The “pique” that I got from the company next to my shovel.
The “cloches” on my “harness.” Their version of bags.
The whole kit
Bugs were bad every day
A regular “pique.” The type that I used most of the time I was there
Attaching the cassettes to the harness. Their version of bagging up.
If you were really ambitious you could bag up 5 cassettes but it would damage the trees on two of the cassettes. But they don’t care about the trees there.
Joelle liked the sunrise that morning.
A stack of empty cassettes was all the checking they needed to do.
The “garette” that gave you internals. An impressive machine fit to be the villain in a planting horror film
Nice sunrise one morning a block overlooking a giant lake
I am a third year planter, having planted my first season with Outland in Manitoba and then my last two with Celtic in BC. Our season ended before the end of July and we had a fair bit of time off so I was looking to get some extra work. There were a few options to continue planting in BC with other companies or doing things like spray but the option that mots appealed to me was to go plant in Quebec. My first year, half of my crew was Quebecois including one of my crewmates, Joelle, who planted her first year in Quebec. Her cousin, Felix, was also on our crew my first year and a half but he left midway through my second year, returned to Quebec, and planted for the same company that Joelle planted for in Quebec. Joelle was talking to Felix and found out that he had become a crew boss this year. Felix told her that there were a couple of spots open in his camp and he would see if we could come and join him.
This was an attractive option to me because it would allow me a week and a half in Vancouver to visit my friends and family before I go away for the year. I go to Dalhousie University in Halifax so Quebec is on my way there. I also speak french and thought this would be a good opportunity to get a lot of practice.
I had Felix confirm that all was good to go for me before leaving Prince George. He gave me a number to call to talk to the people in charge at the company but, when I called, it seemed as though it was a fax number so I couldn’t get through. I spoke to Joelle and Felix and they were telling me that it was really different here in Quebec and that they couldn’t wait to see me so I figured there would be no problem joining them. I went ahead and booked my flight ticket over.
I didn’t get much information about the contract or anything. I was told not to bring a tent and to bring a hard hat if I had one. I knew from hearing Joelle talk about Quebec that there were lots of old men, tree prices were low but numbers were easy to hit, quality was hardly a thing and shifts were 4 and 3’s (Mon-Thurs). That was all I knew.
I arrived late Saturday night and was picked up by Felix. I learned that we were a 6 hour drive from the camp. Before I got there Felix asked if I had gotten the forms that I needed to fill out. I told him no since I hadn’t spoken to anyone in the company yet. He sent me the forms. Sunday morning he asked if I had filled them out. I hadn’t so we had to get them printed before we left so that I could fill them out on the ride there. It turned out there were shit tons of forms to fill out. 44 pages worth. It took me most of the drive to get them all filled out because there was a bunch of technical language in there and my French technical vocabulary is weak.
Once we arrived at the office Felix took me into the garage and got me some equipment. I took three things from the garage The first was a standard yellow hard hat, brand new, in a plastic bad. The second was a red, square metal bar with, what looked like, a single black bicycle handle coming off one end and a centred, flat, perpendicular circle paired with a square bar coming off parallel to the bicycle handle at the other end. I thought it was some kind of auto mechanical tool. The third thing I took was a set of three large, hollow, plastic, orange, triangular prisms in a bag with some nuts and bolts and washers. More on these items later.
After getting my stuff we parked Felix’s car and went to pick everyone up in the company van. Felix’s crew, it turned out, were a bunch of old men. None looked to be under 35 and at least 2 looked to be over 60. I was seated in the front seat and I was uncomfortable to be sitting there while first meeting the other planters. One of the older guys seated in the row of seats behind me started talking to Joelle asking all sorts of questions about me while I was looking right at him. His spoke quietly and I had a hard time understanding. She told him to ask me since I was right there and could understand French fine. I could not understand anything he was saying to me and it was really embarrassing. I didn’t speak to anyone but Felix (in French) the rest of three hours up.
Camp was a bunch of buildings and trucks. There was wifi and a gym! The only person from management that talked to me was the supervisor who just briefly said hello. I was roomed with a guy that rode with us from Quebec, Alex. Him and Felix helped me get all my equipment ready for the morning but it took a while. It was past 10pm when we finally finished and I was told we would be waking up at 3:45 am!
It turned out the red metal bar thing, it turned out, was called a “pique.” This, I was told, would be my new shovel since shovels weren’t allowed here in Quebec My pique was missing the “douille;” which is the detachable piece that actually goes into the ground. I would attach the douille when I arrived in camp that night. It also turned out that this was a particularly poor design that is no one actually uses. Felix and Joelle had a good laugh at it. I was baffled. After arriving in camp a friendly young planter offered me his spare pique which was a much better design so that is the one that I attached the douille to.
