not agreeable, I would sit in my yurt with the rain drumming on the cotton canvas roof, dirt floor under my feet, playing guitar or concertina with the rhythm of the rain, the wind in the trees, and the stream flowing by.


Although my mind still thought about my music practice in terms of a performance paradigm, when I practiced, it was just me and the trees, me and the rocks, me and the stream, me and the river. My efforts here were perhaps somewhat haphazard, perhaps misguided at times, but I showed up, I kept coming back, I kept doing the work. When I search for the roots to my approach to music practice, I find them here. My teachers were the trees, the rocks, the wind, and the river.


Living and working in the woods was very different from camping. When you go camping, you go into the woods for a few days, enjoy the closer connection with the natural world, then start to get tired of the dirt and the bugs, the hassles of cooking on the camp stove, the often- uncooperative weather, and you go back home. When you are living and working in the woods, there is no going home because being in the woods is home. The dirt and the bugs, the hassles of the stove, the weather, are just part of the normal daily routine.


Living this close to the natural world taught me a lot, but I don’t want to romanticize things too much. Mother nature can be a tempestuous bitch when she wants to. The weather was a constant and often challenging reality. When we go camping or hiking, we usually choose our times to try to avoid “bad weather.” As a tree planter, you are out in the weather, whatever it is, every day. Sometimes it would be hot, dry, and dusty, and planting a tree would raise clouds of dust that would stick to the sweat on your skin. Sometimes, especially in the winter on the Oregon coast, it would rain for two or three weeks without stopping. The only way to keep from going crazy was to drop all resistance to the weather, to simply accept the rain, accept the clunkiness of raingear, to accept the cold trickle down your back where the wind-driven rain had snuck in under your rain hat and above the collar of your raincoat. The only option was surrender.


As I write this, it’s been thirty-five years since I left the woods and moved back into civilization, but I can still feel the effects of my time in the woods. The artist that I am now, the artist I aspire to be, was born while dancing, singing, and playing with the trees, the rocks, and the sound of the stream. Even though I now live in the heart of the Denver suburbs, I love to take my flute and go play sitting on the banks of Clear Creek. That relationship is important, something I don’t want to lose.



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