The Golden Spruce

by John Vaillant

  Hadwin didn’t get the job. His only consolation, it seemed, would be a woman named Cora Gray. One of Hadwin’s neighbours in the apartment complex where he was living was Matilda Wale, an elder from the Gitxsan tribe whose homeland borders Tsimshian territory, due east of the Queen Charlottes. The Gitxsan are inlanders; as a result, they remained insulated from Europeans for much longer than the coastal tribes. Even as recently as the 1920s it was considered unsafe for government officials to travel there. Hadwin looked after “Tilly” Wale, helping her out when she needed it and occasionally buying her groceries. In July of 1996, Tilly Wale’s half-sister, Cora Gray, came through town on her way to a powwow, and Hadwin put her up in his apartment. Gray was in her mid-seventies and she had lost her husband and her mother within the year; she was lonely and had a kindly, forgiving manner. She reminded Hadwin of a favourite aunt and he took a liking to her right away. Gray had a camper van and in it the two travelled as far as the Salmon Glacier, an enormous ice-blue tongue that laps the headwaters of Portland Canal, a 150-kilometre-long fjord on the B.C.–Alaskan border. Considering their radically different backgrounds, they had a lot in common; both had been separated from their families at an early age and sent away to schools they hated—Gray to a residential Aboriginal school in Alberta, and Hadwin to a British-style boarding school in Vancouver; physical abuse was commonplace in both institutions. The wounds left by these early banishments gave each an understanding of the other that was rare to find in such an incongruous match. On their trips together, Hadwin would often take time out to go running and swimming; then, in the evenings, he would cook for the two of them. They played cribbage and rummy, and laughed a lot; before long Gray had become Hadwin’s closest friend and confessor. Gray was with Hadwin when he made his first trip to the Queen Charlotte Islands.

  THE QUEEN CHARLOTTES, all but forgotten since the collapse of the otter trade, had been rediscovered during World War I. This time it wasn’t furs, fish, or gold the outsiders had come for, but airplanes. In places such as Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, Vancouver Island’s Clayoquot Sound, and in the Yakoun Valley, they literally grew on trees, specifically, big old Sitka spruce. Prior to the war, Sitka spruce was a low-value tree, frequently passed over in favour of two other Northwest species: Douglas fir (also known as the “money tree”), which had become the builder’s choice for framing, flooring, and trim, and western red cedar, whose water-resistant properties were much sought after for shingles, siding, and fence posts. The only reason for cutting a Sitka spruce down was because it stood in the way of a cedar; once on the ground, it would often be left to rot or, if convenient, maybe pulped for paper.

  But when early airplane designers discovered the tree, all that changed; the lowly—but huge—Sitka spruce became an aristocrat overnight. Light in weight, Sitka spruce wood possesses a rare combination of strength and flexibility that is ideal for making airplane wings and fuselages; cut into strips and laminated, it also makes excellent propellers. It has an added benefit in that it doesn’t splinter when hit by bullets—an unusual quality for any harder wood. For these reasons, the highest grade of Sitka spruce became known as “airplane spruce,” and the Charlottes had one of the highest densities of it anywhere on the coast. During the war years these trees were so sought after that they became the object of an extraordinary mobilization of military forces. Starting in 1917, more than thirty thousand American soldiers from the hastily formed Spruce Production Division, along with thousands of Canadian loggers contracted by Britain’s Imperial Munitions Board, were sent into the coastal forests to cut and mill trees for the war effort. Much of the wood harvested by these “spruce soldiers” went to build French, English, and Italian warplanes.*9 By the time the Germans surrendered, less than two years later, enough spruce had been harvested to girdle the earth one and a half times (about 200 million board feet). However, buried in the Commission on Conservation’s Tenth Annual Report from 1919 is a sobering glimpse of the future of West Coast logging:

  The supply of Sitka spruce suitable for aeroplane construction is extremely limited…. [and the] continuance of cutting on a war basis for another year would have practically exhausted the spruce which should be secured at a reasonable expense of money and effort…. Only the large trees contain the clear, fine-grained lumber required, and these cannot be replaced in centuries. Most of the aeroplane material was cut from trees 500 to 800 years old, and it is doubtful if the succeeding stands will ever attain the same quality as these virgin stands.

