Wood Lit - Winter 2005
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The Golden Spruce
We all live with contradictions, and mostly we manage our internal conflicts without major incident. Sometimes, though, the warring emotions become a public battle as well, as happens in The Golden Spruce, a story that is part history of the Canadian Northwest and big timber and part examination of one man’s demons and his bizarre protest against the excesses of industrial logging.
On the night of January 20, 1997, towing a chainsaw, felling wedges, gas, and oil, Grant Hadwin swam 60 feet across the near-freezing Yakoun River in the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia. Once across, Hadwin climbed the steep bank on the far side and for the next several hours proceeded expertly to cut into a 300-year-old Sitka spruce, leaving it to fall a few days later when the wind picked up. The tree Hadwin cut was the only known Sitka spruce with golden needles. Scientists puzzled over it as a freak of nature. According to Haida Indian mythology, it was a young boy transformed into a tree. When the sun shone, it glowed, magical and revered.
At the time of his defining act, Hadwin was in his mid-40s. He was an experienced timber scout and logging-road designer in exceptional physical condition. A decade earlier, Hadwin had had a spiritual awakening, after which he found it difficult to reconcile the dissonance between what he did for a living and what he valued, the one destroying the other. Thus transformed, the always-intense Hadwin was moved to his singular act of protest. Shortly afterwards, facing charges and feeling threatened by the Haida, he disappeared, some believe to Siberia, others think to the bottom of the Pacific.
Author John Vaillant builds his story from a mix of logging history, Haida lore, and the radical – if misguided – act of conscience of a single man. Vaillant tells the reader: “the story is a puzzle, or more accurately, a piece of a puzzle, the whole of which can never be fully known.”
The Golden Spruce mingles background about the islands, the treacherous waters surrounding them, and the Haida to provide context for the central narrative: a tale of timber. “Logging is an industry that…has altered this continent…more completely than agriculture,” he writes.
A fundamental conflict often exists for those who love the forest and work in it. “Compromise – of an ugly, elemental kind – lies at the root of the timber business,” Vaillant writes. A logger who worked with Hadwin says, “We basically gutted the place. I’ve made a good living, but sometimes you wonder if it’s all worth it.”
Vaillant gives us a vivid tale of mankind’s exploitation of the land, a three-way marriage of masculine excess, technological development, and unquenchable demand. The telling has a sweaty gusto, but Hadwin, the protagonist, remains elusive. We get only glimpses of him from his friends – emerging from a mid-winter swim in the Yukon River, icicles dangling from his eyebrows, or taunting a pair of grizzlies and then dodging them on foot.
According to a constable in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, Hadwin was “a few fries short of a Happy Meal.” That may be, but Hadwin had a rational explanation for what he did: “we tend to focus on the individual trees like the Golden Spruce while the rest of the forests are being slaughtered …. [P]eople are focusing all their anger on me when they should focus on the destruction going on around them.”
A timber industry spokesman described Hadwin as “hell bent.” In Vaillant’s book, hell bent is an equally apt description of the timber industry in the Northwest. The Golden Spruce is a tale of mythic figures, but few heroes.
Thomas H. Rawls
© 2005 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
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Caterpillars of Eastern North America
It’s easy to speak of the elegance and charm of butterflies and moths: their gift of flight, their role as pollinators, their place in poetry, their gossamer beauty. But save some respect for caterpillars.
The plump, crawling larval form of Lepidoptera is in many respects the dominant stage of the insect, an eating machine with remarkable talents. Caterpillars can impersonate snakes and twigs and bird droppings; they can survive our winter, defoliate forests, spin silk, be food to warblers (and humans), and even display supremely shocking colors and patterns.
And now, at long last, they have their own field guide. David Wagner’s Caterpillars of Eastern North America joins the growing suite of masterpiece field guides to flowering, flying, fur-bearing, and now crawling organisms of the Northeast.
This book is a hybrid of a field guide and reference manual. It begins with a concise introduction to caterpillars: morphology, life cycle, ecology, and conservation. And for the child in us all, Wagner offers sage advice on finding and rearing these insects from egg to adult, as well as a rich list of “caterpillar projects” for schools, nature centers, and universities.
No one, not even the amazing Wagner, who is associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut, can be expected to know, let alone photograph in a lifetime, the 5,000 or so species of butterflies and moths east of the Mississippi River. The guide features nearly 700 familiar and findable species. Most reside on their own page, replete with one or more exquisite photographs.
