Dirt Work

by Christine Byl

  For centuries of work in the woods, including the logging of this continent’s great forests, the crosscut was the felling tool of choice. A five-foot-long flexible saw blade (with a curved back for felling or a straight back for bucking), a toothed edge, and a handle mounted on each end, the two-man crosscut dropped big trees with more control and efficiency than an axe, with less likelihood of the tree falling backward and crushing the sawyer (the leading cause of beaver fatalities). Crosscuts still get plenty of modern use, in wilderness areas where mechanized tools are forbidden, in remote settings where a constant supply of gas and oil is not feasible, and in instances where a noise ban protects wildlife—nesting eagles, migrating songbirds, denning wolves.

  The crosscut is a beautiful tool, perfectly engineered for a sawing duo and its single task. Using a crosscut takes muscle; cutting earns you big arms and lats and the kind of soreness that results in one of the tool’s nicknames: the misery whip. But it also takes delicacy; don’t overmuscle it or the saw blade will buckle or bind, and don’t fight your partner—let the push stroke gently float away, make the pull stroke true and hard.

  Across the highway in the Bob Marshall, the Forest Service uses crosscuts solely; the Bob’s wilderness designation prohibits motorized maintenance. The history of old woodscraft is beautifully preserved in that reliance, but there’s a cost. Trail crews in the Bob spend all summer logging out deadfall, with barely time enough to get trails open for traffic, let alone repair damage or upgrade structures. The trails are historical and quiet, but hammered. With trails budgets as they are, it’s only a matter of time before work overtakes workforce. Slowly, more miles of trail succumb to lack of maintenance, eventually too impacted, obscured, or degraded for ordinary use.

  The park, though it contains designated wilderness, has a chainsaw exemption for trailwork, and our crews did most clearing with power saws. Even with mechanized assistance, keeping the trails open was an annual challenge. Back in the crosscut days, the trail crews were three, four times as big as they are today. If we were to use only crosscuts now, half of the trails would never get cleared, resulting in greater resource damage. So, we trade off. A little historical value sacrificed for a little modern access. Hikers appreciate it; the growing burden of industrial-scale tourism demands it. With a burgeoning population seeking respite in nature and an ever-shrinking agency budget, the days of sustainable land use are long gone, so what option is there? No matter our preservationist bias, for these months we’re laborers, not lobbyists. Short a major change in policy, there’s nothing to do but fire up the saws.

  Forest Service crews like to play superior, and sometimes I think they are, calibrated honestly to the slow, steady drone of handwork, what’s possible in a day dictated by their own limits. But although there’s less vintage cachet to the chainsaw than the crosscut, running a power saw is an art, too; this is clear when you watch someone who’s really good at it. Even without nostalgia to buoy its value, skill is compelling, and moving wood is good work. There are places where it’s best to do it by hand, and places to do it faster. Whether in the Bob or the park, a long day of sawing is a wearisome and admirable thing, and work does what it does—helps keep cynicism at bay. Visitation numbers and crew budgets and land designations fall away; crosscut or chainsaw, the things that have always been true remain true. Don’t cut through holding wood. Stand uphill of a log when bucking. Keep the teeth out of the dirt.

  Five of us stand in the parking lot at the trailhead, shovels and pulaskis over our shoulders, awaiting the crew leader. A man approaches the trail and passes the cluster of us, looks us over, keeps walking, then, just before heading into the woods, he stops and asks: What are you looking for? We glance at each other, blank. No one gives a derisive snort, or leaps to the usual explanations about maintenance, about drain dips and turnpikes. What are we looking for? It’s a damn good question, isn’t it?

  Glacier National Park belongs to the traditional territory of the Niitsitapii. Translated as “the real people,” the Blackfoot Indians of Western Montana call these mountains the backbone of the world. The Blackfoot traditionally used Glacier’s passes as travel routes and rarely lived in the mountains, steep as they were, glaciated and inhospitable. Some peaks have sacred purposes—vision quests, celebrations—but home was always the plains, where long vistas made enemies easy to spot and prevalent game surrounded the settlement. The current towns of Babb and East Glacier mimic that historical range, lying just east of the divide on the Blackfoot Reservation. To an outsider’s eye it’s a desolate and hardscrabble place; rustic, undeveloped, perched on the edge of the gust-scoured plains as if it’s only there until the wind moves it again.

