Dirt Work

by Christine Byl

  I learned to swing an axe at the age of twenty-three. In my first weeks on trails, I learned lots of new things. How to run a chainsaw, eyes glued to the tip of the bar, alert for dreaded kickback. How to approach a mule without getting booted. Which tools you could grab anytime, which were kept under lock and key. By the time I’d been working for a week, it was hard to recall if I’d ever known how to do anything. Except hike. I could do that, walk miles carrying a daypack without complaint. So, hiking behind Reba one afternoon, I felt mildly adept. Our day’s task finished and a couple hours before quitting time, we were going to chop out two downed trees near the Park Creek trailhead, skipping the chainsaw, which was back at the shop, in favor of the double-bit axe in the truck bed.

  We came to the first downed tree a few hundred yards in, a spruce, its branches jutting out, barring passage. Reba unlashed the axe from her pack and unbuckled the leather sheath from the head. I stood back as she swung at the bases of limbs, hacking off enough of them to clear a section of trunk for chopping, a few feet off the trail. She turned to me. “Wanna try?” she asked, extending the axe by the head so the handle pointed at me.

  I took it. It didn’t occur to me to think, “I don’t know how to chop.” I had split firewood rounds before (with a maul, I know now, though back then all the handled chopping tools looked the same), and compared with the specific and easy-to-confuse logistics required to start the chainsaw—brake on, choke on, pull, pull, fire, off choke, pull, pull, fire, off brake, throttle—the axe seemed too simple to require much instruction. (If you know how to swing an axe, you know that I am about to make a fool of myself.)

  I stepped up to the trunk. I can’t recall each motion, but I’ve since watched many people who don’t know how to swing an axe try to swing an axe, and I know what I looked like. Axe head up next to my ear, arms awkwardly cocked with hands spread wide on the handle. Then, the downward motion we picture when we hear the word chop, a vertical blow akin to the board-breaking karate move. The blade hit the trunk straight on, bounced off lamely, just missing my shin. I tried this a few times, putting more muscle into it, until the pure ineffectuality of the whole thing stopped me short. I looked to Reba. She was laughing, not unkindly, the guffaw I’d hear many times over the next months. “Any tips?” I asked her.

  “Watch.” She took the axe from me, squared her body to the tree, and, swinging the axe over her head, hands moving up, down the handle with each blow, she dispatched the tree in less than ten minutes. Karate-style, it would have taken me all day. Reba didn’t explain the mechanics—she wasn’t given to clear verbal instructions, instead gesturing, like this, and lighting into the task like a storm—but watching her, I could see that what she was doing made sense. Her swings had constant rhythm, the motion of the axe while not in contact with the tree as important as the chopping. The blade hit the wood at an angle, chiseling out pieces the way you’d whittle with a knife, and making clear the origin of the word “woodchips.” Reba swiveled the handle in her palms in midair so she used both bits of the head to chop on alternate sides, the width of the cut twice the diameter of the tree, leaving plenty of room for the angling cuts to meet in the middle and sever the trunk. My technique, I could see, was at best bludgeoning, more suited to driving a spike with a sledgehammer (the twelve-pound version of which would later make a different, equal fool of me). When Reba swung, it looked not exactly effortless, since her T-shirt was soaked with sweat and she stopped to catch her breath, but at least graceful. It seemed clear why you’d use that tool to do this job.

  I watched Reba chop and tried to picture her somewhere else—at an office job, in front of a fourth-grade classroom—and I couldn’t really do it. In clothes that filthy, with all those freckles and so much energy to burn, she belonged where she was, before that tree. She’d barely turned thirty. She’d just gotten married, and Rob, her husband, was a packer for the Forest Service. Tan and quick and light on her feet, she was at ease in the woods in a way I didn’t even know how to describe. Before I started my trails job, back in Missoula spreading out maps and counting new pairs of socks, I wondered what my co-workers would be like. I guessed, as I usually do when joining a gang late, that they were much different than me. And they were, stronger, confident, knowledgeable. But Reba didn’t fit my worries. She was a chatterbox, easy and open, and she told me stuff. The names of flowers, which truck couldn’t go in reverse, don’t ask the foreman questions until after morning briefing, how much she missed her husband when they were apart for a month. I was starting to know her. The axe was the bigger stranger.

