Submitted April 2008
Today I woke up 5:42, I ate 6 grilled cheese sandwiches and took shotgun before anyone else could. Alice cut mine and Adam’s piece at 8:17; it was 240 trees to the treeline and 50 trees across to Anna’s piece, so about 672 metres by 140 metres…9.4 hectares, give or take. I filled my bags with 270 trees 17 times. The plugs were 4 cm by 12 cm, real easy to j-root so you have to be careful. Throughout the day I ate 2 chocolate brownies, a twix bar, a turkey sandwich with cheddar and mustard on rye, and a bag of shreddies. I walked approximately 14.52 km. I shat once, after my second bag up. I drank 8 litres of water and on average peed every bag up. I bent over a minimum of 4,590 times and planted the same number of trees. I was paid 13.1 cents per tree and made $601.29. When I planted my last tree at 5:48 my face was burning hot, probably close to heat exhaustion; I had that feeling you get when you have drank to much and can’t sit still. I paced around for 10 minutes then ate the rest of my shreddies in the truck and waited for the last of the crew to finish up. This was my 3rd last day of planting. This was the most trees I had ever planted in a day, and the most money I had every made in a day in my entire life. If I made that much daily, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year, my salary would be $156,335.40 per year. That is never going to happen. Enjoy it while you can.
Today I woke up at 6:15, late, that can only mean one thing, no more honey combs and no more turkey for sandwiches. Goddammitt. Shelly had put out bagels for breakfast… cinnamon raison bagels… what the hell am I going to do with that Shelly? The only space left in the trucks was in the back of the crummy, that means a bumpy ride. Me, 4 other planters, and Alice had a special mission today; a few of the blocks had some ‘holes’ that needed to be planted. When West Fraser prepped some of these blocks they decided to leave several small, isolated patches of excavator mounds. I had to walk to my first piece with full bags; it took 45 minutes. I finished the miscellaneous patch of mounds in 40 minutes. The block was finished, and I still hadn’t finished my first bag-up, it was 11:30. We arrived to the second block that Kyle was planting as it started to hail, not as big as last time but hail the size of mothballs still hurts. Kyle came to the truck and said he had a hole that was thirty trees or so, Kyle was a rookie. So I did the bushwack and arrived to the patch of mounds, and bagged out. By this time the hail had turned to a hard rain. Still a 15-tree hole left and the checker is on our ass so I have to go and bag up again…I hate you Kyle. We planted 3 more blocks that day, all of them were patches o’ mounds. I planted 1,080 trees that day and made $124.42…before camp costs.
