Six Million Trees

"Six Million Trees" is an extraordinary memoir of what it's like to work as a tree planter, replanting the clear-cut forests of northern Ontario, Manitoba and the Maritimes. In equal parts bleak yet funny, and always brutally realistic, "Six Million Trees" follows the author and her companions as they battle blackflies, blizzards, and broken bones, through isolation, desperation, solidarity and healing. Derkowski first became a tree planter because of the money, but returned to the bush again and again because of something else she found -- a sense of meaning beyond the cookie-cutter conformity of modern life.