Christine Byl

For many students who love the outdoors and are looking for summertime seasonal work, national park and forest trail crews are often first step summer jobs.

Maintaining trail is very hard work – not only the physical shoveling, sawing and rock removal, but most trail crews hike to their work destination each day, with the exception if they are on a ‘swing’; then they hike to their destination camp there. Strings of mules led by packers may carry the heavier equipment, but the trail crews have to get in on their own power. In addition, if the trail is in the wilderness, no mechanical tools such as chain saws can be used.

Author Christine Byl found she loved the hard, physical work and the hard-fought acceptance as a woman keeping up with men doing the same job.

She spent time on crews in Glacier National Park, the coast of Alaska and eventually Denali National Park, where she now works in a more administrative capacity as well as following her career as a writer.

Her chapters not only evolve along her timeline of work, but also each one highlights a different tool such as adzes and pulaskis that those not as familiar with hand forestry may not know.

Since I live in an area where many friends have worked seasonally in forest jobs, I found this fascinating.… (more)

To paraphrase another beloved American nature writer, two roads diverged, and I, I left school for work in Montana and Alaska and got myself an education anyway. {...} I saw how place becomes as much a part of you as idea or experience; how inner shifts happen knee-deep in a hole. And inner shifts predict outer ones.

It’s place, not story or characters, that Byl puts at the heart of her book, which combines an homage to nature and tools with a memoir of her traildog (“a laborer who works in the woods maintaining, repairing, building, and designing trails”) years in Montana’s Glacier National Park, Alaska’s Cordova Forest Service, and Alaska’s Denali National Park. She parses her experience into six chapters, each opening with a profile of a tool -- axe; rock bar (crowbar/fulcrum); chainsaw; boat; skid steer (Bobcat earthmover); and shovel -- that features literally and thematically in the chapter. (Of course, nominative determinism would say her attraction to tools is no accident; the Americanized version of the Dutch word for “axe” is, after all, “byl.”)

I love explorations of nature and explorations of workplace and I anticipated loving this memoir. But while Byl is likeable, her experiences just aren’t new or interesting and the writing is workmanlike -- flat and unevocative. The only glimpses of insight and originality I encountered were in those riffs on tools and in Byl’s occasional tendency toward lists -- “What tourists say to a female traildog”; “What {traildogs} want to say to tourists”; what she’ll miss about working on trails -- that develop into something, often funny. I’m fresh enough from reading Tracy Kidder’s memoir, Good Prose, that a line still echoes: “With good writing the reader enjoys a doubleness of experience, succumbing to the story or the ideas while also enjoying the writer’s artfulness.” Here, I felt neither.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)… (more)