Reward circuits and anti-reward circuits: Planting’s drug and party culture

Dale David Kendall (right) and fellow planter Steven Alexander smoking between bag ups. (Photo by: Dale David Kendal, June 2016)

Dale David Kendall was picked up by another tree planter in Squamish, B.C. headed to a tree planting camp further up north. He sat in the passenger seat of her van with the windows rolled down. 

“The windows are all down and I’m sweating and cold,” Kendall recounts later. “And she’s like ‘are you ok?’ And I’m hunched over.”

Kendall was in withdrawal from substance use disorder of opiates. 

“I just sweated out for the whole ride up there,” he says. “I tried to eat some food, drink some water, wait for the next day. Sometimes you can’t sleep at all at night.” 

He says it wasn’t the first time he showed up to a season of tree planting “dope sick.” 

Kim Hellemans is a behavioural neuroscientist at Carleton University. She studies addiction and what factors contribute to substance use disorder. She says that “dope sick” is how some people refer to the process of withdrawal. 

She explains how addiction and withdrawal work. There are neurological pathways that run through our brains, specifically a “reward circuit” which looks for happy things and to keep us alive, and an “anti-reward circuit” designed to balance that out. Opiates are designed to send the reward circuit into overdrive. 

“You can imagine that over time, when you have repeated activation of this pathway, it’s tricking the brain into believing that drugs are what’s most important for survival,” Hellemans says. 

She says that withdrawal is essentially when those anti-reward, or stress, circuits are “unmasked” by taking drugs out of the occasion. The hormones that are released in the stress circuit continue to be released to balance out the anticipated hormones that come from the reward circuit. And this doesn’t feel great. 

“Withdrawal generally feels awful,” says Hellemans. “What happens when the drug is metabolized and you’re not activating those reward systems anymore, those stress circuits are pumping out things like cortisol and adrenaline that are going to be very high in the absence of all that dopamine and endorphins.”

Kendall uses drugs when he’s not planting. Over his 10 seasons planting trees, he’s gone through withdrawal in planting camps more than once. 

“I would come here, dope sick,” he says. “I’d get out of that pretty quick, three to five days. Once you start getting busy, you keep busy. It’s the most important thing. Idle hands are the devil’s work, and that’s the truth.”

It was late on a Tuesday night when I reached out to him again for an interview. We’d missed each other a few times since he was already planting trees on Vancouver Island. Upon opening my message on Facebook, he immediately gave me a call. 

The door of the motel he was staying in was propped open behind him and, despite the darkness outside my windows in central Canada, the sun was just starting to set. The internet connection dropped just as we started talking so I quickly sent my cell phone number for him to call. 

Kendall, 32, started planting in 2012. He was born in Ontario before moving around with his mom and brother. They eventually settled in Abbotsford B.C. when he was eight. 

“I went to different schools every two years for my whole life,” he says. “I have a single mom and she had to keep moving. She couldn’t afford to keep me and my brother at the same place for a very long time.” 

He remembers taking pills on weekends when he was 14. 

“I was 14 the time I started taking ecstasy because press tabs and pills were the big thing when I was that age,” Kendall says. “I never thought I was addicted, but I would do it every weekend with my friends.” 

Slowly, ecstasy on the weekends turned into cocaine every once in a while. When Kendall moved to Edmonton, every once in a while became more frequent. After a relationship ended, he moved to Victoria, B.C. 

“When I moved to Victoria, I ended up trying the pure version of cocaine, which is crack,” Kendall says. “It’s what I’d do on the way home from the bar to sober up. And it turns into a social thing.” 

As summer was approaching, he heard about a tree planting opportunity. 

“The first year I went planting, I was getting heavily involved in drugs in downtown Victoria,” he says. “I needed to get away and it’s always been something that I wanted to do.” 

That first year, he was a rookie in a camp full of university students and didn’t feel like he fit in. But there was nowhere to get drugs. He fell into a routine.

