The Tree Play

The block the crew worked that winter was marked TP on the forestry map, and nobody could say what the letters stood for by the time the contract ended. The planters called it the tree play. The name stuck to the bunkhouse, then to the house the bunkhouse turned into, and now it is on the sign at the road.

What is here

Eleven rooms across two floors. A kitchen that cooks one sitting a night. A counter that opens at four. A covered pool in the old wing, which was a drying room for wet gear and still smells faintly of cedar when the heat comes on.

The house sits where the inlet road bends, nine minutes by car from the harbour and about forty on foot if you take the pine avenue instead. Most guests take the avenue once and drive after that. It rains here more days than it doesn't.

• Eleven rooms, four shapes, no two laid out the same
• One sitting at seven, bookable at the desk or by telephone
• Covered pool open from seven in the morning until nine at night
• A rope walk behind the house, strung between two firs

The planting season, and what it left

Crews came through here from 1954 until the late seventies, and the buildings on this road were put up for them: thin walls, big stoves, and drying space for forty sets of boots. The stoves are gone. The drying space is the pool now, and the big windows are the ones the crews worked under.