Dirt Work

by Christine Byl

  Christine Byl

  DIRT

  WORK

  An Education

  in the Woods

  Beacon Press Boston

  For traildogs everywhere.

  For Gabe,

  the original workingman’s thinker.

  If your feet aren’t in the mud of a place, you’d better watch where your mouth is.

  —Grace Paley

  Place is one kind of place. Another field is the work we do, our calling, our path in life.

  —Gary Snyder

  It’s a good life if you don’t weaken.

  —Trails aphorism

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  What We Carry

  AXE

  Chapter 1. North Fork: River

  ROCK BAR

  Chapter 2. Sperry: Alpine

  CHAINSAW

  Chapter 3. Middle Fork: Forest

  BOAT

  Chapter 4. Cordova: Coast

  SKID STEER

  Chapter 5. Denali: Park

  SHOVEL

  Chapter 6. Denali: Home

  Afterword

  Traildogs’ Index: A Life in Statistics

  Acknowledgments

  Works Consulted

  INTRODUCTION

  On the front porch of Frida’s, we sit feet-up on the railing. If you walk by, glance at the clapboard bar, you’ll see us there—four men and one woman; dirty pants, boot soles mud-caked. Eyebrows black. In West Glacier, Montana, on the front porch of Frida’s, it’s beer-thirty on the last day of a hitch and we’ve forgiven each other everything: the annoying way one guy chomps his cereal, how so-and-so always leaves the tool cache a mess. On the porch on day eight, crew leaders and laborers, fast hikers and slow, we’re just company. We rib each other and toast a job well done. We narrate the week, ushering it into our oral tradition: Can you believe the packer lost a load on the Ole Creek ford? How big you think that tree you logged out was? What was the best dinner? The worst weather? Are your boots dry yet? Are yours?

  A woman in river sandals and a visor stops on the stairs. “Are you trail crew?” “Yup,” Justin nods. Her boyfriend works on the east side crew, she says. She’s a raft guide, but she might put in for trails next year.

  “How do you keep up with them?” she asks me, a girl-to-girl aside.

  Justin answers before I can: “She can’t keep up. We carry her everywhere.” He pauses for effect and grins. “No, no, for real, she kicks my ass.” All I do is shrug.

  “That’s so cool,” says the rafter. “You’re so lucky.”

  She’s right. I am lucky. I’m lucky my job smashes me face-first against my limits. Lucky I get paid to sleep in a tent and piss in the brush. I’m lucky to be one of these guys, yet also not: lover to one, leader to some, daffy kid sister to the rest. I’m lucky that I like my eyebrows matted, my knees a little stiff, my heart rate low and steady. Who knows how any of us ends up where we’re meant to be? I’m lucky that I stumbled into this life and got to stay.

  We finish our beers, swigging the last warm inch of Miller Genuine Draft from plastic cups, and clump down the stairs. Some of us will meet to climb a peak on our days off. Others go home to families, houses in town, and won’t see anyone from work until we gather at the barn for the next hitch. We slap grimy palms, grab fingers, and punch fists in the routine crew farewell. Peace out. See you next week, fuckers. So long.

  The National Park Service was formally established by Woodrow Wilson in 1916, and in 1983, writer Wallace Stegner called it “the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, [parks] reflect us at our best.” Today, the Park Service is one of the United States’ most widely emulated federal innovations; over one hundred countries have comparable agencies for protecting public lands. In the United States, the Park Service manages 84 million acres in 393 areas, places where more than 285 million visitors—American, Swiss, Korean—go each year in search of leisure, education, wilderness, or respite. Parks vary in focus—from Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell to Florida’s Everglades to Wrangell-St.-Elias in Alaska, the largest of all parks (nearly double the size of Vermont)—but they are united around the intent, as written in the Park Service Organic Act of 1916, to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

  I first visited national parks on family vacations, after long road trips complete with car sickness. When I was twenty-two, the Park Service became an employer, the job a summer diversion. And then, over years, a park became a home, the way any home gets made: through work. As in employment, and as in effort. Each with its own set of tools.

