by By John Vaillant
WW Norton, 2005
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.