  In my six seasons in Glacier, Dwight was the only Blackfoot I worked with for long. He did trails for years and his nickname was “The Surgeon,” for his prowess at chainsaw repair. He was a quiet guy who spoke with the distinct lilt of Blackfoot speech, and when he laughed, his upper body ratcheted from the waist.

  Dwight had a drinking problem. Many traildogs binge-drink on days off, and most can’t go a night without beer. But Dwight came to work hung-over, checked out. He smelled like liquor distilled through flannel. He was often late; once, still drunk, he passed out at lunch break, pale and damp-faced. His crew leader held it against him, as was his right. There was tension. The leader felt his hands were tied: if he came down hard on the only Native for being late, would he be racist? Was giving him a pass because he was a Native any better? The whole thing made him nervous.

  It made me nervous, too. I wished Dwight didn’t have a drinking problem. Partly because being around drunks of any race makes me uneasy and sad. I wanted Dwight to be able to look his leader in the eye. I thought I was rooting for him: There’s not much on the reservation, Dwight. Don’t get fired. Now it’s so clear to me, the condescension I missed back then—I’d assumed my elective career was a job he felt lucky to have. I never asked.

  I didn’t know much then about addiction’s vice grip, or the burden of only-ness. I never asked Dwight how it felt to come from the rez to work in the park. I never asked him if he liked his job. Under that, if he liked us. And under that, if he liked me. I wanted him to like me. It would mean that I was a good white person. But Dwight didn’t offer much, a reticence partly cultural, partly personal. Who could blame him?

  I remember a joke I heard, maybe twice, in those days. How do you starve an Indian? Answer: hide his unemployment check under his work boots. This falls into the category of despicable jokes prized by a group of people who find nothing too dirty, too shameful, too rude to laugh at. Sexist jokes, politics jokes, pedophile jokes: traildogs tell them all. We push too far. In our way, we’re snatching after some of the nuance that “correctness” stifles. We’re eager to see difference, tension, to name it the only way we dare. (We’re weeding out the easily horrified, who won’t last long on a trail crew.) Some jokes, especially when told to or by the target, can be liberating. When I screwed up on the work site, I could trust one of the guys to say, “Guess you’d better give the boss a blowjob.” That pissed me off. But it also made me laugh. We all howled when the only queer guy on the crew told jokes about butt pirates. There’s nothing like rapping on the wooden head of taboo.

  When I think about the starving Indian joke, though, I cringe. I don’t recall it being told in front of Dwight. Humor can be a great equalizer, but maybe that’s true only if you already feel equal, and all the conventional wisdom about racism said Dwight couldn’t possibly have felt equal. But maybe he did. Maybe Dwight felt better than us, and we couldn’t look him in the eye. In any case, the subtext of the joke was clear: Indian=lazy=worthless=drunk. Reality made it more ridiculous than funny. For one thing, most of us collected unemployment checks. And Dwight wasn’t lazy. He could hike fast, and he was strong. He wasn’t worthless; he knew things a lot of us did not. But I couldn’t gloss over drunk. It stunk up the cab of the truck. It frayed the crew bond.


  In the years since I knew Dwight in Glacier, I’ve learned that addictions of any kind—work, sex, the private ones we don’t even admit to ourselves—have, in many cases, less to do with genes and race than with a thing broken and the urge to mend. Add to that very ordinary pathology the distinct wounds of genocide and its parody, the guilt-built pedestal, and brokenness becomes tragically explicable. A Tlingit writer I know said to me once, “History has done its work and left us here, and sometimes it seems like such a great divide.” Like many western whites, I wish I could undo history. Like many humans, I wish I could return to a time I did someone wrong, meet that person again, and make it right. I am not even a footnote in Dwight’s biography, I know. I make too much of myself, thinking about it this long. Why? In part because, as that same writer, large of heart, said next, “The only way we can go on is together.” I want to believe her. I want to be believed.

