Nine Thousand Firs on the Hill He Cut

Planting

With a crew of more than a dozen, the hill changed by the hour.

The loggers knew how to plant. Half of them had planted trees for summer money when they were young, back in the days when the big companies hired school kids by the busload.

They spread out across the slope in long lines, each person working a strip, swinging and stepping and moving on. You could hear it all over the hill, the chunk of the blades going into the dirt, the thump of boot heels.

Lorne’s daughters took Colby with them and taught him a faster swing. The loader operator’s son, who was about Tanner’s age, worked beside Tanner the whole day, and by noon they were racing each other up the rows.

The woman from the scale house kept a tally on a little notebook in her vest pocket. Every time a box was emptied, she made a mark.

At noon we all sat on the stumps and ate sandwiches out of coolers. Someone had brought a big thermos of coffee. Someone else had brought a pan of brownies wrapped in foil.

Emmett sat on Grandpa’s old moss stump at the top of the hill, and nobody else would sit on it while he was there.

That Monday, we planted almost two thousand trees.

The Middle of the Week

Tuesday more people came. A couple I did not know from up the river. A retired forester who had heard about it at the feed store. The pastor himself came up on Wednesday afternoon, in old jeans, and planted until he had blisters.

Not everybody came every day. People had jobs and cattle and kids. But every morning there were pickups on the skid road, and every afternoon the green rows had crept higher up the slope.

The rain held off just enough. It misted every day, which kept the seedlings happy and the ground soft. Emmett said it was the best planting weather he had seen in ten years.

I asked him once if he thought Grandpa was watching.

“I think he is laughing,” Emmett said. “He always said the women in this family had more sense than the men.”

Lorne’s wife started bringing hot soup in big jars. The baby rode on her mother’s back all week and slept through most of it, rocked by the swinging of the hoedad.

On Wednesday late in the afternoon, after everyone left, Tanner and I walked to the top of the hill alone and looked down.

The bottom half of the cut was green now, faint but there, tiny trees in rows that ran all the way down to the skid road. From a distance they looked like stitches.

“It looks like we’re sewing it back up,” Tanner said.

I had to look away so he would not see my face.