“They give you a place to stay and a purpose. What better place to get clean than somewhere where they’re going to feed you three meals and pay you,” says Kendall. “It’s like a stop in life. Time doesn’t move and you nothing except get clean.” 

After the first season finished, he went home with $500 on the Greyhound bus. He says he owes planting his life after moving to Victoria. 

“If I hadn’t gone planting in that first year, in the second year, I would have been in downtown Victoria hanging out with stickup kids, getting drunk and I would have exposed myself to more drugs,” says Kendall. 

Planting, he says, offered him a different kind of high. 

Dale David Kendall planting trees in one of his earliest seasons. (Photo by Dale David Kendall, 2013)

“You get a high from working hard and completing hard tasks,” he says. “You know, you sit there and just look up at the block you planted.” 

And there’s a responsibility to the job to make sure you’re ready to work every day, especially in one as physically demanding as tree planting. 

“There’s so much you have to do to take care of your body,” he says. “You learn a lot while you’re [planting] and it can’t be done unless you’re doing things to take care of yourself.” 

For the past 10 years, Kendall says he’s been an “offseason drug addict.” Despite knowing that it isn’t the healthiest cycle, he doesn’t want to do the conventional “detox” or rehab. 

Hellemans works in Ottawa with the Community Addiction Peer Support Association (CAPSA), an outreach service that helps people with substance abuse disorder recover. She says there’s a misconception that “recovery” means abstaining from all substances. She says emphasizing harm reduction instead can be an effective path for those more vulnerable to addictive substances. 

“It’s about improving wellness,” she says. “What some people worry about is that there’s only one way: it’s abstinence or nothing. And there are other paths that involve harm reduction.” 

Harm reduction means slowly reducing your intake of certain substances or choosing substances that are less harmful. That can look like using cannabis instead of opiates and drinking six beers instead of 12. 

“I want to be able to enjoy my life for the rest of my life,” Kendall says. “Like drop acid at a music festival if I want to.” 

Kendall attributes success in planting to the people he’s worked with. 

“The people I’ve met and surrounded myself with out here definitely helped me change a lot of my other life,” he says. “Just to be a nicer person in general. For sure tree planters helped me find who I wanted to be and how I wanted to be as a person.” 

“The people” is a pretty common response when asked what about tree planting makes you love it. And the same is true for people who’ve struggled with substance use disorder. Tree planting is known for having a party culture. A lot of bush camps are populated with university students and located far enough away that very few people even know where you are. 

While Kendall had developed a substance use disorder before planting, others sometimes develop that while in camp. 

Ashley Moodie started tree planting in 2019 after meeting a Canadian planter while travelling in South America. In her first season, she planted with a camp in northern B.C. She found the planting mentality fostered the party culture. 

“It’s the tree planter mentality. You’re out in the woods so the same rules of society don’t apply anymore,” she says. “And that’s why it’s acceptable to get fucked up every three days if that’s what you’re looking for.” 

Moodie says that the partying was “relentless.” 

One of many themed parties, a wedding with clothing thrifted during day off, CJ Wardley attended. (Photo by: Graham Perry, 2017)

“Every three days, you’re off work and it’s ‘bush Friday,’” she says. “It’s just drink, drugs, whatever and then you have day off the next day.” 

On day-off, they’d go into town and right to the bar. 

It was in her second season that Moodie said she had a wake-up-call. After a night of partying, she blacked out and woke up in her van. She’d thrown up overnight and was covered in vomit. 

“And I just had this realization,” she says. “First of all, worst hangover of my life. But second of all, I almost died. That’s the dumbest way to die. Choking on my own vomit in my sleep in a van in the bush is not really the way I want to go out.” 

She stopped drinking excessively for the rest of the season but felt alone and isolated because she sat out of party nights. 

“Every night off if you’re at all tempted, it’s around you, you’re surrounded by alcohol. It’s just a free for all,” Moodie says. “It is isolating because I was like, I’ll just hang out in my van and write in my journal or watch a movie.”