  How can we go on together, Dwight? You could tell me the jokes about white people: there must be a book full. I could say I’m sorry for laughing at a joke that did you wrong. You could make me foolish, as I have done to you. We could mock the tourists instead, those hapless wankers who think I can’t carry the saw because I’m a woman and you must know Chief Joseph because you look like their postcards. I want us to laugh at it together, this stupid script that neither of us wrote but both of us star in. I want us a fucking standing ovation.

  That’s what I want, but here’s all I know: Dwight drank too much, had a great laugh, and was a hell of a sawyer. I get it. He was not then, and is not now, my Indian. And neither of us needs any applause.

  Sierra Club volunteers came to the park every summer to do trailwork service trips. Predominantly men and women in their forties and fifties, middle- to upper-class, these dedicated conservationists pay hundreds of dollars to visit the park and do some good, and they usually got sent to do good in the Middle Fork, which always needed charity. Twelve volunteers per trip, they came with their own crew leader and a cook. They were good citizens, many of them interesting folks with golden intentions. But none of them, even the leaders, could do trailwork without serious guidance. So the park placed a pro crew on the project, to model the pace and the standards and do QC.

  It wasn’t kind, but we always complained about working with the Clubbers. From a distance, they could be a little eager, almost embarrassing in their earnestness. Some admired us too cheerily, claiming that ours was “real work.” A few were insufferable, arrogant do-gooders with a sense of urban entitlement out of synch with woods culture. We were grunts, they thought, and they could easily master our trade in no time flat. Any dummy could dig, after all, and they were architects, psychologists, engineers. To be fair, to them, I’m sure we seemed unkempt and young, cocky and woodsier-than-thou.

  But, over the course of a hitch, the work usually schooled us in each other’s real ways. We let down our guard and grew to like some of them, the ones who could laugh and cuss, who ribbed us and didn’t take things so seriously, and they began to like us, even our crass mouths and bravado. We shared pride in the job we were doing, grounded in our bodies made tired by work. We traded trivia on trips back and forth from the fill pit, surprised at what we knew in common (Battle of Normandy, Johnny Cash’s first hit single, how many digits of pi). We asked them questions over dinner about their cases and clients, about living in San Francisco, Chicago, their pets, their kids. They asked us if we’d gone to college (some yes, some no), what we did in the winters (ski, travel, serve coffee, more trailwork, write). We plowed through our usual gut-bomb dinners, and they delighted in their forsaken city diets, packing food in like they’d earned it.

  One volunteer per trip managed to preserve his disgruntled superiority, bemoaning the work, the weather, the bugs. The biggest jerk I’ve ever met in my life was on a Sierra Club trip, a type-A hedge fund guy from L.A. who thought so highly of himself I’m not sure what tempted him into service at all. He disdained advice, did things wrong just to do it his own way, patronized the women, had a short temper, broke things. After my first few olive branches got snapped and handed back, I turned cold out of spite. I gave him tedious jobs and my evilest eye. On the opposite end of the spectrum was a delightful older woman—a veterinarian, I think—and her grown daughter, both of them proud of their blisters, the fact that by the end of the week they could tell pulaski from mattock and chisel from adze. I cheered their prowess and told them our jokes (not too dirty). The woman and her daughter, and that unhappy man, stand out in my mind as clear reminders—there are all kinds of people in all kinds of places. No archetypes, villains from the city, saints from the woods. Flagging a cab or chopping a log, it’s pretty simple: sometimes we like each other, sometimes we don’t.

  Justin, Kent, Gabe, Sam, Max, and I had been clearing every day for a week. We’d drive to the trailhead listening to eighties rock on B-98 (“the Flathead’s best rock-and-roll!”) and then load tools onto our packs, three saw teams to cut the epic downfall left by the past winter’s winds that blew hard through a burn. We shed our morning fleece by 9 a.m., sweating long before the day found its heated center. At lunch on the last day of that week, every one of us fell asleep. We woke in a collective rustle twenty minutes after break should have been over, tripping over ourselves to hustle, one guy with a puddle of drool on his sweatshirt, my backpack buckle imprinted on my cheek. It’s the only time I remember Max spending a second over thirty minutes on a lunch break.