Here in these photos is a lesson in evolution. The caterpillar of the moth called curved-lined angle (Digrammia continuata) looks precisely – and strategically – like the northern white-cedar vegetation on which it feeds. The Baltimore checkerspot (Euphydryas phaeton) caterpillar, bright orange and black, has an arsenal of medieval spines that shouts “don’t mess with me” to any would-be predator. And the spiny oak slug (Euclea delphinii) looks like a cross between a caterpillar and a fireworks show.
The written account for each species includes help with identification, range of occurrence (no maps), common food plants, a small photograph of the adult, and a heavy helping of remarks. The remarks section, caterpillar wisdom from Wagner’s passion for this life stage (and access to scientific literature), makes for delightful reading, like Roger Tory Peterson issuing tidbits on the lives and secrets of birds.
Species in this guide are arranged by family. There are no keys or shortcuts to help identify a given caterpillar. But that’s okay. This book is a page-turner. If you think you know butterflies and moths, get acquainted with the complexities of caterpillars and their world – and then learn your lesson in humility.
Bryan Pfeiffer
© 2005 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
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Wandering Home
Hikers in the Adirondack Mountains of New York and the Green Mountains of Vermont often share a common reward when they emerge from the wooded lower slopes to the open summits: a marvelous view of the other range, etched on the sky, seen across Lake Champlain and its north-south-running valley.
To the hikers, it often seems like a single marvelous landscape, with its own wonders – a clean northern light and its hard, worn underpinning of granites and limestones.
In many ways, however, the Adirondacks and the Greens are different countries, politically, socially, and even geologically. Northeastern New York encompasses some of the poorest counties in the U.S. There are dairy farms in the Champlain Valley of New York, but once you get into the foothills and then the higher peaks, you realize that, as Bill McKibben points out in Wandering Home, New Yorkers have essentially left the countryside alone.
Vermont, by contrast, has been quite heavily used. Dairy has faded in the last two decades, but its impress is still clear not only in the valleys but also in the hills. Moreover, Vermont has become a center of light industry, with a base in technology. And it has become in the process quite progressive, politically and socially. The Adirondacks are a bastion of conservatism.
McKibben, a writer with homes in both the Greens and the Adirondacks, attempts in this book to tie the two regions into one, which he calls “America’s most hopeful landscape.” The book is a chronicle of a walk McKibben took from his home in Ripton, Vermont, where he lives while serving as a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College, to his second home in Johnsburg, New York, deep in the Adirondacks.
The long route he chooses is the spine for his story, which is both a rumination on what he sees as an integrated landscape and his own attempt to see his way forward to an integrated society worthy of it. To this end, he talks to a variety of people along the way, noting that Vermonters are trying all sorts of ways to live lightly on the land: they operate small truck farms, vineyards, diners devoted to locally grown foods, and the like.
On the New York side, he celebrates the efforts of his friend John Davis and Jamie Philips of the Eddy Foundation to establish a wildlife corridor from the west shore of the lake across the floor of the valley to the foothills of the mountains.
The sum adds up to the case that McKibben has been making in many of his books: that we belong to this corner of the earth as well as to the community that occupies it, and we need to take care of both.
If there is a criticism here, it might be that he is a little too sanguine about the prospect that the counter-culture enterprises he likes so much can deflect the march of economic greed and suburban sprawl that have disfigured so much of Vermont, especially in its northwest corner.
Nonetheless, I would sign on to the epitaph he sets out for this work:
I have the great good fortune to have found the place I was supposed to inhabit,
a place in whose largeness I can sense the whole world but yet is small enough
for me to comprehend. If, when it comes my turn to die, I really do see again that
world from Mt. Abe, I know it will contain all these things: farm, field, forest,
mountain, loon, moose, cow, monarch, pine, hemlock, white oak, shepherd, bee,
bee keeper, college, teacher, beaver flow, bakery, brewery, hawk, vineyard, high
rock, high summer, deep winter, deep economy. Yes, and cell tower and highway
and car lot and Burger King. This is part of the real world. But what’s rare in
that real world, and common here, is the chance for completion. For being big
sometimes and small at others, in the shadow of the mountains and the shade of
the hemlocks.
Hamilton E. Davis
© 2005 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
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