  While concerns like this were raised periodically over the ensuing decades, it would be more than fifty years before any meaningful action was taken. By then many of the islands and much of the coast would be reduced to moonscapes.

  The spruce soldiers’ highly organized assault on the coastal forests helped to usher in the modern age of logging when the technology for dismantling forests began outstripping the imaginations of those who wielded it. It also led to phenomenal waste: with less desirable species such as hemlock and balsam being abandoned in favour of their more profitable neighbours, it has been estimated that, on average, nearly 30 percent of a cutblock’s usable wood was left to rot—or burn—among the slash. Despite having grown up in the forest, many West Coast loggers seem surprised at how fast their trees have fallen, and some of this can be attributed to a kind of magical thinking that was at work in the woods. Many in the industry were operating under the untested assumption that by the time the old growth was gone, the next generation of trees would be ready to harvest. This might have been true in the hand-logging—or even the steam-logging—days, but no longer. By now the industry had become blazingly efficient, and yet the majority of cutover forests were still left to reseed themselves once the loggers had gone.

  Following a local catastrophe such as a fire, windstorm, or clear-cut, a forest will rebuild itself through a natural process called “succession.” On the coast, a series of species, beginning with berry bushes and low scrub and progressing through fast-growing alders to such shade-tolerant “climax” species as spruce, cedar, and hemlock, will follow one another in a predictable pattern that can take centuries to unfold. In the Charlottes, the seemingly commonsense practice of actively replanting cutover areas was not institutionalized until the 1960s; for interior and mountain forests like those around Gold Bridge, replanting wasn’t introduced until the 1980s.

  “They bullshitted us,” a retired Haida logger named Wesley Pearson said of the logging companies he used to work for back in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. “They said when we finished logging [the Queen Charlottes] we could start over. Well, we logged it a hell of lot faster than anybody thought we’d log it. A lot of mistakes were made; the government didn’t keep an eye on the big companies.”

  But lies are easier to swallow when the money is good, and for fallers and high riggers like Pearson, it was. Another Haida faller named Bill Stevens could have been speaking for the entire logging industry when he said, “When you have that job, you forget about everything else for awhile.”

  To get an idea of the scale of logging taking place in the Charlottes during the last thirty years, one need only look as far as the Haida Monarch and the Haida Brave. At the time of their launching in the mid-seventies, they were the world’s largest floating log carriers, and both were built to serve the islands; the Monarch (the larger of the two) is capable of carrying nearly four million board feet of timber (about four hundred truckloads) at a time. When one of these vessels dumps its load at the booming grounds in Vancouver, it can generate a spontaneous wave three metres high.

  MacMillan Bloedel, Canada’s biggest logging company at the time, operated the Haida Monarch and Haida Brave, and both vessels would routinely travel through Masset Sound on their way to Juskatla Inlet and the “log sort” where much of the Yakoun Valley’s trees were taken for transport. Whereas the nineteenth-century otter ships had appeared to be in plausible proportion to the houses and canoes that lined the village beaches, these modern
vessels dwarf everything in sight. Both ships are approximately one hundred and twenty metres long, and they seem a tight fit in the slender gut of Masset Sound. From beach-or boat-level, a log carrier looks less like a ship than a floating wall of steel; more than thirty metres above the water loom fifty-ton cranes for loading the literal forests of cargo. In addition to their tactless choice of names, their colour scheme exudes a sinister otherworldliness: the vessels are matte black, like Stealth bombers, as if they were designed to evade detection. But the opposite effect is achieved: as they emerge from the fog, moving inexorably across the celadon-grey North Pacific, they bring their concentrated darkness with them. Watching them approach, one has the feeling that no good can possibly come of this. And yet, laden with a suburb’s worth of cedar decking, these seagoing resource removers are as much a part of the modern Haida legacy as the Nor’westmen. For decades, sometimes as much as twice a week, the residents of Masset have watched their patrimony get loaded up and carried off. Although 80 percent of the logging jobs are given to people from off-island and 95 percent of the wood is sent south, some of them have profited from it. As Wesley Pearson put it, “If you’re born in the Charlottes, you’re either a fisherman or a logger.” These are, after all, virtually the only jobs available out here, and so many Haida find themselves in a strangely familiar double bind: aid and abet the plundering of their historic homeland, or get left behind.