  Few trails jobs kicked my ass like long days logging out trails. We hiked, depending on the density of downfall, sometimes four miles, sometimes twenty. The weight of the saw, the work of cutting, and the focus it took made for profound weariness. I loved those days, even in the early weeks of the season, out of shape and vying not to be last in line, even at the end of the season, burnt out and stiff, even in the rain, even in a burn when the bark was compressed powder and cutting made us cough, left a thin film of ash on our skin. I loved those days. I loved them because I loved running a chainsaw, and I loved them because I felt free. Free to work hard and talk shit and eat huge lunches, free to laugh with the guys, even those I had nothing in common with after 5:30, free to be confident and at the same time have so much left to learn. Free to run a saw without being “a woman who can run a saw.”

  The knife edge of work flayed off the silly posturing, the eyeball and swagger between men and women in the regular world, where a girl unloading a chainsaw from the back of a truck elicits a leering whistle, when entering an engine repair shop brings on the size-up from the shop tech that men do not get, the one that says, How much does she know? When you’re cutting with a partner, swapping back and forth all day, breakneck, and then, when you’re both exhausted and there’s still the hike out to the truck, and the miles seem long but bring ’em on, there is no energy for Isn’t a girl with a chainsaw sexy or Does he think I’m competent? There is energy only for the necessary: Did he drop the rakers or I wonder if she has any water left or Take this thing, please, it’s killing me.

  The packer Greg refused to walk more than the distance from the barn to the stock truck or the string to the hitch rail. He rarely led the mules on foot. “Walkin’? Hurts too damn much,” he said. He couldn’t touch his stiff knees, let alone his feet. He complained cheerfully, thumped his melon-belly with both hands: “It’s hard work draggin’ this pup around.” Once, Reba asked, “Greg, you ever try yoga?” He looked at her, cocked a bushy eyebrow. “Nah, I don’t eat that stuff. Too sour.”

  By late summer, the Middle Fork is clogged with vegetation. The long drainages (Park, Nyack) spend 15 to 20 miles in the trees before trail pops into the open alpine. Every so often there’s a burn, an old-growth clearing, or open spots along rivers with cottonwoods, but mostly, miles and miles of lodgepole, Doug-fir, spruce, larch, pine. In July, brush takes over the lowlands: blueberry and mountain maple, devil’s club and cow parsnip, alder and willow and yew tangled in a cat’s cradle. A trail th
at’s been neglected more than five years turns from pathway to tunnel. Head off the trail two feet to take a piss and you could be gone a while, searching for cut log ends or that brighter swath of light to guide you back on trail. Whoever first said, “Can’t see the forest for the trees” had surely been lost in woods like these, knew this about the big picture: perspective is critical, and easily obscured.

  When a crew brushes a trail, we cut vegetation back five or six feet off each side, and when the job’s done, the mess raked up and dragged away, we hike back through the swath with saws and brushers over our shoulders, sticky and satisfied, the itch of cow parsnip on our forearms, devil’s club spines embedded in our fingers. Yet, despite the open view of the trail snaking into the distance, the weary muscles that tell us we’ve made a dent, we can feel the greenery sneaking back in as we pass, a sinister behind-the-back enemy: too slow to catch in the act, too fast to feel we’ve conquered anything.

  On September 11, 2001, we were up Harrison Creek working on a bridge, a bunch of remnants from different crews assembled for the late-season project. It was clear and cool with starry nights, elk rutting, and the trees turning their seasonal stunts, the kind of weather and place in which you just feel lucky to be alive. On September 12, Sam and Mitch hiked in to join us, and we looked forward to their arrival—the paper, extra chocolate, new jokes. They showed while we were having lunch in the sun, one gabion abutment finished, the log stringers ready to be hauled across the span. Sam pulled the paper out of his pack. Mitch said bomb and plane and terrorists and dead and New York. The rest of us looked at each other: are they screwing with us? This remote, so easy to play War of the Worlds, to invent some disturbing news we couldn’t disprove until we got out in a week. Those guys were jokers. We wouldn’t put such a caper past them. But there was the headline in the Daily Interlake, not prone to reporting beyond the region. There was the color photo, mostly smoke, and the headlines in large type. It looked real.