When the season ended and some of those habits carried into her life outside of planting, Moodie stopped drinking completely. She attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the offseason and opted for a planting camp that was run out of a motel rather than a bush camp. 

“When I left camp, I was like, that’s it. The season’s done. I’m done. I’m so done,” she says. “I wasn’t binge drinking on the weekends. [Planting] was a good thing because it made me realize a lot faster than I probably would have had I just kept going about my life.” 

Moodie was completely sober for a year. She found solidarity the following season in a Facebook group chat. 

“I actually started a women’s sobriety Facebook Messenger group at that point,” she says. “It was for other women who were lonely on night off and wanted to chat. We would send each other voice messages and stuff.” 

Finding a group of planters that you fit with can make or break a season. CJ Wardley identifies as queer and uses they/them pronouns. Wardley saw a post on Facebook after their first season about a crew in B.C. that would be made up of all queer individuals and people of colour. 

For a lot of camps outside Alberta and British Columbia, planters are divided into crews once they get to camp. On the west coast, crew bosses hire their own crews and camp supervisors work with crew bosses. So, Wardley’s camp was not entirely queer and POC individuals, but their crew was. 

In their first season in 2018, Wardley worked in a camp in Ontario. They say that the party culture was hard not to fall into. 

Campfire party after a day of planting at CJ Wardley’s camp. (Photo by: CJ Wardley, 2019)

“The first season was just a lot of partying and drinking,” they say. “I just kind of fell into it because it felt very natural and like what everyone else was doing.” 

Throughout the season, they realized that partying one night usually resulted in feeling down mentally for a few days. 

“I feel like because the party days were so close together, and all that constant drinking, it would be constantly recovering from the high of partying and the low of the depression,” Wardley says. 

After that first season and some struggles with mental health, they stopped drinking and have been sober since February 2019.

Hellemans says that substance use can often be a way that people cope with other issues they’re facing in their lives. 

“They can get sucked into a party culture, because that's a place where they can avoid their problems by using substances,” says Hellemans. 

She says that some people are at a greater risk of developing a substance use disorder for various reasons, like genetics or some of their personal experiences. For those people, situations like isolated planting camps where there’s not much else to do can lead to addiction. 

“You’re physically isolated. And then on top of that, you’re putting your body through this immense amount of stress every day,” says Moodie. “You’re just totally cut off and I understand people want to let loose.” 

Not only are planters isolated from the rest of society, but they’re also often isolated during the day from one another. Usually, no more than two people are planting a piece of land at a time. A block of land is often assigned to a crew boss who divides it into pieces for the six to 12 planters on their crew. It’s not uncommon to go the entire day without seeing or talking to anyone else. 

Planting is a physically demanding job, but the mental demands of isolation can sometimes be even more significant. 

“I think a big contributing factor to that are hours and hours where you're in solitude where you're just like, ‘okay, I think I'm stuck with my own thoughts,’” says Moodie. “You know, I'm trapped.”

Erica Dolman (right) and Tomas Moncayo (left) shot-gunning after a day of planting. (Photo by Rachel Clarke, 2021)

To mitigate that, planters often listen to music, podcasts or even audio books. As long as it’s something to think about other than the trees they’re putting into the ground. 

“If I don’t have music to listen to while I’m working, if I’m stuck with my thoughts for too long, I stress myself out like crazy,” says Kendall. “It’s almost like I don’t have control what I’m thinking of. It’s a stressful thing, you know, if you can’t be alone in your own head.” 

But sure footing with your crew and your camp can make the actual act of planting a tree more tolerable. 

Wardley says that their second season felt more comfortable. 

“I didn't feel as secure in my environment [in the first season,]” they say. “Whereas in the second season, I felt like I was more secure in my environment, because I knew that I was accepted and more comfortable.” 

After Moodie’s wakeup call in her van and time with AA, she’s navigating a new relationship with alcohol. 

“I drink now,” she says. “But I drink very, very casually. I’m super aware of myself and I haven’t gotten as drunk as that since.”