The Golden Spruce

by John Vaillant

  In the late 1960s, MacMillan Bloedel began reserving small patches of forest that were considered particularly beautiful or environmentally sensitive. These “set-asides” were generally minuscule, seldom amounting to more than three or four hectares—nowhere near big enough to serve a significant conservation function for the ecosystem. Their primary purposes were recreational and symbolic—the briefest of nods to the great forests that had once stood there. One drawback to these pocket parks is that with no other tall trees to protect them, they are extremely vulnerable to “windthrow” (getting blown down). Even today, these little reserves are begrudged by some in the industry; in 2003, during a stroll through an old-growth set-aside on Vancouver Island, a local forester confided, “If this was mine, I’d cut it all down and plant it in fir.” The park covers just over three hectares. A hundred metres away, loaded logging trucks were passing at a rate of one every twenty minutes.

  Recreational possibilities were seen for the golden spruce in the mid-1970s and at the urging of the local logging and forestry community, MacMillan Bloedel planned to set aside five hectares of old-growth forest around the tree. However, the tree’s protection became a moot point when recent environmental regulations declared riverbanks and other sensitive riparian zones off-limits to logging. The Haida were not formally consulted on the matter because, apparently, there was no awareness among the white community that the tree had any special meaning for them. But the same could be said for the Haida themselves; even within the tribe, only a handful of people knew the story associated with it, and at that time they had more pressing concerns. Native people did not get the right to vote in Canada until 1960,*10 and the Haida’s resurgence was still in its infancy. For them as for many other North American tribes, a period of dramatic rediscovery was just beginning.

  Meanwhile, MacMillan Bloedel ran a proper trail in to the golden spruce, and a bench was built there so that visitors could view the tree, which stood across the river on the west bank. The tree itself was inaccessible unless one had a boat, or walked several kilometres up to the nearest bridge and then back downriver on the other side, a detour that takes several hours due to heavy brush and windfalls. In 1984 tour buses began making regular stops at the tree, benefiting local businesses, including the Golden Spruce Motel. In 1997 the town’s growing ecotourist trade got an additional boost when an albino raven showed up. Usually killed or ostracized by their black counterparts, the white raven was the only one of its kind in the province. Between it and the golden spruce, Port Clements had cornered the freak-of-nature market in western Canada.

  Both creatures had a startling, supernatural quality to them, and on a sunny day the golden spruce’s luminescence never failed to impress—or to mystify. D’Arcy Davis-Case, a forestry expert who lived in Haida Gwaii for years before becoming a consultant to the United Nations on forestry issues, recalled that, “botanists and dendrologists were always trying to explain the tree’s golden colour.” When asked what they had concluded, Davis-Case smiled and rolled her eyes. “Magic!” she said.

  To those who were lucky enough to see the golden spruce in bright sunshine, Davis-Case’s explanation sounds plausible enough. Many spoke of its peculiar radiance, as if it were actually generating light from deep within its branches. Ruth Jones, a Vancouver-based artist, visited the golden spruce late one sunny afternoon in 1994. “It looked as if it were made of glowing gold,” she said. “It was like a fairy tale: how can this be?” After seeing it on a sunny day in 1995, a journalist named Ben Parfitt came away feeling that it was “somehow closer and more alive than all of the other trees around it.” Marilyn Baldwin, the owner of a sporting goods store across Hecate Strait, in Prince Rupert, visited the tree on a grey foggy day in the early 1990s. “A few minutes after we got there,” she recalled, “the sun burned the fog off, and suddenly there it was in its golden brilliance. We called it the Ooh-Aah tree, because that’s what it made us all say.” A senior engineer for MacMillan Bloedel who saw the tree under similar circumstances compared its sudden illumination to a religious experience.

  But Hadwin saw something different, and it was the same thing that many of his more pragmatic colleagues saw: a “sick tree.” More so than most people, he would have been struck by the contrast between the vestigial grove containing the town mascot and the free-range saw log farm that surrounded it. To a person who knew the woods as well as Hadwin, it would have been as insulting and ludicrous as an albino buffalo on a putting green. Where were all its healthy counterparts? Headed south on the Haida Brave.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Fall

  A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

  —William Blake, PROVERBS OF HELL

  NOT LONG AFTER his trip to Haida Gwaii with Cora Gray, Hadwin left Kamloops for good. He headed north again, alone, eventually winding up at the Yukon Inn in Whitehorse, just north of the B.C. border. Here the Yukon River drops down from its source near the Chilkoot Pass to begin its three-thousand-kilometre arc up through the vast heart of Alaska and down again into the Bering Sea. Winter lasts a long time here and it had already begun by the time Hadwin arrived. He had always taken pride in his high tolerance for frigid water, and over the years he had swum in icy rivers throughout British Columbia, Alaska, the Yukon, and Russia. While he was in Whitehorse, he began taking dips in the Yukon River. The banks were covered in snow by this time, and ice was starting to form on the surface. Besides swimming and exercising, Hadwin’s purpose for being in Whitehorse was unclear, but he stayed in regular phone contact with Cora Gray. He missed her company, and in mid-November he persuaded her to join him, going so far as to pay for her plane ticket.