  I’ve now been a “traildog” for sixteen years, a laborer who works in the woods maintaining, repairing, building, and designing trails. The Park Service runs on the backs of my cohorts and me—seasonals, we’re called—and we perform every manual task. Most people recognize the seasonal NPS poster children, rangers in flat hats giving campfire talks, but few see behind the curtain, where mechanics keep the fleet running and maintenance guys empty rest-stop outhouses. Carpenters, firefighters. The road crew, repainting traffic stripes, steaming ice out of culverts. And the traildogs.

  Our numbers may be invisible, but our tasks are concrete. We’re the ones who hike a trail first in the spring to log out fallen trees that cross it. My crew has built the rock steps climbing a mountain pass, and the gravel path that connects parking lot to visitor’s center. We clear rocks from drainage ditches, fill muddy spots. We build bridges, sink signposts, grub reroutes, blast snowdrifts. To get to every job, we hike.

  If it sounds like simple work, in many ways it is. Once you learn the tools and develop the eye, once you discern your limits and strengths, trailwork can be brute simple. Dig trench. Move log. Roll rock. Swing axe. Yet, like any craft, it’s as complex as you ask it to be: how to sand a tool handle so it fits your grip, tuning a carburetor by ear, what width a bridge stringer can span. And the dawning understanding of why: the way trail grade relates to the angle of the slope it traverses, that aged wood is better than green. If you’re curious, any task can offer something new.

  There are almost as many reasons to turn hands to physical work as there are tasks that require it. Some people fall into labor because of lineage—a father’s lumberyard, a trade union membership generations long. Others choose labor because it suits them—they’re good with their hands, they see how things work. Sometimes, it’s necessity: an immigrant takes an hourly job when she was a doctor back home. A recession hits, and we do any work we can find. In many cases, labor happens when you can’t afford to pay someone else to do it. We learn a task because the timing was right and an opportunity came along. Or the work just needed to be done. One way or another, there is always work to do, and someone who has to—gets to—wants to—do it.

  I was not born to labor, not led to it by heritage or expectation. In the age-old dichotomy made too much of, I was headed away from physical work, toward the education meant to save me from it. This is a familiar polarity to many of us, used as we are to lives based on split realities: mind over body, now or later, men against women, work then pleasure, culture versus nature, blue collars and white. In my case, despite a diverse family (teachers and tradesmen) and the climate of 1980s feminism, I inherited a common unspoken baseline. Boys took shop. Smart kids went to college. Think about your future! Sharpen your mind. Sports after homework is done.

  We all encounter these assumptions and more, and it
might surprise us to notice how many of our choices are circumscribed by them. Exercise must fit into the workday. Nature is where we go to escape our ordinary lives. Women in certain arenas are token, if welcome at all. Such schisms may seem purely theoretical until we start to wonder, Who would I be if I chose the opposite? Or, perhaps even more revolutionary, What if they aren’t really opposites at all? Can’t our work bring us pleasure? Culture be based on nature, not carved out? What if manual tasks are mentally rewarding? What if a woman in a man’s world makes it anyone’s world? The problem with my old dichotomy—education, not labor—was the problem with all of them: it entirely missed the point. It turns out, reality is more interwoven—more interesting—than dichotomies allow; it turns out I had a lot to learn.

  Sixteen years have passed since I went from school to the woods. The details of my life and job are no longer novel. Trailwork is not fetish, hiatus, or a meander off a truer path. Through two decades of changes, years of both drudgery and stimulation, trailwork has been an unexpected constant, the magnetic pull that swings my inner needle true, the thing that has taught me, in a way, how to live. When spring comes, fieldwork calls, and I migrate—back north, back outside, back to “trails,” as we call it from within. Back to a world so tangible to me now I can taste and smell it as I write—chainsaw mix and spruce pitch, diesel fumes and sweat.

