Saturday, January 29, 2005
A tribute to cream everywhere
While Meagan made me breakfast this morning, I picked a book off her shelf called Handmade Forests: a treeplanter's experience. Filled with beautiful pictures, this book shows the hardships and realities and exquisite beauty that is treeplanting.
It was interesting to note that many pictures looked as if they had been taken at last season's plant, despite their being over 10 years old. Planting fashion is timelessly Canadian - warm, weathered and practical. Only some of the haircuts and "in town" (read: clean people) shots gave away the ancient styles.
Many, many beautiful shots that displayed the realities of treeplanting: exhaustion over one's shovel at the sight of a wide open clearcut; to see naked, mud-coated planters doing very realistic impressions of Greek statues; the duct tape not barely holding together some very torn leggings; and, of course, hands - the dirty, scarred hands.
The book also came with a hilarious (to a planter) literature, including glossary of planting terms. Noting how planting is lke an excuse to eat anything you want - burning four to six THOUSAND calories per day gives you license to eat not one but four pre-bedtime snacks. Or how life at camp, in a sense, revolves almost entirely around the cooks. Or the extent to which people choose to deal with the blackfly situation.
Good times.
It was interesting to note that many pictures looked as if they had been taken at last season's plant, despite their being over 10 years old. Planting fashion is timelessly Canadian - warm, weathered and practical. Only some of the haircuts and "in town" (read: clean people) shots gave away the ancient styles.
Many, many beautiful shots that displayed the realities of treeplanting: exhaustion over one's shovel at the sight of a wide open clearcut; to see naked, mud-coated planters doing very realistic impressions of Greek statues; the duct tape not barely holding together some very torn leggings; and, of course, hands - the dirty, scarred hands.
The book also came with a hilarious (to a planter) literature, including glossary of planting terms. Noting how planting is lke an excuse to eat anything you want - burning four to six THOUSAND calories per day gives you license to eat not one but four pre-bedtime snacks. Or how life at camp, in a sense, revolves almost entirely around the cooks. Or the extent to which people choose to deal with the blackfly situation.
Good times.
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We just watched an animation in class called "The Man Who Planted Trees" about a solitary villager near Province who plants an entire forest from nothing. I think you'd love it especially since you know what that hardship is like. I'll see if I can take it out from the film library over at ECH so you can see it.
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