Six billion trees planted in the province of British Columbia. An unfathomable number, but not quite as mind-boggling as the size of the forest they replace. With these trees you could replant an area roughly the size of Sri Lanka. At the height of the trade there were an estimated 18,500 tree planters in this country, which is about the number of soldiers in the Canadian army. The average career lasts five seasons.

The first tree planters in these woods were unemployed men put to work by the government in Depression-era relief programs. Conscientious objectors planted trees during World War II. They used grub hoes, rendering the work even more ergonomically unfriendly than it is now. They carried seedlings in buckets and burlap shoulder bags, which they put down to rest every time they dug a hole. They planted in crews of a dozen men, working in rows, separated by an arm span or two. Many were Mennonites who’d been shipped far from the Prairies. They were farmers, used to hard physical labor. Work reminded them of home. Their enthusiasm was also a way to transform punishment into a kind of reward. We know this, too. Hard work done reluctantly is more torturous than work done fast and well.

In the sixties the government again made use of the unemployed, along with prison inmates, for its silvicultural labor force. Men worked for fixed wages, planting quotas of just four hundred trees a day—what an average modern planter can pull off in an hour or two. Reforestation began as community service, as rehab for the planters just as much as for the land. There is something of the misfit rebellion that still endures today.

Tree planting, in its modern, high-speed incarnation, has only been around for forty years. Some say it began in the Purcell Mountains. Some say the first professional tree planters were American draft dodgers hiding out on the coast. Maybe nobody can identify the first professional tree planter, but at some point nearly everyone in the business mentions Dirk Brinkman.

In the early seventies, Brinkman was a long-haired tree planter with an entrepreneurial streak who got the idea to bid for his own contracts. At the time most crews still used the old shoulder bags for hauling trees, as well as that medieval implement, the mattock. Brinkman got his hands on specially manufactured seedling carriers—a prototype of the current ergonomic design.

These newfangled satchels sped things up considerably, but more than that, a new kind of mindset took hold. If you could learn to think of manual labor as a sport instead of purgatory, then you could train to become more efficient. You could learn to keep all your parts moving and to perform several motions all at once. When you decreased the number of movements, you shaved seconds. Seconds collected into minutes, and cents cascaded into dollars. Then, as with one of those demonic Sudoku puzzles, the code had been broken. It wasn’t long before everyone caught on. Production doubled and then tripled. Dirk Brinkman didn’t invent tree planting, but you could say he helped turn it from industrial gardening into a competitive, peak-performance event.

Dirk Brinkman is now the ceo of one of the biggest reforestation companies in the Americas. Even the Brinkman children plant trees. They look as if they were genetically engineered for it, tall and lean and broad shouldered. Brinkman’s wife, Joyce Murray, also a former tree planter, is a Member of Parliament. At official ceremonies, when she plants a tree, she might be the only politician who really knows what she’s doing.

When august rolled around the summers turned scorching. The work dried up, just like the water in the creeks. And so the tree planters edged out in search of further employment, as far north as you could go before tumbling over the border into Alaska, Yukon, or the Northwest Territories.

In the North, you could drive for hours between gas stations. The roadside ditches brimmed with coffee-toned water. Organic fluff blew around in the wind, like summer snow. What the woods lacked in height they made up for in breadth. They seemed to be made of just a few ingredients. Water, sphagnum moss, trembling aspen, but mostly spruce, which is what we planted, almost exclusively. The land felt flat and endless and old as rock, as if mastodons might come crashing out of the underbrush. If you slipped into the bush and wandered in the wrong direction, you might turn in circles for days.

No way out but even fewer ways in. Up here, the land was so spongy and saturated during the warm months it was difficult to tell where terra firma ended and water began. The forest sprouted up out of muskeg—a soup of black muck topped by rafts of sphagnum moss. In many places the ground was so liquid and ever shifting that the only vehicular access was down ice tracks in the winter. Or along the seismic lines—long, treeless corridors used by the petroleum industry for their pre-drilling explorations. Camps were air-lifted into place, piece by piece, mess tents and cook stoves and all-terrain vehicles. These contracts began with helicopters, which might dip down by a random field or a strip of lonely road and pick up a major appliance in a cargo sling. You could watch a refrigerator levitate and disappear into the forests waiting beyond—a familiar thing in the wrong place, like a car floating down a river.

Until eventually, when no infrastructural pieces remained, the people became the cargo. I scurried to the helicopter with my duffel bags and shovel. I ducked my head under the whiffling blades, the sunlight strobing in my eyes, not knowing much about where I might be headed. Only that I’d call it home for as many weeks as it took to get the job done. I climbed in and buckled up, and the helicopter lifted over spiky green treetops. I looked down at orange-rimmed swamps with watery centers.

They looked miniature, like puddles glistening with gasoline rainbows. Boreal forest stretched out in all directions, seemingly without end, like the pelt of an enormous sleeping monster.

