North of Unreal
Beetle Mania
Teenagers lean out of their truck and shout, “Robson’s on the rag!” at the blood red trees that skirt the park. Tourists from Michigan eat blueberry bagels in the front seat as they drive past Vanderhoof and marvel at how the north has such pretty fall colors all year long.
In my neck of the woods, I watch thick bush wrestled into mud bog and slash heaven. In winter, I drive home past pyramids of yellow flame, strings of abandoned campfires licking the night air as they blaze across a dark field. I watch the cattle move in, with their big, dull eyes, and the deer nibble up to the side of the road, and then skit away, in search of cover.
Long ago, we could only see what was happening if we were up in the sky. Flying back north, we all pressed our noses against the tiny airplane windows, making startled sounds with our tongues, or shaking our heads. Later, we saw red right along the roads to Hixon and Houston and we’d fret about it as we paid for gas in Quesnel or Vanderhoof.
These days, Prince George is playing strip poker right in the pines and she’s lost her shirt and she’s showing a lot of skin. She reveals things I’d never noticed before: gravestones, hillsides, schoolyards and neighborhoods that used to hide in the shade. Now, we can watch the death throes in our own backyards, as we wash the burned bits from the pot in the kitchen sink. One man shows me the trees he’s losing, the track marks left behind. His eyes are red, as if there’s been a death in the family.
For years, I’ve been going to press conferences where politicos and forestry folks speak of the Red Tide. Their speeches log the words catastrophe, emergency, and unprecedented natural disaster. Each word is worse than the one from the year before. These folks carry a pine beetle model as big as my dog. They say, “That’s one big, honking pine beetle.”
They use words like infestation and epidemic. Some of them blame Tweedsmuir and the socialists, as if the park and the NDP were Patient Zero in the spread of AIDs. They chart the spread of the mountain pine beetle on larger and larger maps. They name a Beetle Boss. They launch a War in the Woods. When I meet the premier for the very first time, I ask if his arsenal includes woodpeckers. “Yup.” he says. “We’re going to bring in an army of woodpeckers.” But he’s only joking, and so am I.
I write about serious things: the flight of the beetle, the sound of all those tiny wings on the wind. I imagine the taste of what they nibble, the heat of their lusty libido and their potent procreation, the blush of the blue fungus they leave behind. I write about tough love. About people who inject trees with arsenic to kill the pine to get the beetle, like the nursery rhyme: “She swallowed the bird to eat the spider, who wiggled and wriggled and tickled inside her. She swallowed the spider to catch the fly. I don’t know why she swallowed the fly…I guess she’ll die.”
I investigate plans to repel the bugs with a smelly bag of pheromones that looks like Swiss cheese and hangs on the trees. I repeat the word pheromone, because I like the sounds. The words are less pleasing, but still I track down annual cuts and logging uplifts and twenty-five cent stumpage fees on two-bit timber. I tell stories about pellet plants and trucks overturned fully loaded on the Beaver and about plans to drown dead wood under water. I dream about everyone in the north holding their breath, fearful about what is coming ten years down the road, when the alarming words are all used up, and the forest is lying on the floor.
I dig up the words red and dead, and watch them lie down, side by side, in their grave.
Betsy Trumpener is producing a new CBC Radio series, Beetle Mania: Real People and Pine Beetle. It draws on stories from artists, poets, and others northerners to talk about how the mountain pine beetle infestation is changing our landscape and our culture and getting under our skin. Beetle Mania will air on Daybreak North and Almanac beginning in September, 2006.
By: Carolyne Macdonald
6 October 2009