There are four bedrooms in the house. Since Nicole left, I sleep in the small one on the main floor. Upstairs is the master bedroom, our old room, the one with the bathroom. Now I use it to plan for my period one class, Grade Eleven Physical Geography. There is an impressive stack of reference books on the bed: North America and Its Landforms. Glaciation. The Hidden World Beneath. Not that I have opened any of them recently, but if ever I needed to look something up, I'm sure I would find my answers. The thick binder on the desk is where my lesson plans are filed. Each day, in order: handouts, overheads, quizzes, all there, ready to be photocopied. I have been teaching this course since 1996, and little has changed in the world of Physical Geography. Except a little erosion, but that is hardly noticeable.

Jenny's room could use some redecorating. It still looks like a kid's bedroom with its pink wallpaper border and stuffed animals on the shelf but I'm sure I could fix it up if it helps sell the house. Staging, I think they call it. I could stage all this, for show. In the meantime, I'll use Jenny's room to prep for my second-period class, Human Geography. The course description states, 'Students will explore the interdependent connections between the land and its people.' Settlement patterns, industrial development, demographics. The kids find it boring, but it counts for one of two mandatory credits for Social Science, so the course runs every year. The curriculum has done away with the textbook and now only refers to online resources, but I still have photocopies of the old book. I write notes on the blackboard and the students copy. The exam questions come right out of these notes, so it should be easy to get a good mark. That's what I tell the kids.

Down the hall there are three doors: the middle one is the bathroom, to the left is my fourth-period prep room. (Period three is my spare. I don't need to set aside a room in my house for my prep time at school, which is taken up by meeting with the principal, returning calls to angry parents or covering the class for a teacher who is away coaching a team.) Fourth Period Geography is called Issues in a Changing World. It's a senior course, supposedly a preparation for university in which students are challenged to take a position on global issues and defend their point of view. The kids enroll in the class, all dreamy, thinking they can make a difference.

The bedroom on the right? There isn't much to see in there. I use it to store old files, photos—that kind of stuff. Before I move out I'll go through it and throw away what I don't need anymore. I still need to box up some of it for Nicole. She said she wants the photos of Jenny as a baby. There is other stuff in there too, things from my past, before we were married. The locked file cabinet in the corner is for those. I don't need to open it very often to look at the old photos or read the letters. I remember what she looked like, I know what the letter says. But, imagine if one day I were to forget? It is comforting to know that if I needed to, I could open the second drawer and flip to the letter K, and there, between my fingers, would be the photo I took of Layla with her old Pentax. I remember: I have the camera propped up on her work boots, trying to keep it from moving as I hold the shutter open for twenty seconds. The print is blurred and grainy, but it is all I have left of her. The remains of the evening sun burn ochre speckles into her skin, the curves between her hip and her shoulder dip like the rolling hills on the horizon. But the lines are blurry, especially when I first wake up. Kapuskasing doesn't have hills. Peru does, Ecuador too. The hills must have come from the dream, the one where she sits beside me and our knees touch as she wipes my cheek like a mother and tells me everything is as it should be. I awake fulfilled for a moment, certain she visited me in my sleep until the awareness of my place in the world settles. So I keep these files to remind me of the truth. This cabinet, these drawers, hold in alphabetical order all of which I am certain. The documents ground me to reality and some mornings, after the dream, I find comfort in opening the files and pulling out this old photo. The red June sky and the contour lines of her skin, as she lay on her side, turned away from me—I know it happened.

We were in my tent. The rain fly was pulled open and the mesh screen closed tight and we had just made love. It was hot, the end of June. Outside, the mosquitoes roared, blacking the sky in a blur. We both smelled of dirt and fly repellent and cigarettes and neither of us cared. We were sweaty tree planters lying on the hard ground beside each other, in the dying light, camped in a clearcut in the bush, somewhere on the Great Clay Belt, south of Kapuskasing, Ontario.

I tell the kids in the Eleventh Grade how the Great Clay Belt was formed and I think of her. When the last glaciers melted, the silt and sediment from a continent's wastewater settled on top of the Precambrian Shield. "Everything flowed north back then", I tell the kids at school, "the Great Lakes, all of this" (I'll point around the classroom for dramatic effect) "would have flowed north into the ancient Sea." I didn't learn that from the textbooks on the bed in the other room, I know this from my brief stint as a planter for GrowNorth Reforestation. Ask anyone who planted in the early nineties and they'll tell you how it was. No one forgets their time in hell. And no one will deny that tree planting made them who they are today.

For many tree planters, hookups with other workers were inevitable. It went with the territory. A bunch of college and university kids away from home and friends, working hard, getting wasted. I thought Jill and I might end up together when she sat next to me on the bus the first day. I was taking a bit of a self-directed hiatus with Nicole at the time and knew Jill from my residence at Western, enough to say 'hey' in recognition of a familiar face in a camp full of strangers. Jill was a first-year cutie from the floor below who took off to see her boyfriend on weekends. But when Jill told me her friend Layla would be joining our camp in a few days, I knew she wouldn't need my companionship.