  Reba finished the first cut and I began the next one, swinging as she had shown me, the head at an angle, my hands loose on the shaft. The axe still glanced off here and there and I had to rest often. I started the cut too narrow, and at the bottom of the V, the wood pinched the blade of the axe tight. The last swings to chop it free were the most difficult and awkward of the half-an-hour’s production, and taught me a critical thing: even a simple task relied on precision, and was easier if you planned ahead. The six-foot section finally dropped free of the trunk. Reba and I rolled it off to the side of the trail, then tipped it onto its angled butt and toppled it forward in a move I’d soon learn to call an “end-o.” Its bulk surprised me. So recently alive, the log was full of sap and water. It would take a year on the ground before it dried out enough to mimic the lighter-than-expected heft of well-seasoned firewood.

  I couldn’t linger over my success. Reba had already shouldered her pack and moved up trail. The second tree was smaller and I chopped the whole thing myself, planning the cuts, their width, how far apart. It took me twice as long as the larger tree had taken her to chop, so it was almost quitting time when we left the site. But I’d done it. Every step. Reba gave me a jubilant high five and we slammed a quart of water each and jogged to the truck, stomachs sloshing. On the ride back to headquarters, my shoulders were hunched high and already sore to the touch. I stretched my wrists, holding the fingers bent back from the palm the way I’d seen Reba do. We pulled in to the shop at 6:30 p.m., long after the other crews had left for the day. That night, getting ready for bed, I could hardly lift my toothbrush.

  Hitch: n—An extended stint in which a trail crew lives and works in the backcountry, typically eight or ten days long. Most of the summer is spent “on hitch.” Also called “the woods,” as in “when did you get out of the woods?”

  Hitched out: adj—The state of participating in a hitch. Usage: “How long were you hitched out at Quartz?”

  Spike camp: n—Our home while on hitch—a cabin, or a cluster of tents around a kitchen tarp. Also called a “gypsy camp.”

  Note: It’s important to get these phrases right. You don’t say “camping out” if you mean “hitched out.” Camping out is fun. Hitched out is work. And you wouldn’t say “backcountry camp”: too many syllables. You’d call it spike. Language isn’t all it takes, but getting words right is how you start to belong.

  Who belongs more than the critters? In the North Fork, as in all of the Northern Rockies, there are animals everywhere. Wolf, mountain goat, bighorn sheep, black bear and grizzly, coyote, moose—the superstars. And smaller creatures, too: snowshoe hare half-turned white, marten on a tree branch, dippers nesting beneath a bridge, pika lifting the lid of my Tupperware lunch box, star-nosed mole burrowing in the duff. Animals stay far clear of the chainsaw’s roar, but when we lived and worked ten days in the same place, we’d see the fawn sleeping in the stamped-down bear grass, hear the swoop of an owl’s wings over the tent in the night.

  There are humans out there, too, us working, and hikers, kids with their parents and their pockets full of stones, college students on a long-planned backpack trip, newlyweds from a big city with brand-new gear. They’re eager to chat, full of questions, often thankful for our work. But when people grow quiet, or crowds scatter, animals appear. One early morning at the job site, a wolverine ran off a switchback in fro
nt of us and we watched it scramble up three tiers of waterfall pouring over sloped rock. Hiking out of a hitch, fast, heading for the truck six miles downhill, we saw a quick snake cross the trail and my crewmate jumped, pack and all, into my arms.

  When animals appear, clichés sidle up close. Watch out. Soon there will be “electricity” between a bear and me, “dignity” in a lone wolf’s eyes. Trite as it is, such telescoping from the experience of an animal to a philosophizing about it is not such a base instinct. I want to make sense of creatures, at once exotic and kin, and as I try to interpret their presence against the backdrop of my own existence, it’s a very short leap to the owl as talisman, elk a stately messenger from a wilder world. I am more eager to see what an animal means to me than what it means to itself.

