EAU CLAIRE, Wis.–My camper van travels took me all across America and into Canada, but it wasn’t until the 2017 edition of the Eaux Claires Music and Arts Festival that I met someone who was so thoroughly excited about trees.

Dylan Smith looked at trees with the zest of the birds and the bees.

I was camped at the Whispering Pines Campgrounds outside of Eau Claire (French for clear water), about a mile from the music festival site.

My future neighbors pulled in late at night. Dylan, his wife Meghan and friend Eric Westelaken came to Northern Wisconsin from Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Co-curated by Justin Vernon of the minimalist folk band Bon Iver, Eaux Claires is becoming a big deal. In 2016 the festival attracted 14,500 people from 35 states and several countries. All of the campground’s 1,500 campsites sites were sold out and there were hundreds and hundreds of tent campers covering most of Whispering Pines’ 40 acres.

Besides my Canadian compatriots I ran into a family of Isralei campers during the third edition of Eaux Claires. I envision more mid-range marriages of camping and music like Eaux Claires, especially when I look at Alpine Valley in East Troy, Wis.

The next morning, before the mid-June festival began, I heard the organic sounds of Canadian guitarist Daniel Lanois coming from Smith’s 16-foot Starcraft Launch Extreme camper.

I asked him to take my picture with my Blue Bird camper van. Smith walked backwards about 20 feet from my van. His steps were as measured as a tightrope walker. He laid down on the ground and pointed the camera upwards in order to frame my van with the tall campground pine trees. It was a beautiful thing.

Smith is a Canadian logger.

“A logger, but I would call it a ‘woodsman’,” said Smith, 30. “Trees are living things. They’re beautiful. When I’m walking through the woods I do take a lot of pictures. There’s a thousand trees in the woods and one will just grab you. You have to take it in. The way they bend with the weather and time. Maybe some (trees) were almost destroyed when young so they have these crazy crooks in them. They make a perfect bench for you to sit on. You can’t walk by it.

“I do specialized forestry work,” he explained. “I chase contracts around. I’ll do anything from surveying to blind cutting and claim staking for mining companies. With claim staking, you’re the first one in the woods. You walk with a GPS and tag the trees with the date and the time. You want to be doing that in the winter. You do that in the spring and you’re going to run into the marshes, bugs and foliage. I’m either running through the woods looking at trees or chopping down the ones that are sick.

“I’ve been lucky enough to do mostly reclamations and less logging. More specialized insect attacks. We do tree planting in the summer. I do line cutting contracts where you cut perfectly straight lines for geologists to walk with special machines.”

Smith grew up in the Canadian woods. His father Marcel and grandfather were loggers. “In my twenties I got offered a job in the Rocky Mountains cutting down trees that were infected with (beetle) pine kill,” he said. “It decimated the pine industry. The government put a bunch of money into controlling it. I ran as hard as I could and fell into the industry. I’ve been all across Canada doing specialized forestry work.”

There’s a lot of trees in Canada.

“Lots of trees, yes,” he said. “Once you get over the mental aspect of working in 50 below every day for three months straight and once you see how much money you can make–and once you don’t do it for a while, you get the itch. When I had my little boy (Felix) with my wife I thought I’d stay home forever. But it’s just not for me.
“It’s my second family, my forestry home.”

His wife said, “In the winter sometimes his eyes freeze shut because its so cold.”

Smith explained, “I was doing an Arctic contract near (the territory of) Minerva. It’s north for Canada. I don’t even know how the trees grow. There’s polar bears. But when you’re running a chainsaw all day you’re sweating–in 50, 60 below. As long as you don’t stop working I’m usually just wearing a long sleeve shirt and jacket. You have to let that sweat dry and get away from you. If you’re cold, you’re not working hard enough.”

Smith lives 80 per cent of a year in the heated hybrid camper, where tents pop out of the side. The camper has a stove, shower and small bathroom with a 2,000 pound holding tank. “The company I work for lets me use it for personal use,” he said. “I’m blessed to work for such good people. It gives you lots of space to live with another guy when you’re working or bring the kids and the wife. I tow it with my Honda Ridgeline. This is my first music festival with the camper.” The drive was seven and a half hours from Thunder Bay.

Smith was excited to see Mountain Man (three women from Durham, N.C.: Amelia Meath, Molly Sarle and Alexandra Sauser-Monning). “Its music I actually listen to when walking in the woods,” Smith said. Ironically, Mountain Man performed in the Oubeaux woods adjacent to the festival main grounds.

A black “Snake Farm” trucker’s cap set Smith apart from the pack. “Snake Farm” is the name of his forestry crew. “That’s my second family,” he said. “The name comes from a Ray Wiley (Hubbard, 2006) song. We listen to it every day in the summer and pull up to every job where everyone calls us the ‘Snake Farm’.”

Smith also listens to singer-songwriter Leif Voellebekk from Vancouver, who had regional success in Canada with “You Couldn’t Lie to me in Paris” and lots of Eau Claire’s own Bon Iver. “And I’m hooked on Beck again,” he said.

“You get lost in it.”

Off in the distance Meghan and Eric were lost in a game of “Polish Horseshoes” near some elm trees. Smith laughed and said, “That’s what we call it. I think you call it ‘Golf Toss.’ (with rings and frames) ‘Lather Rings?’

The tools of Smith’s trade haven’t changed much since his father and grandfather were woodsmen.  “It’s still pretty stone age,” he said. “They try and do things with machines but for the pine needle is so specialized and you don’t want to damage the forest. You have to go in by foot and go in by hand.

“Droning technology will take away a lot of the surveying but when it comes to specialized control work, that job will be here forever. I’ve been very lucky. A lot of time away from home, but at the same time I’m camping and the people I work with take care of each other.”

Smith believes in climate change.

“In America you see the policies and the struggle,” he said. “There are cycles throughout our life. We have our impact. But when Mother Nature wants to do something it’s gonna happen. The science community is saying something. Our winters are getting shorter. In the woods the blossoms happen at funny times and the mayflies will be out when they shouldn’t and the food isn’t there. There’s little shifts that are happening. It was the hottest year on record last year. It’s got to be happening.”