The orange triangular pieces are called “cloches,” which means “bells” and they were going to replace my bags. In Quebec they don’t have boxes of trees in bundles; they only have “cassettes,” which are black plastic cases where the trees are grown. The cassettes are made so that they can clip onto your hips and you can pull from them directly. The cloches are so that the bottoms of the cassettes don’t scrape your body up and so that the trees in the cassettes are easier to pull from. Removing my bags and attaching the cloches was tedious because Felix couldn’t find proper tools to use and because I kept attaching the cloches in the wrong orientation.
The first morning I followed my roommate Alex over to the meal hall and tried to follow his example for how to get my food. Vegetarian options were not plentiful. I was the only vegetarian in camp. I sat at a table of strangers who just looked at me awkwardly avoiding eye contact.
I gathered my shit and talked to Joelle to see where I should go and what I should do. It turned out one of the people seated at the breakfast table with me was my crew boss, Sonya. I put my stuff in her van and sat in the back. I looked straight ahead in terror as Sonya swerved and sped and fishtailed her way to the block in the darkness before the sun had risen.
The first stop she told Joelle and another guy to get out. Then she asked Joelle if Nigel would be getting out here with her. Joelle said yes and I quickly got out and grabbed my shit from the back. There were no trees so we were left at the side of the road. I was left to begin planting without ever having been spoken to by my foreman!
Once the trees arrived Joelle showed me how to attach the cassettes to my harness but quickly realized that I was missing a couple important pieces to attach them. The other planter with us showed that it was possible to attach the cassettes without these little “plaquettes.” The solution was less than perfect and so the cassettes were falling off my harness about every 10th tree planted.
The land was all prepared with trenches about 6x as big as the scarification I had seen in Manitoba. They called the trenches “sillions” and they were often filled with water. Joelle explained that we were to plant 1.4-1.6 meter spacing in each trench with no regard for two dimensional spacing.
After a load (bagup) or two my foreman told me she would come back with the plaquettes that I was missing. She came back with them but with no way of attaching them to my harness so now the cassettes were falling off my harness with plaquettes. The next time I saw her drive by I told they were still falling and she said she would go and get some wire to attach them. She clumsily attached them with wire as Joelle and I waited eating lunch. She asked if I wanted her to check my spacing and I said I was probably fine so she never did. She literally never went into the land the entire time that I was planting for her!
The rest of the day got a lot better. The sillions became sandy and the cassettes stopped falling off my harness. By the end of the day I PBed! Just over 4000 trees. But made just over 300 dollars because we were getting less than 8 cents a tree.
I never hit that number again and became the camp lowballer. Joelle and I would buddy plant very slowly – in relative terms since we were still hitting 3k most days. The bugs were terrible every day. I wore more deet than I ever have in BC or Manitoba or anywhere. Blackflies were worse than I had ever seen and it was freaking late August!
Some of the blocks were gigantic. As far as the eye could see was just devastated forest. It was rather depressing.
Camp culture was super strange. I was the only Anglo in the whole camp and Joelle was the only girl planter. Average age had to be around 40. Almost everyone was from the Lac St Jean region because of the way the work week was scheduled you had to go home on weekends. No one hung out. It was a dry camp. There were no campfires. You had to scan your card when you went for meals. There was a TV that people would sometimes gather around to watch the news. Literally nothing but the news ever played on that TV. And apparently only local news too because they didn’t care about was was happening in the rest of Quebec or Canada or the world. Many people there had never left the region not even to Quebec City which is only a 2 hour drive away. Most of them were sort of afraid of me because I was Anglo One even called me a square head to my friend Felix!
Management was paid day rate so they never worked hard. Sometimes they would make fires to roast their sandwiches. So many times we were wondering what to do with our land while we could see the van parked somewhere. Since Sonya never left the van we knew she was just sitting in it. She also didn’t have us cut pieces just told us to do a line in and then plant in one direction until we run out of unplanted land. There would also often be 5 planters in a piece. There were definitely holes left all over the block.
Lots of the younger guys on our crew were interested in going out west for planting and would ask me and Joelle all sorts of questions about what its like out there. They were also frustrated with how shitty management was. Joelle would always give glowing reviews about it and highly recommend it to them. The highballing rookies on our crews were making $400 every day. That doesn’t really happen at Celtic. Still its a much better experience out west but some people might get disappointed.
Anyways. Planting in Quebec was weird. Really weird. Hopefully this gives you an idea.
plantingquebec 