  Why do we do this? (Don’t you do it too?) I have some hunches, about power and connection and disappointment, about the margins of ego, and the urge to idolize. Short heroes of our own kind, it’s no wonder we build pedestals for bears. But if I push past the initial urge to codify, or else, to ooh and aah, if I force myself to watch without judgment, philosophy soon falls away, the meaning of the animal quashed by the actual animal, moving, through the same world as me. Wait. The same world? Well, that’s frightening, isn’t it? Me and a grizzly bear, in the same exact world?

  Which brings us to danger. Part of what fascinates me about wild animals is the element of threat, not because they are bloodthirsty or even necessarily predators, but because their actions are not about me. My wolf-faced dogs share the social contract of domesticity—I trust they will not hurt me, and they look to me for food, exercise, companionship. With animals I do not feed or sleep beside, there is not trust. I am curious about them, I can guess how they will behave based on other experiences, or what I’ve read, but I do not know, despite my field guides, what their priorities are, what they aim to do, and when. A grizzly could maul me if I stepped between it and a carcass. A moose might charge if I skied past its calf in the alders. A fisher could bite my leg if I sat too long in the outhouse it has made its winter home.

  The specter of danger mingled with curiosity results in an otherness that both beckons and warns. This potent blend leaves me off-balance, invigorated, and by necessity, returns me to watching. To feel as safe as possible in situations I cannot predict among company I don’t control, I have to trust my senses and read signs. A congress of ravens circled and hollering might indicate a fresh kill nearby. A calf prompts a look for its mother. On a brushy creek, I scan for fresh bear prints in sand. Evolutionary lessons ring true: keep eyes open, nose pointed into the wind. Notice everything.

  There’s a funny thing about connection, though. I say it’s the animals I’m drawn toward, but these sightings usually bring me closer to humans, whether the crew mate in my arms or the hiker we tell later on the trail, Watch close for you’ll never guess what we how cool was that. The bond over animals is one of the strongest I have with particular friends; stories about the fox that stood for minutes on a creek bed watching fish, and how the Sandhill cranes seem early this year. We ask questions: This feather frozen in ice, do you know what kind? We point and wonder: How’d that get there, a Dall sheep skull on a gravel bar, half-filled with sand?

  The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote, “We’re separated from nature as if by a glass wall. . . . We are akin to it and yet we are alienated by our consciousness—our curse and our blessing.” But, Milosz, we are nature. Don’t you see? Still, he’s on to something, the egocentric positioning that lets us fool ourselves. Sharing space with wild creatures stirs me (blessing), and as soon as I’ve said “stirs me,” I cringe (curse). Sheepish or not, proximity to wild things makes me feel feral—incautious and frisky and willing to gamble on what I cannot prove. And proximity to wild things makes me feel tame—glad I don’t have to hunt for every meal, eager to hunker next to a fire on a cold night. Wherever I am, banging against the glass.

  Some mornings when I crawl out of my tent to a bright sky and stretch the kinks out of my back by lifting my arms and twisting left and right with a muted howl and when I walk across spruce needles in my socks to the food prep area for my cereal and banana while sitting on top of a pile of pungent duck-cloth mannies and when I hear the red squirrels sssk-ing in the branches above me and the violet-green swallow sing as the sun starts to heat the dirt, and as I think about the day to come, the lifting and laughing and tinkering and eating and hiking and figuring and eating and cussing and hauling and eating that will mark the next ten hours, and when I lace up my boots over the last three hooks in that familiar rhythm and strap tools to my pack and fall in line with the group, I feel something I almost can’t describe. A contentedness located down near my kidneys, a radiant center, like a full bladder or a deep breath held in to bursting. Purposeful and competent, almost embarrassed that the rituals of work can make me feel so happy.