Three days later our team was working the middle of a planting site in a vast cutover. The sun was high in the late morning sky, the black spruce treetops a dotted line far in the distance. It hadn't rained for days and I could see the white dust billowing from the logging road long before the supervisor's truck rolled into the clearing and stopped. From behind the cloud of dust, doors opened and closed. Then Layla broke through, parting the curtain of backlit clay dust, sauntering toward the crew chief. She moved like she had this, the planting business, she had it nailed. Her army pants hung off her hips, her shape a mystery. Her hair was tied under a bandana in a sloppy ponytail, sunglasses hiding her eyes. She threw her pack to the ground as the boss pointed to where Jill was working, one row past to me. I looked up, tossed her a grimy grin, then looked back down to my shovel.

The black flies brought us together while they tore us apart, bite by bite. Any crack between clothing, any gap of exposed flesh, and you were chewed. The flies would work under cuff and collar, into a head net. We all had waistband tattoos, constellations of bloodied bites. It became our nightly ritual to inspect each other while standing outside the dining tent smoking, comparing the carnage. In the evening the black flies would disappear and before they were replaced by the onslaught of mosquitoes, there were a few glorious bug-free minutes at dusk when three or four of us would share a joint, laugh at the chew marks on our bodies then dash into the tents and start the swatting that would ensure a peaceful night's sleep.

On Layla's first night, after Jill complained about the fly bites on her back and proudly displayed the battle scars above her waistline, Layla said, "What about these?" Hooking her thumb into her waistband she pulled down the front of her pants and, with her other hand, grabbed my wrist. She forced my hand, pressing my palm firmly against her skin and in one luscious movement, slid my hand across the flat plain of her tummy. I felt the bumps from a thousand fly bites. I felt the ridges of her pelvis, the crest of her pubic bone, the landscape of her flesh. I felt my heart erupt. And what made that act the single most erotic and arousing moment of my life, was that for Layla, it didn't appear to be sexual at all. It seemed natural. She didn't look into my eyes, didn't show any suggestion of pleasure or teasing or invitation. She seemed confidently without care while my fingers brushed inches above her pubic hair. That was Layla. And at that moment, she possessed me. Had Layla tossed me a handgun and said, "Donny, let's steal a truck, drive to Kap and rob a gas station," I would be looking around the camp for the fastest getaway vehicle. She had a power over me.

Now, if we flip back a few pages there is a map of the planting area where I worked. I tell my students in the Environmental Geography course the clearcut between the CNR tracks and Highway 11 is the only manmade environmental destruction visible from space. They tell me that isn't true, that Google Earth can see everything, pointing to a car in my driveway. And what about the massive reservoirs created by hydroelectric projects in China or Egypt or Quebec? I admit, my information might be outdated, but it was true at the time, twenty years ago. We were part of the crew that replanted the flat and barren plain referred to as The Gordon Cousins Forest, believing in twenty years it would be thick with jack pine, black spruce and tamarack, ripe for harvest. It was comforting to know the pain and hardship we endured, the suffering, the injury, would be, in the long term, worth it. A billion board feet of lumber, ready to be shipped south to become the floor joists, wall studs, and rafters that would build America. And now? The trees should be green and tall and ready for logging again, and another crew of grimy tree planters should be heading into the wilds come spring to earn their adulthood.

But Layla told me otherwise. How we weren't environmental martyrs, pilgrims or crusaders. We were mere fodder for the forestry company, expendable indentured servants carrying out their campaign, how our suffering was only lining the pockets of the owners and investors of the multi-national conglomerates who were treating our forests as their cash crop, part of the industrial-military complex, how over the next twenty years they would spray pesticides and herbicides to eliminate competitive species, kill the beaver who drowned their investment, cut and scrape a network of access roads to subdivide their acreage. How I was a fool to think I was making a difference, planting a few thousand saplings. She knew.

We had been together for a couple of weeks by then. I moved my tent next to hers and used my 12x12 tarp to protect our little two-person refugee compound. One night I would be in her tent, then the next night she would be in mine. In the morning we would hear the blast of the truck horn and I would unzip the tent door and crawl through the pre-dawn darkness to armour myself for the day's onslaught: the fire of a relentless sun, the poison of wasp and hornet and bee, the stab of mosquitoes and black flies, horsefly and deerfly, or the slow attrition from the cold, the rain, the backache, the trench-foot.

"Fuck this shit," she said one morning, late June. Layla proclaimed she had enough. She would stay in her tent and not report to the morning line-up. They didn't care. Someone else would plant her trees. "I'm out of here, going to walk to Kap and fuck this place." Was I coming, or would I stay here and be a tool for the global capitalist-industrial oligarchs? 

Photo Credit: CHARLES-MATHIEU AUDET, LaPresse.ca  No copyright infringement intended.