  “I liked logging as a young man,” recalled Pearson. “I’d never have made anywhere near the money I made in logging ’cause I didn’t have any schooling. I can’t say anything against it ’cause too many people depend on it. But how do you control it? The big companies always get the wood they want.”

  This question had been bothering Hadwin, too, and he carried it with him everywhere he went. In September 1996, shortly after what came to be known as the Haida Brave blockade, Hadwin visited Haida Gwaii for the first time. In doing so, he stumbled into a vortex of conflicting hopes, dreams, and ambitions. The golden spruce and its environs embody the collision between the ideal of “Haida Gwaii”: a true rainforest paradise complete with gigantic trees and genuine Natives, and its industrial alter ego, “the Charlottes,” an offshore timber warehouse employing vertical storage. British Columbia has been described as a banana republic, only with bigger bananas, and nowhere else in the province is this more blatantly the case than here. As such, the islands are an internationally recognized poster child for loggers, environmentalists, and Native rights activists alike. The golden spruce was caught in the middle.

  A month earlier, on August 1, while staging a protest against MacMillan Bloedel’s continued logging of the coastal rainforest, Greenpeace activists had been fire-hosed off the deck of the Haida Brave while it lay at the dock in Juskatla Inlet. Later that afternoon, as it made its way down Masset Sound with a full load of logs, the barge was intercepted and forced to turn around by approximately fifty Haida in war canoes and motorboats. This wasn’t the first time: with the assistance of environmental groups, the Haida had staged several highly successful anti-logging campaigns during the 1970s and 1980s; not only did they establish the archipelago as a key battleground in the coastal forest wars, but they marked it as the site of one of the earliest—and greatest—victories for forest preservationists. The creation of the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve in 1987 saved the southern third of the archipelago from logging but also resulted in the loss of more than a hundred forestry jobs. What distinguished this latest event was that it moved the conflict “offshore” it was the first time in nearly a hundred and fifty years that the Haida had taken action against a foreign vessel.

  With the point having been made, the Haida Brave was allowed to pass the following day, but Greenpeace continued to harass the barge as it made its way south, and just outside Vancouver some activists successfully boarded, chaining themselves to logs and loading cranes. The islands are a small place and the Haida and Greenpeace actions were big news there. For six weeks afterward, the Greenpeace boarding and its legal aftermath received steady coverage in B.C. newspapers. It is highly likely that Hadwin would have been following this story, just as he had followed the standoff at Gustafsen Lake.

  Hadwin had been at home in Kamloops when he made the decision to go to the islands, but because Hazelton, Cora Gray’s hometown, was on the way, he took Matilda Wale and her boyfriend with him for a visit. Once in Hazelton, Grant invited Cora, along with her sister Martha and her husband, to join them in the islands, and he paid their way across. They would have made an odd party: five elders and Grant, still rippling with muscle, still casting about for a task that was consistent with his principles and equal to his stamina.

  Hadwin and his entourage spent a week in the islands, and during this time he visited the golden spruce. The tree’s location couldn’t have been less auspicious: over the years it had been surrounded by a maze of logging roads, and all of them terminated at Juskatla, the base of modern logging operations in Haida Gwaii. Lying only a few kilometres west of the golden spruce, Juskatla is a chilly, desolate parallel universe of scoured earth, heavy machinery, and dozens of white Ford 250 pickups—the official vehicle of the logging industry. Equipment is stored and repaired there in a cavernous building, and off-road logging trucks rumble in and out like clockwork. On one typical day, a large sign proclaimed 9 DAYS WITHOUT AN INJURY. Nearby is the dock and log sort where the barges are loaded. Evans Wood Products had a yard like this on the outskirts of Lillooet, and once you’ve seen one, it’s not hard to understand why a person like Hadwin would avoid it at all costs.

