The 2012 British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-fiction went to Charlotte Gill for her book Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe. The $40,000 prize was announced last month in Vancouver at a ceremony that included presentations from all four of the short-listed finalists. This year's jury panel considered a whopping 134 non-fiction books published in 2011, a feat that also deserves a prize.
Gill spent 17 seasons planting more than a million trees throughout B.C., and in Eating Dirt she describes the arduous life as a member of the tree-planting "tribe." Tree-planting is not for the faint-of-heart, as I quickly learned in the opening paragraph.
The day of a tree-planter does not begin with a hot shower and cup of coffee. Rather it begins with falling out of bed into rags "still crusted with the grime of yesterday" and with bodies so dirty that "muddy bands circle our waists, like grunge rings on the sides of a bathtub." And this is before they step out into air infused with a cacophony of biting insects.
In many ways this is a quintessential B.C. story. It is a memoir of a tree planter interspersed with fascinating observations on B.C.'s natural history and insights into the logging industry. And who doesn't know someone who has at least attempted to earn a living planting trees?
Charlotte Gill's previous book, Lady Killer, a collection of short stories, won the B.C. Book Prize for fiction in 2005 and was short-listed for a Governor-General's award.
Last year, John Valiant received British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-fiction for his book Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival. This is an extraordinary tale set in Russia's far east of a Siberian tiger that is not only killing people but seems to be hunting them. It is also a story about the region, its natural beauty and the indigenous people who have worshipped the tiger.
