too many t-shirts

Sometimes when I come back from planting I have a tough time remembering that it's a bad idea to unzip and relieve myself wherever and whenever the spirit leads. While tree planting, the world is my urinal and, as I am drinking gallons just to keep up to the self-lubricating demands of a body taxed to the limit, I end up peeing most everywhere.

After ten years, I have achieved a certain level of mastery. Not at peeing, mind (although I've had enough practice to be... er... quite a hand at it), but rather at transitioning between my wild bush state (in which I run around naked, climb trees, and rarely wash) and a somewhat closer approximation of civility. I think. It could be that I'm deluding myself, and that I have actually sunk so deeply into a state of general savagery that I'm barely aware of the difference - but I like to imagine that after ten years of planting/civilization/planting/civilization transitionings that I've become somewhat adroit at the art of sociocultural quickchange. I can go from loincloth to double-breasted suit in public in a matter of seconds using only a large Elvis Presley beach towel and some carefully orchestrated misdirection (Argh! Rowr! Grunt! ... What In the World Could that Be! ... I say, old chap, care for a spot of tea?).

Nonetheless, having left my last three weeks ever of "real" treeplanting behind for a week at home before some more oil site reclamation work, I find myself, oddly enough, a bit discombobulated by the jarring impact of the self-shifting call. Maybe it is because this is my last time (seriously), and the era-ending nature of the change is forcing upon my psyche a wee bit of self-searching reflection. Whatever the case, the differences are a bit frustrating.

It started, probably, with the inevitable climate change, flying from Edmonton to Vancouver. Edmonton - a dry, bright morning in rolling hills with a fire-orange sky burning away the edges of the night - was replaced after an hour and a half flight with fog, hard unceasing rain, and an overall greyness that would have reminded me exactly of London, England, had I ever been there. This weather is normal, here, but nonetheless set the stage for a gloomy entrance.

After the drive from the airport there was my home itself, full of things and clothes and books and pictures and bright colors. I went to put away the two extra shirts I've been toting around for the past month and a half and found a drawer perversely overstuffed. Normally, I see my clothes (which seem to have to have clustered around me like parasitic amoebas) as far too numerous in a theoretical sense, but after living out of a duffel bag for a while, the panoply seemed to be positively puking out opulence. How many t-shirts, I wonder, can one person wear?

I have the fortune of living on an acreage, which is presently lush with... well... lushness - so a reasonable facsimile of "outdoorness" wraps around me there. But shortly after arriving home the wife, unborn child and I headed off to a Gathering which meets on Sundays to try to learn about God. Not, you would think, a very threatening environment, but as I walked up the stairs and through an archway of drywall I felt as though a giant hand was tapping thumb and forefinger repeatedly against my temples. Some sort of eighties rock was scratchboarding over the sound system and the room was filled - filling - with people... people who seemed to be talking all at once, and far louder than necessary.

How did they think, I wondered? How did they have time enough to reflect on the words that would come from their mouths - to weigh them for wisdom - when everything and everyone in the room seemed to be careening in several directions at once. It reminded me of a playpen writhing, six inches deep, with wind-up toys. How did they really listen to each other?

There is something about the vast silence of trees that calms your spirit and helps you listen, something that doing yoga to a whale sounds CD can never hope to approach. There is something in the broad forests and quiet nooks of underlogs and rarely-observed stream beds and above all the endless patience of a forest, that mocks modern overactivity and calms the soul.

A Tolkein adherent would note, perhaps, that it takes a long time to say anything in the language of trees. Being out there, it seems that the plants gobble up not only the quantifiable carbon monoxide wastes of a species gone mad but the existential wastes of their minds as well. I doubt many wars are started by people who just came back from some solid, deep tree time. Not if they really meant it, really listened.

I could be wrong, though - a foolish, deluded romantic. What chance does a tree have against the stubborn pride of a man? There is little in nature that can rival the blind, willful obstreperousness of the human spirit. No sooner does a man feel awed by the indifferent power of a tree, or wave, or mountain, than he feels rising within him the need to demand the grand significance of himself, this puny little anthropoid with opposable thumbs. "Oh yeah, tree? You think you're all that? Well, check this out - opposable thumbs! Not impressed? Well, you'll be impressed when you see how easily I can use them to pull this cord on this cutting thingy!"... and so on.

And that's ME, you know? As a planter of trees I do a good thing, I think. Or at least a better thing. But that does not change the fact that I am, in essence, a facilitator of an industry that has helped make my generally luxurious lifestyle a possibility. It may be better to plant than to not, but I have to remember that the very reason I have been able to spend so much time in the forest thinking about the stupidity of humanity's land-raping habits, has been because of an industry whose attitudes and intentions I pretend hypocritically to abhor. The same goes for the oil-site reclamation work I've been doing - bandaiding the scars of oil-extraction with grass and alder plants.

I can stand on a ragged stump waving my arms and ranting about sustainability and stewardship, but I am not an innocent victim. I am a blithe perpetrator who drives on petroleum-based roads in my own car, eating crap and wasting crap and throwing crap in landfills. My mouth says one thing but my life, mostly, says that I don't care. I am presumptuous and selfish and I don't even bring my own mug around to places where I know they're only going to have styrofoam and waxed-paper disposables.

What, then? Despair? No, no, no... and "F"! NO! Not despair, but hope. Not lazy acquiescence, but change! Change, clinging, to the words spoken silently by a quiet forest blanketing an implacable mountain range. Learn, grow and struggle towards making a difference.

I am not a hugger of trees (rough bark, annoying sap - unpleasant) but I do love them and feel that there is a spirit to the forest that is violated by we who cut trees without respect and rip up earth without sorrow, for purposes of power and control rather than creation and stewardship.

In a bookstore today I picked up a Robert Bateman picturebook, where in the back he mentioned the contrast between the early aboriginal attitude toward a tree they cut down (respect, sorrow) and ours. He mused that perhaps the world would be a different place if logging company executives had to hold board meetings and have apologetic ceremonies every time they were about to cut down an ancient, old-growth behemoth.

I know, I know. It's not possible, it would wreck the economy, I'd have to give up two-ply toilet paper (which I love passionately), et cetera...

But change that attitude, just for one second, and wonder. What if I didn't need to control nature? What if I didn't have my needs met and exceeded easily whenever I wanted? What if I didn't need to own twelve t-shirts?

What if?