Tree planting is done by outcasts and outlaws--winos and wetbacks, hillbilies and hippies, for the most part. It is brutal, mind-numbing, underpaid stoop labor. Down there in Hade, Sisyphus thinks about the tree planters and thanks his luck star because he has such a soft gig.

The workday begins with a long, smelly ride down a torn-up moonscape of gravel where last summer's logging ended.

The foreman steps out and, with a few mutterings, the crummies empty. Ten men jostle for their equipment. The hoedags and tree bags rest in a jumbled pile.

Most planters aren't particular about which bag they use (provided it doesn't leak muddy water down their legs all day), but each man has a favorite 'dag that is rightful his.

You develop a fondness for your 'dag over time. You get used to the feel of it, the weight and balance and grip of it in your hand.

The hoedag is a climbing tool, like a mountaineer's ice ax, on steeper ground. It clears the way through heavy brush like a machete. You can lean on it like a cane to help straighten your sore back.

The foreman hands out the big, waxed cardboard boxes full of seedling trees. The boxes are ripped open with a hoedag blade, and the planters carry double handfuls of trees,wired up in bundles of 50, over to the handiest puddle to wet down their roots. Dry roots will kill a tree before it can get into the ground, so the idea isn't purely a matter of adding extra weight to make the job harder -- though that's the inevitable result.

Three to four hundred trees get stuffed into the double bags, depending on their size and length of the morning run.

The idea is to cover the ground with an 8-foot by 8-foot grid of trees. If mountains were graph paper, this would be easy, but instead, each slope has its own particular contours and obstacles, which throw the line off.

The two fastest planters, the tail men, float behind the crew, planting two to ten lines apiece, straightening out the tree line for the next pass. They tie a bit of blue plastic surveyor's tape to brush and sticks to mark the way for the lead man when he brings the crew back up from the bottom.

It's best not to look at the clearcut itself. you stay busy with whatever is immediately in front of you, because, like all industrial processes, there is beauty in the details and ugliness in the larger view.

Oil film on a rain puddle has an iridescent sheen that is lovely in a way that the junkyard it's part of is not. Clearcuts contain many wonderful tiny things--jasper, agate, petrified wood, sun-bleached bits of wood, bone and antler and wildflowers. But the sum of these finely wrought details adds up to a grim landscape--charred, eroded and sterile.

Although tree planting is part of something called reforestation, clearcutting is never called deforestation--at least not by its practitioners. The semantics of forestry don't allow for that. A mountain slope is a "unit;" a forest is "timber land;" logging is "harvest;" repeated logging is "rotation."

On the worksheets used by foresters, a pair of numbers tracks the layers of canopy-the covering of branches and leaves that the living trees have spread out above the soil. The top layer is called the overstory, and beneath it is the understory.

An old-growth forest may have an overstory averaging 180 feet and an understory of 75 feet. Clearcuts are designated by the phrase "Overstory: Zero."

In the language (and therefore the thinking (of industrial silviculture, a clearcut is a forest. The system does not recognize any depletion at all.

"Old growth forests are dying, unproductive forests -biological deserts full of diseased and decaying trees. By harvesting and replanting, we turn them into vigorous, productive stands. We will never run out of trees," the company forester will tell you.

But ask if he's willing to trade company-owned old-growth forestland for a reforestation unit of the same acreage and the answer is always, "No, of course not."

I thought of the hardscrabble canyon of Rock Creek, of the old units logged twenty and thirty years ago that we'd replanted all winter long, trying for the fifth or sixth time to bring back the forest on land whose soils had been muddying the river for decades.

You see your frenzied work as a life-giving dance in the ashes of a plundered world. you think of the future and the green legacy you leave behind you. But you know that your work also makes the plunder seem rational and is, at its core, just another part of the destruction.

More than the physical exhaustion, this effort not to see the world around you tires you. It takes a lot of effort not to notice, not to care. When the world around you is painful and ugly, that pain and ugliness seeps into you. It builds up like slowly accumulating poison. You do violent work in a world where the evidence of violence is all around you. You see it in the scorched earth and the muddy streams. You feel it when you step out from the living forest into the barren clearcut It rings in your ears with the clink of steel on rock. It jars your arm with every stab of your hoedag.

This essay was adapted with permission from Robert Leo Heilman's book of essays, Overstory: Zero; Real Life in Timber Country, published by Sasquatch Press.