  If most laborers have strong opinions about work boots, traildogs are fanatics. Since we spend ten-hour days on our feet, many of them hiking, a good boot is critical. I’ve never met anyone who did backcountry trailwork for more than a season in cheap boots. Loggers’ boots are popular, high-laced leather with a swayed back and stacked heel, ubiquitous in fire camps. White’s are the Cadillac boot, made to order for every foot, but several off-the-shelf brands do the trick for less. Logging boots lend stability and protection for saw work and are bomber in mud, but hard for hiking long miles, as they pitch your calf into a forward position—good for side-hilling, awkward on flats. Full-grain leather hiking boots are a solid choice, especially for long miles; with a coat of Huberd’s boot grease, they’re far more watertight than sweaty and expensive Gore-Tex. Some boots split the difference, with the shin-tight fit of a logging boot and the flat lug sole of a work boot, like Danner’s popular “Rainforest” (my favorite).

  A durable boot is critical, because in addition to pounding trail, boot sheaths foot, a trailworker’s ace-in-the-hole tool. Use feet for dragging fill, kicking roots, prodding rocks, freeing bucked log rounds, testing structural soundness, sampling soil, digging a hole for an unexpected crap, leveling grade, and finishing touches. You can wear out a boot in a couple seasons. Nothing’s worse than a boot with holes. Rain and rocks get in, stink gets out. Boots indicate character, competency measured on the break-in scale. New boots scream “novice” (though everyone needs them sometimes), but hammered boots carry the same shameful whiff as a poorly maintained tool. Want a clue about a person’s work? Look at her boots.

  Also, look at her hands. I trust dirty fingernails. I am drawn to people with that half moon, the sliver of filth that indicates kinetic expertise. Perhaps they do fieldwork—ratty truck, weathered tools. Are they teachers, the ones who kneel next to kids examining earthworms in mud? Potters, naturalists, firefighters, farmers: dirt is a secret code, dusty knuckles the special knock of a fraternal order. I trust this small sign because it implies a tangible relationship. To get dirt under your fingernails, you have to touch the world.

  Randy is a ranger in the North Fork. He lives at the station just inside the boundary, on the Park Service compound near the river, complete with brown buildings and green-and-gray uniforms. The town site of Polebridge is two miles south on the road, made up of an old mercantile, a saloon, a few cabins for travelers, and a bunch of rusty trucks and roaming dogs and horses. People who live in Polebridge can be a little odd, and people who work for the Park Service are also often odd, so people who work for the Park Service in Polebridge are, on the whole, wonderfully odd.

  Randy’s from Jersey (or Queens?), but he’s been working seasonally in the North Fork for so long he qualifies as a Polebridge local. He hikes trails, checks cabins, monitors permits, mans the station, tinkers with vehicles. He’s isolated and chatty, a wicked combination, and when the right truck passes through, he’ll lean on the driver’s rearview mirror. Randy likes to talk shit, to tease and bluff. “I just heard on the radio that Charley’s looking for y
ou,” he’ll say. “He sounded pissed!” When the leader reaches for his radio to call the foreman, Randy slaps the side of the truck and cackles. It’s hard not to fall for Randy’s jokes. It’s almost an agreement: when you talk to Randy, you are buying tickets to a certain kind of show, and you can’t ask for different once it’s started. If you aren’t in the mood to talk, or be ribbed, keep driving, lift two fingers from the steering wheel in the standard rural-road greeting.

  You might be sorry you didn’t stop. Randy’s helpful, and he knows the district. Maybe he needed to tell you that the road is flooded at Kintla Creek, or there are six trees down in the Bowman campground. In that case, when you come back through, Randy will let you hear it, laughing: You shoulda asked! And suddenly, you’re the joker, not him.

  The prized pulaski is a hand tool with adze and axe on either end of a midsize head, named for the Polish American firefighter who invented it, his moniker as stout as the tool itself. Tools and equipment used for trailwork have names that tickle anyone who likes words. Listen: hazel hoe, Swede hook, come-along, pulaski, McLeod, manty, donkey dick, sandvik, misery whip, pigtail. Picture it: some old immigrant, the bend of his saw blade moving through wood. A whole narrative in a single word.