The trees broke, and we hovered above a clear-cut so big I had to squint to see the edges. From the air it looked like a small prairie. The helicopter set down, and I got out with a group of my co-workers. The helicopter engine whined an octave higher and kicked up a blast radius of dust. We crouched and watched the chopper rise into the sky, taking with it our last chance for escape. The motor drained away. The sound was replaced by the buzz of a million mosquitoes, singing for our hot, red blood.

We lived on the edge of our worksite, like miners camped at the lip of a crater. We erected our dome tents in the leggy spruce that fringed the clear-cut. The forest floor was a timeless, mossy shag. When I stepped into it I sank to the ankles. I wondered how long it had taken for this living carpet to grow, how long before we killed it with our weight. It would take two days on foot to get to the nearest telephone, flush toilet, and electrical outlet, assuming you set off in the right direction.

We had no trucks, only an ATV. And so the crew walked to work like Snow White’s dwarves in a line, all of us trudging through mud, woody chaff, tall grass, red paintbrush, and fireweed in bloom. We shared footsteps, like people do in snow. When we arrived at our daily patch of the clear-cut, we filled our bags with spruce. We put ourselves to work in the coiling trenches like needles set down in vinyl grooves. We bent over at the start of our days and didn’t stand up straight again until it was over. When I glanced back at my lines I could see the little trees leaning to one side or another. I knew it didn’t matter. No company forester would venture all the way out here just to get down on his hands and knees to scrutinize my handiwork. So I kept on nailing them in with bleary abandon, scarcely wondering if they’d survive the winter.

The afternoons cooked. The sun baked our necks and shoulders. It seemed cruel that a place so savagely cold in winter could get so hot in summer. As if the land knew no middle ground, only extremes. The heat grew boggy and moist. Salt dusted our cheekbones. Our lips turned dry and white. Always the sweat ran, down the spine, through my scalp and down my cheeks. Every time I bent over it dripped off the tip of my nose. There was an insect for every hour of the day, as if they’d arranged their shifts. I spent a lot of time slapping myself across the face.

We carried our drinking water with us. If we ran out we could take our chances slurping out of a creek—if we could find one that ran clear. Mostly we went thirsty. In the distance I saw one tree left standing in the entire clear-cut, like a single point of stubble missed by a razor. It was a skinny thing with lopsided foliage waving in the air. In a few weeks we’d plant our way across the cut block and make it to that tree. Hundreds of dirty, sweaty man-hours would tick by before then, but at least there’d be something to mark the days. Some sign of progress in a cut block as featureless as a sand dune, where it seemed we could plant forever without making headway.

Back in camp, we had miles upon miles of forest to explore, but we stayed within twenty feet of the clearing. Nobody cared to penetrate the deep of it, where the woods grew dark and the breeze no longer penetrated. We pitched our tents as sailors swim at sea, never too far from the ship. At night, after the generator ran down, it was the kind of place that made you think of winter and loneliness, even at the height of summer. In the icy dark, when the temperatures dropped so low the wind could crack a face, the loggers came for the cutting and hauling.

We were so far north that the sun dipped in the middle of the night without ever descending completely. It dipped just under the horizon, a forever-twilight, moving from west back to east. Scalloped clouds drifted over milky sprinklings of stars. They weren’t so much bright as everywhere, close and yet a million light-years away. Aurora borealis sparked across the sky so frequently that it became unremarkable. During the day, the bush hummed with mitosis and reproduction. It was louder than us, like the distant roar of a superhighway.

On our days off there was nowhere to go, nowhere to swim in the heat. We lay down in the creek beds and let the water gush over our naked shoulders. We slathered ourselves in clayey mud and then crawled out like swamp creatures. We watched ourselves dry out and crack. We breathed clouds of particulates, pollen, insects, the dust of a billion things growing and dying and disintegrating back down into the earth.

If we were lucky, a breeze blew through, combing the trees. I liked to look up and watch them sway. They moved separately and in tandem, like people leaning their heads together to talk at a noisy party. They were old, survivor trees. I could wrap my hands around many of the trunks. Examining the stumps, I found growth rings so tight they were no thicker than paper. I didn’t know why anybody would take the trouble to roll out here to hack them down. Maybe the land, despite its wild hackles, was so flat it practically begged to be rolled over.

We planted trees until the clear-cut felt like our home turf, until we’d filled it up completely with our footsteps and our legions of orphan trees. Finally, we reached the timberline at the far side. When its shadows fell across my face it felt as if I’d planted right to the brink of some dense, monumental thing. It occurred to me that this place under my feet was neither particularly north nor especially empty. The timberline was merely the southern margin of a wilderness so big it felt galactic to stand at the edge of it. It was the very same forest in which I’d learned to plant trees—three provinces and a few thousand miles away.