I only cooked for a logging camp once

A short story for your Monday

I only cooked for a logging camp once. It was for one week in September a few years back. I was broke after a series of back to back low paying co-ops in the city and my final semesters at UVic which ended that July. Born and raised in northern BC, when I run out of money and have a short time period to make some quick cash, my instinct is to go to camp. For me of course, this means camp cooking. I had missed the tree planting season, but I got lucky because there happened to be an acquaintance of mine looking for some help cooking for a logging camp near Prince George.

The woman who put out the ad was a 65 year old hippy camp cook, lets call her Joanne. She had been doing the work for most of her adult life, having started the same way as me, in a tree planting camp in the 70s. It was a job that allowed her to travel and live an alternative lifestyle, spending her winters bike packing in hot sunny places and her off seasons in the BC mountains. She was a real camp cook vet, which was obvious by her hardened, tough personality and sheer ability to keep doing it at that age.

On a sunny September morning she picked me up on the edge of town in the company van and together we drove to Costco to pick up some groceries. There didn’t seem to be a budget on this shopping trip I thought, as she grabbed thick cut bacon, nice steaks, and high quality cheeses I never dared reach for when shopping for tree planting camps. We didn’t talk much during that grocery shop, but I followed her around helping pick up items and pack them swiftly at the check out. We gassed up and hit the road, driving for a while on the highway before turning off onto a forestry road.

Once we got driving, we got to chatting. Albeit reliant on logging and mining companies for her paychecks, Joanne did not hold back when it came to criticizing resource extraction, the “men in charge”, the patriarchy in general and the greater systems of oppression at large associated with white man camps dotting the Canadian landscape. I agreed with her, aware of our role in the system and our reliance on this type of work. It felt good to hear another woman bitch about that kind of thing. She told me about how she started in tree planting camps in the 70s, and how she remembered taking acid for the first time and observing the forest floor up close while eating buckets of honey. I listened while she tore down the dusty road, jostling the groceries in the back and whipping around blind corners, a cloud of dust billowing behind us. I held on to the handle nervously and stared at the horizon, watching as cut blocks, healthy forests and tree plantations took turns peppering the landscape.

As we chatted, Joanne reached for the radio and called kilometres, alerting logging trucks in both directions of our presence on the road. When we passed a kilometre sign, she would hold the key down and call out sweetly “25 up for 1”, before resuming her full blown rant about the "fucking men” this and “fucking loggers” that. The logging truck drivers, recognizing a woman’s voice on the radio, would reply to her callouts with things like “thanks little lady” and “drive safe honey”, to which she would reply very pleasantly again “thanks guys!”.

We arrived at camp in the evening, which was a series of Atco trailers stuck together, with a kitchen trailer, bedrooms and bathrooms. It sat in the middle of a large gravel parking lot at least 100km in the bush. There was a creek nearby that we were drawing our water from, an incinerator for garbage and the largest generator I’ve ever seen, as big as a school bus. The dining room was sterile with large windows looking onto the parking lot. Each table was neatly staged with napkins, ketchup, HP sauce, salt & pepper, little containers of butter and hot sauce. Refrigerators hummed in the background, keeping bottles of water and lunch fixings for the next day cold. We unloaded the groceries and Joanne slapped together a simple meal that evening as the loggers came home from their shift and I put away the new food.

There were men of all ages showing up for dinner. Young guys right out of high school chasing the same quick money as me, old guys who had been working machinery since they were young guys. They were all friendly to us as they came through the kitchen and got served their dinner, chatting about their day while sitting down at the neatly organized tables, dumping hot sauce on their plates and buttering their buns in a routine way. There was a fellow who hit the bottle the second he walked through the doors, stumbling around the trailers from his room to dinner and back again. “Ivan’s a drunk”, Joanne shared with me. “But he’s harmless”. We were the only two women on site, and we had our own rooms. I didn’t feel unsafe at all, but this place did have a rougher vibe than the office on West Pender street where I had just completed an internship.

The day’s went by rather slowly as the shifts in logging camps were split. Breakfast was served at 3 am, and so after making the same bacon and egg fry up each morning, Joanne and I would go back to sleep. Around 7 or 8 we’d wake again, and I’d find Joanne sitting in the dining room with a list waiting for me. She had me mostly baking treats and dessert, and helping prep things for dinner. Having been a head cook in a tree planting camp for four seasons, I was revelling in the simplicity of this job and the high pay to bake brownies. I also had to stock the dining room with pudding cups, juice boxes, cookies, and bags of chips. “These guys must be so unhealthy”, I thought.

One morning during a break from the kitchen I was sitting at a dining table when the owner walked in. He was checking in on the camp for the day, having arrived in a jacked up Ford F350 that looked shinier than the other company vehicles. He was 6 foot 3 with a muscular build and slicked back black hair. This guy looks like such a douchebag, I thought. “Who are you?” He asked me blatantly. “She’s filling in for Emily” yelled Joanne from the kitchen. “Am I paying you to sit on your computer?” he asked me. Oh my god, he is a douchebag, I thought.

My shift in the logging camp was only a week long and all the days seemed to blur together. Joanne and I cooked meals and cleaned up the kitchen and dining spaces on the same schedule each day. The food was uncomplicated and hearty with meat and potatoes being the basis of most of the things we made. The guys liked simple comfort food and nothing too unfamiliar. We made things like meatloaf and mashed potatoes, spaghetti and meatballs, and steaks with baked potatoes and corn. The generator droned on, a constant rhythm in the background, powering our little Atco trailers in the bush. At the end of the day I’d haul the garbage bags out to the incinerator and watch the sun crest below the treed hillsides as the guys sat on the makeshift porch smoking and the late season bugs came out.

When it was time to go, Joanne and I cleaned the kitchen one more time, leaving the tables neatly arranged with the same napkins and condiments awaiting hungry diners. We loaded up the van and gassed up at the fuel cache before setting out and quickly catching up to a logging truck in front of us, it’s load bouncing around as it made its way on the bumpy road. My couple years in the city completing a different path made me miss the bush and the harshness that comes along with it, but I was thankful for the brief nature of the experience and the cash I was able to make. Every time I emerge from a shift like that I have new perspectives on the world that I am thankful for. Joanne reached for the radio to chat up the driver ahead as I held on to the handle and watched the cottonwood trees pass by, their colours beginning to turn gold.