I taught a course in journalism at Ryerson this spring. The last day of class, on April 11, proved unseasonably warm, so the five instructors retired to the roof of the Queen and Beaver to celebrate. As the sun went down two instructors departed. The three remaining retreated inside, to the warmth, and huddled around a candle, where we drank rye and ginger ale.
I mentioned in passing that I was to get 500 trees to plant in a couple of weeks. Perhaps the liquids inspired my fellow instructors to feel magnanimous. Both of them announced that they wanted to come out to our farm, near Madoc, Ontario, to lend a hand.
A few days later, I sent out an email with the subject line, “Your drunken vows.” I invited them to the farm, to plant some trees. One of them begged off. The other, whose name is Sonya, agreed to come out with her family. She is married and has two little boys, aged eight and six.
On the Friday night, our family met theirs at Barley’s, a little pub in the village of Madoc, to eat supper before our arrival at the farm. I volunteered to take the boys for a walk by the river while we waited for our food.
“Go for it,” said the father. “You can dangle them by their feet over the river if you’d like.” The boys proved to be, quite simply, little boys: full of mischief and full of questions.
The next day we picked up the trees: 200 white pine, 200 white spruce, and 100 white cedar, in big paper bags. We began to plant. My son planted 36 trees, for 50¢ each; Sonya’s son proved a bit more resilient, and helped to plant 100 trees, for which we paid him 15¢ per tree. Her husband, rather than plant, created a remarkable curry lunch.
Still, as the afternoon wore into evening, Sonya and I found ourselves alone in a field, one tree line east of our cottage. We stood in the tall dead grass. Spruce trees, planted 20 years ago, dot this field, and it is here we each year take a Christmas tree. We sliced the earth with our spades, and put in infill pine and spruce in the gaps between the trees. As the sun sank to our west and geese honked overhead, we compared notes.
“I may have neglected to mention, when I told my family about this trip to the countryside, that there was tree planting involved,” said Sonya.
“Mimi says that I told her you had ‘a family,’ but that I didn’t mention that you have two young boys,” I said.
We laughed. And then we planted some more trees. We got about 300 pine, spruce and cedar into the ground that weekend. I went back a week later, by myself, and planted the other 200 trees.
Last year planters working for the 50 Million Tree program planted about 3,000 trees, mainly red pine, at our farm. With the punishing drought, they all died. The ministry, God bless it, funded planters to return this spring and replant a field in red pine.
I can only hope that, with the nice wet spring we’ve been having, the trees, this year, will survive.