  The golden spruce grew equidistant between Juskatla and Port Clements, the pioneer settlement that has since evolved into a bedroom community for loggers; today, about 530 people live there. Located halfway up Graham Island, on the eastern shore of Masset Inlet, the village’s welcome sign is made from an uprooted cedar stump, and once past it, the first thing to greet visitors is a clear-cut littered with slash piles and rusting logging equipment. It is so wet here that any object capable of casting a shadow is also a breeding ground for algae; if left alone, the green slime will give way to mosses and ferns; eventually seedlings will take root and, in less time than just about anywhere else outside the tropics, an abandoned truck, or a mobile home roof, will become an ecosystem unto itself. It could be argued that the golden spruce owes its preservation to the village’s loggers and foresters. Over the years, locals had grown fond of the curious tree; Harry Tingley had picnicked by it with his father in the 1930s, and it had always been a place where islanders would take friends and family who were visiting from the mainland. For Haida and Anglo alike, the tree was like an old friend, a benign and reassuring constant for all who knew it.

  To this day, come October, Tsiij git’anee clan members gather on the Yakoun River, downstream from the golden spruce, in order to catch salmon as they make their annual trip up the Yakoun River in order to spawn and die. There is every reason to suppose that this seasonal harvest has been performed in roughly the same place, using roughly the same technique, for millennia. It’s almost dizzying to imagine the dozens—perhaps hundreds—of generations who have participated in this unbroken cycle of food gathering. Today the entire Tsiij git’anee clan could fit inside a two-car garage, but at one time the clan controlled a significant portion of the Yakoun River watershed, including the spot where the golden spruce stood.

  Before European settlers and miners arrived in the 1860s, the Queen Charlotte Islands were exclusively Haida territory, and fishing, hunting, berry picking, or water rights to a particular area were held by one clan or another. For this reason among others, intratribal warfare and territorial disputes were a fact of life in the archipelago. Thus, the land the Tsiij git’anee claim now may not always have been theirs and its ownership is still in question. Their claim has been contested by a Tsiij git’anee offshoot called the Masset Inlet Eagle clan, but this claim has had to take a number behind several other claims: that of the Haida Nation, the Canadian governm
ent, and MacMillan Bloedel, Ltd.

  Until recently, MacBlo had major holdings in Europe, Southeast Asia, South America, and the United States. Its Canadian properties included an enormous lease in British Columbia called Tree Farm License (TFL) 39, which is composed of timberlands on the mainland, Vancouver Island, and the Queen Charlottes. MacMillan died in 1976, and in 1999 the company was taken over by Weyerhaeuser, the world’s largest wood products company, based in Tacoma, Washington. Weyerhaeuser, which has been a dominant force in the timber industry for well over a century, controls timberlands throughout the world. The Charlottes’ portion of TFL 39 is called Block 6, or the Haida Tree Farm License; it encompasses many of the archipelago’s northern islands and much of the Yakoun Valley, including the golden spruce. In 2005, Block 6 was sold again to Brascan.

  By the time Hadwin showed up, most of Block 6 had been levelled at some point during the previous eighty years; entire islands had been shaved bald, in some cases out of spite born of intraisland rivalries. Much of the landscape has been permanently scarred by the landslides that follow poorly managed clear-cut operations. It is hard to appreciate the scale of the logging until you see it from the air. “When you fly over the northern islands now and see all that’s been taken,” said a Haida artist named Hazel Simeon, “you can’t speak for a few days afterward.” As a result of all this activity, the golden spruce was one of the few mature Sitka spruce trees still standing at the north end of the Yakoun River, and as such it had become even more of an anomaly than it already was. Most of the other survivors, including some big cedar and hemlock, were clustered around it; together, they composed a tiny island of old-growth forest in what is, effectively, a huge clear-cut in various stages of recovery.