  Henry David Thoreau famously wrote, “I went to the woods in order to live deliberately,” and with this statement, the godfather of American nature writing entrusted to the genre its lasting foundational question: what does the natural world have to do with an authentic life? When I first read Thoreau in high school English, I lived in urban Michigan and had no experience with subsistence tasks. My tomboy youth spent playing in the mud was as close as I’d been to wild, but I’d traded dirt for college prep trimmings: Greek myths and Ivy League catalogs. I had not hoed a row of beans, split firewood, or learned the birds in my backyard by name. Yet I loved Thoreau from the first page. Something about what centered him made sense to me—life connected to the place where you lived, and what you did there. I liked how he was humble yet sure of himself. I liked that he admired squirrels.

  Despite my attraction to Thoreau, it took me years more to go to the woods, and when I did, I went haphazardly. If you had told me when I was a sophomore intent on grad school in philosophy that I would one day bring home a paycheck by hauling brush and then spend it on the porch of a ratty bar, I would have laughed. I thought of myself as a thinker. My mind was the muscle I’d trained, and as Plato and Augustine taught me, it was the place where my elegant soul dwelt. I didn’t think much about what the body could do.

  By the time I finished college, I was more tired of school than Socrates had hinted possible. I moved out West after I graduated, broke and ready for a different life, and ended up in Missoula, Montana, a town where writers and laborers, professors and loggers not only drank at the same bars, they were sometimes the same people. In this place, I had to earn money, and goaded by new friends who worked seasonal jobs, I went to the woods in order to get a paycheck. I wanted to get to know the Rockies, which I had admired mostly from a distance, and I had thought a lot about Wilderness, which I was ready to experience firsthand. But mostly, I wanted to make a living, and to make it learning something new. My boyfriend, Gabe, and I went to work on a Park Service trail crew. As it turns out, dirt was calling me back.

  I was hired on by flat luck, since my résumé didn’t assure that I’d know which end of a hammer to hold. That first season, I studied everyone—the lifers, the newbies, the cranky mule packers, and the tough-ass women kind enough not to laugh in my face—and I absorbed enough to do my job. My effort was worth money. For the first time in my life, my salary was connected to palpable, not intangible, work. My inner dirtball began to reawaken, and novelty aside, I found I loved trailwork, and a lot of the people who did it. Over seasons, as my expertise increased, I saw that the skills I was honing had uses beyond the work site—log notches for bridge sills could be used to build a cabin. I could fell, limb, and buck trees for firewood the same way I cleared a trail. The endurance and strength and confidence I’d built up from long days of work outside would do me good living in any wild place. The skills I was learning were old ones that had served working people for a long time, and in that sense, I was apprenticed not just to mastery, but to history.

  Here’s a puzzle: our culture is at once almost totally disconnected from the rhythms and limits of nature, yet obsessed with what is “natural.” Some of the thinking about this is deep and critical: what should we eat? Where should it come from? What are things made of ? Who makes them? How do our actions affect this planet? How should the planet affect our actions? Other riffs on the nature theme are purely commercial: lanky magazine models loll in grassy fields with wicker picnic baskets. Log homes are status symbols, the “rustic look” perfectly orchestrated by an interior designer. “Mama grizzlies” are leashed for political fund-raising.

  Yet, a hunch persists in many of us that a life connected to nature has little to do with commerce, and less still with image. “I want to get back to the land,” we say earnestly. But arriving at the doorstep of our own Waldens, we have to ask, What do I do now? This is where “going to the woods” gets difficult, because what to do is not among the skills twenty-first-century Americans know best: which stuff to get from which catalog, what message to cultivate, how to broadcast it widely. “What to do” is tasks and tools and the experience—or the openness—to put them together. The truth is, no one can live on the land without touching the land. And touching land requires old, unglamorous, sometimes artful, sometimes boring, dirty work.

  Which brings me back to Thoreau’s question. What exactly does it mean to live deliberately, to have an authentic life? I asked a handful of people this question—from an urban freelance writer to an off-the-grid homesteader —and here’s what I heard: living within your means, having a sense of purpose. Feeling grounded, being responsible for the necessities of living. Being happy, but in a deep way, more like content. Existing with a sense of natural limits, where progress isn’t everything. Knowing how to do real stuff. Something’s a little wild, everything’s not figured out. Living the way we evolved to, where our surroundings matter.

