Highballer

In 1983, at nineteen, Greg Nolan was hired (reluctantly) by his older sister’s boyfriend—a treeplanting contractor based in Northern British Columbia. His crewmates didn’t know what to think of the wide-eyed kid whose mom drove him the 750 kilometres to hook up with his first job. But within a week, Nolan was hitting the thousand-trees-a-day mark. By the end of his first rookie season, he gained the status of top producer among a crew of extraordinary young men and women. Over the course of his twenty-seven-year career, he planted over two-and-a-half-million trees. Planting large numbers of trees, Nolan excelled at. Surviving in some of the more remote, isolated and technically challenging regions in BC and Alberta, that was trickier, often requiring resourcefulness... and luck. Nolan was stalked by a large black bear on his first contract near Purden Lake, BC. He all but lost his mind supervising his first project deep in the wilds of Northern Alberta. He was nearly mauled by grizzlies while tenting out in the wilds of Bute Inlet. Nolan survived hurricanes, landslides, hostile loggers, Woodstock-like tent camps, whirlwind romances, the madness of the subculture and life-threatening situations of nearly every conceivable kind. Despite many escapes, Nolan was not immune to tragedy and he grappled with guilt over his own indirect role in a multiple-fatality vehicle accident, throwing him into a deep depression. Only by returning to the challenge of planting trees in remote wilderness settings, did he manage to find peace. For Nolan, the job offered far more than mere financial reward; it opened the door to a world that very few people, especially those in urban centres, ever get the chance to experience. As he writes, “Shit tends to happen, with the craziest of frequency, when you place yourself in the path of a tribe of roaming treeplanters. The adventure never seems to play out the same way twice. You come together in the middle of some of the most remote and pristine wilderness on the planet, and once there... you live, work and experience things that will entertain your thoughts and haunt your memories for the rest of your days.” Hair-raising, cocky and a blast to read, Highballer is an exuberant record of a time in the silviculture arena when the industry was largely unregulated, and the wilderness was still wild.

The magnificent second novel from the legendary author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sailor Song is a wild-spirited and hugely powerful tale of an Oregon logging clan. A bitter strike is raging in a small lumber town along the Oregon coast. Bucking that strike out of sheer cussedness are the Stampers: Henry, the fiercely vital and overpowering patriarch; Hank, the son who has spent his life trying to live up to his father; and Viv, who fell in love with Hank's exuberant machismo but now finds it wearing thin. And then there is Leland, Henry's bookish younger son, who returns to his family on a mission of vengeance - and finds himself fulfilling it in ways he never imagined. Out of the Stamper family's rivalries and betrayals, Ken Kesey crafted a novel with the mythic impact of Greek tragedy.

There’s a rhythm inside things ... It is the spring of 1987 and the blackflies are thick in the air. Twenty-year-old Rory Fleck—runner, bassist, ex-boyfriend, baby of the family—joins a tree-planting brigade in Northern Ontario, camping out in a pup tent and whiling away the evenings writing letters to his dead brother. Haunted by dreams and plagued by gruesome visions from the past, Rory goes in search of the rhythm—in planting and in life—that leads to the mindless trance tree planters call ‘Freak Zero’. He takes comfort in a meaningful mix-tape titled VOYAGER 1 (ten songs, one for each full year his older brother, Mike, has been gone) and he develops a camaraderie with his fellows in the camp: timid, meticulous planter Eddie; gruff, Shakespeare-spouting camp cook Jerry; and kind, vibrant, tempting Betina. But there are others whose motives are less than friendly. Crew boss Ty’s rampant jealousy threatens Rory and Betina’s budding relationship, and the mysterious Mr W’s calm detachment conceals a startling connection to Rory’s past. When his time as a tree planter comes to an abrupt and painful end, Rory must choose whether to keep running, or find out what it means to stop and face the music. Midland is a gripping story of trauma, family ghosts and the healing forces of friendship and music.

Tennessee Coal Mining, Railroading & Logging in Cumberland, Fentress, Overton & Putnam is a fascinating look back at life in the early 1900s in four counties of the northern Cumberland Plateau area of Tennessee. Featured inside is a wealth of old photographs--more than 200 in the book's 120 oversize glossy pages--maps, and descriptions. Emphasis is placed primarily on the coal camps such as Wilder in Fentress County, with great detail concerning the railroads that served the coal mining communities.