Book Review - Eating Dirt by Charlotte Gill

This two hundred and fifty page book is richly planted with history, information and humour. The ‘tribe’ ~ men and women of all ages who make up motley teams that replant our forests ~ forests valued in dollars and cents. The equipment of tree-planting ~ from hand tools to trucks for transportation to large heavy equipment. The history of the forests that have been relentlessly harvested to the baby trees planted by the tribe. Descriptions of British Columbia’s weather, forests and coastlines are damp, gritty and glorious. Charlotte Gill has crafted a continuous, rolling movement through the rubble and slashes of re-forestration, the slap-dash camps, and companies that employ anyone who dares test themselves in the rough and ready career of tree-planting.

“As the planet warms, we may come to see clear-cuts 

as an obsolete extravagence. We may wish we’d looked

 at forests in a different way. Worth more standing than

they are lying down, better off as trees than as logs.”

~ Charlotte Gill, Eating Dirt

Title: Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the 

Tree-Planting Tribe

Author: Charlotte Gill

Copyright: 2011

First paperback edition 2011

Type: Non-fiction 

Publisher: Greystone Books

ISBN: 978-1-55365-977-8 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-1-55365-792-7 (pbk.)

ISBN: 978-1-55365-793 -4 (ebook)

Author's note: Edited April 05, 2024

There and Back

Home again from a lovely sojourn in Alberta leaving me comfortably tired, reclining in my own rocking chair, with my own fireplace burning warm and bright.

Now that I’ve had tea and toast in the warmth of my own home, the value of travel both there and back offers clarity to my mind.

Travel is really only A to B; but between those points is 
conversation with interesting angles and points of view
changed landscape catching eye and imagination
routines shifted from foundations threatening to become too rigid
and on this trip ~ for me ~ 
reconnecting with family similarities reminding me of a home distant in memory and time.

So I leave the melting snow and wide prairie, for another today and tomorrrow.......

“There’s a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on

existing in a place even after we’ve left it.”

~ Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

Skating, Books and Good Food

After a lovely morning and a short drive into Calgary, my sister and I made a quick stop at Pages Book Store in Calgary for a browse and a purchase each. Then it was on to the Olympics!?

A quick tour of the Sochi 2014 room, in the Olympic Oval building, after doffing skates and helmets then it was on to lunch with Tom at Eidelweiss for some delicious German cuisine. On the road again, Betty and I stopped in the town of Airedrie to tour the ‘Where Did You Get That?’ Antiques.

Finally, in this last full day of this wonderful visit with Betty and Tom, I have experienced one of the values of the Olympics. The buildings and programs that were established for and following
the Olympic competitions in 1988, are still used today and leave a lasting legacy to the host city, to the residents and to the country at large.

“The Olympic Games must not be an end in itself,

they must be a means of creating a vast programme of physical 

education and sports competitions for all young people.”

~ Avery Brundage

A Day Well Spent

Morning to evening, my vision stretched out along fence line and horizon.
Dark lace of tree and bush edged the broad azure sky with barren limbs.
Songbirds twittered and cheeped in sheltered bush or brave evergreen.

For lunch at PaSu Sheep Farm restaurant, mountain grandeur sketched another distant horizon, while savoring lamb shepherd’s pie, country sandwich, saskatoon pie and profiteroles.
Returning through countryside splayed out on either side, 
listening to a story told by sister Betty,
toured through Tom’s workshop to watch his handiwork with hay, 
evening spent by a fire with a kitty on my lap,
all valuable ingredients to a successful and well spent day with family.

“Personal satisfaction is the most important ingredient of success.”

~ Denis Waitley

Keeping it Short

There is value in being brief ~ especially when a day has been so full of families with children,
good, plain food and, of course, lots of visiting.

Words merely become too much chatter.

So good night all!

“If you bring that sentence in for a fitting, 

I can have it shortened by Wednesday.”

~ M*A*S*H*, Hawkeye, “The Gun”

Earthly Cooperation

Waving curves of snow stretch for miles;
earth frozen and sleeping beneath a frigid blanket.
Mounds of scooped and plowed gritty gray snow are unceremoniously pushed aside for cars and trucks to pass unimpeded.
Ice, polished by wind and snow lays down dangerous strips on black and frozen asphalt.
Graceless piles of gray snow stacks up in yards, ditches and along roadways.
Banks of snow blow up against anything immovable sculpting a wintery landscape, burying all but a few spare and dry hints of growth and green.
Winter, a valuable season of hibernation and dormancy,
allows earth to rest, regroup and recharge while we live busy lives on her surface.
Other winter hardened animals work harder for food and shelter.
Evergreen trees and skeletons of deciduous trees fill in spaces on plains and mountain.
Man's cooperation with weather, land and animal keeps us all fed, clothed and warm.

“Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.

Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”

~ Chief Seattle