  By these definitions, which echo my own instinct, an authentic life will not be built on what we think (“I’ve escaped the city”) or of what we buy (a pine bench for the entryway, the perfect work pants). Not of what we say (“buy local” and “live in the moment”) or even what we find (feathers, shells). An authentic life will be built, at least in part, of ordinary verbs: wake, plant, dig, mend, walk, lift, listen, season, note, bake, chop, store, stack, harvest, give, stretch, measure, wash, help, haul, sleep. And verbs bring nouns, what doing requires: shovel, needle, basket, axe, seed, pencil, boots, match, handle, bucket, knife, ear, saw, tape, bowl, barrow, boat, level, soil, wedge, hand.

  Perusal of this list quickly reveals that life attached to a location does not require forty acres and a herd of heirloom goats, or a kayak and four months without human contact. The questions that nature triggers are persistent and subtle, and they arise in any place: when does the sun rise? When does it set? Which birds come in spring, and leave in fall? How much does it rain in July? November? Which plants are edible? Is it cold for this time of year? Will a tomato grow in the windowsill? Is the pond frozen enough to cross, or should we walk around? Through questions and tasks and endless figuring, authenticity sneaks up on you, and perhaps by unnoticed accrual is the only way it can, because authenticity comes not from trying, but from being. Witness my first months of trailwork: I longed to be a “real traildog,” but mostly, I felt like a poser. Once I had become a real traildog, I didn’t think about it anymore.

  Of course, only someone who’s never done any would say that grunt work alone is path to a fulfilled existence. Days made up solely of hard labor or mindless chores create a different
kind of deadness, even as they invite another kind of meaning. We need our minds to organize our actions, to set up scaffolding for our choices, even as we need our bodies to enact them. In my experience, this is why a deep education is one of both head and hands. Over the past twenty years of my life, books have taught me some things, people have taught me many things, and tools have taught me everything else. I mean this as neither romantic nor prescriptive. It just means that touch and work are part of what I had to learn.

  Back on the porch of Frida’s, the guys are shaking their heads. “You talk too much,” Max might say. “Have another beer.” I flip him the bird, Socrates quick to my tongue: Dude, the unexamined life is not worth living. But Max is right. The over-examined one isn’t, either, and every road has its potholes. A life on the land sometimes sucks. You get soaked, your feet hurt. What you have to carry is too heavy, where you need to go is too far. Moose eat the garden. It rains for a month straight. The corners aren’t square. Exhausted, you lose your temper. There’s no one to fix it but you.

  An authentic life is often held out as utopia, but I hope I am clear: I don’t believe in idylls, not iconic men and women made better by proximity to “nature.” Life in the woods has its charms and its burdens, like any life; a rural, even wild existence holds no redemption inherent. If dirt does not damn us, it doesn’t save us, either. Wherever we end up, we are human once we get there, as vulnerable to unease and envy on talus slopes as on Broadway corners. And yet. I have a bias, because my life in the woods changed me. Work changed my trajectory, my days, changed the shape of my hands.

  Take my friends on the porch. If Max and Justin and Gabe held out their hands for your scrutiny (which they won’t), you’d see labor’s imprint: knobby joints, chapped knuckles. A purple thumbnail, taut tendons in the wrists, the tan that extends to midbicep and stops where a filthy T-shirt begins. Despite the common wilderness maxim, passage on land cannot possibly leave no trace, because just as we mark the world when we live in it, so the world marks us. A place—a certain sky, the feel of walking on one type of ground, the unfurl of seasons—stakes its claim, makes itself familiar, which is sometimes to say, known. And work always marks a body. Mine has small muscles on skinny limbs, two broken fingers permanently crooked, callous-shod feet, legs that can eat up the miles. Carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists, two hernia surgeries, joints that feel older than I am. Also, work marks the spirit. Foresight and patience not innate in me have taken root, fixed by impermanence—erosion, aging. I look for new clouds in an old sky.