  She was watching as Hadwin went into the Yukon one December day when the air temperature was thirty-five below zero. By this time the only part of the river that wasn’t frozen was a particularly fast-moving section by a dam outflow. Hadwin walked out onto the ice and used a stepladder to lower himself in; he remained immersed for about fifteen minutes. Witnesses were so alarmed that the Mounties were called, and a reporter from the Yukon News showed up as well. “The water was smoking,” Gray recalled. “When he got out, there were icicles hanging off his eyebrows and hair. He ran back to the car, where I was waiting, and he said, ‘I know I’m OK when you’re there watching me.’ I asked him, ‘Why are you torturing yourself?’ and he said, ‘I’m training myself. I won’t be around here next year.’ I knew he was planning something.”

  But she had no idea what. During the previous six months Grant had confided in her the most intimate and painful details of his life, but his future plans were a mystery. Cora began to get nervous; she had intended to stay in Whitehorse for only two weeks, but under pressure from Grant, she ended up staying for six. On several occasions local Natives took her aside and told her they had a bad feeling about Hadwin, that she should get away from him. “When I mentioned flying home,” she explained, “Grant cried like a baby, saying, ‘I think you’re the only one who’s ever worried about me.’” But he also told her not to answer the phone when her sisters called. “Finally, I persuaded him that I had to go home, and he offered to drive me. He said, ‘Don’t tell your sisters you’re coming home; surprise them.’”

  It was at this point that Cora Gray began fearing for her life. This was also when her half-sister, Tilly Wale, had the frog dream. As with the Haida, the Gitxsan are divided into clans; Cora is a member of the Frog clan, and so is Tilly. Only days before Cora was due to leave Whitehorse, Tilly dreamed of a frog getting crushed by a car. She was so frightened that she called her half-sister and told her. Cora was frightened, too, but she was so far from home; there was nothing she could do.

  Grant and Cora left Whitehorse at 4 A.M. on December 30. It was a fifteen-hour drive through extremely remote country to Cora’s home in Hazelton, and due to the high latitude and the time of year, the sun would be up for only six hours of the trip. Moose, wolf, cougar, and bobcat are common sights up here, and their disembodied eyes glint
ed green and orange as they stared back from the darkened roadside. At five-thirty that afternoon, two hours north of Hazelton, they reached the Nass River Bridge. Like most bridges in the north, this one is only one lane wide and Grant headed toward it at full speed. Despite the bright moonlight and clear sight lines, he failed to register that a pickup truck was crossing from the other side. Cora remembers being very calm, saying, “Grant, did you know it’s a one-lane bridge?” The road was icy at the entrance ramp, and at the last minute, Hadwin hit the brakes. His Honda skidded and went sideways, up onto the low railing. From the passenger seat, Cora continued narrating what she believed was the end of her life: “Then I said, ‘We’re going into the Nass.’ I didn’t panic; I just thought, ‘If I’m going to go, I’m going to go.’ I was kind of expecting it.”

  In the end, they didn’t go into the Nass; they hit the pickup head-on. Cora’s ankles were shattered, her cheek was broken, and both hands were bruised through; Grant, meanwhile, suffered only a cut lip. Even more worrisome than Cora’s injuries, however, was the fact that it was forty below zero and they had lost their heat source. At this temperature cast iron can shatter like glass, exposed flesh will freeze in seconds, and the touch of metal will burn like fire. The nearest ambulance was two hours away. Grant jumped out of the car to assist Cora, but in his haste he forgot to put on his gloves, and when he attempted to open her door his fingers burned instantly. Meanwhile, the suitcases in back had been thrown against the passenger seat and Cora was indeed being crushed—she was choking on her seat belt—but Hadwin’s hands were so badly blistered that he was unable to free her. He called to the truck driver for help and then he put his arms around Cora. “Don’t die!” he begged. “Don’t leave me behind!”

  Grant had bundled Cora into heavy clothes and a sleeping bag for the long, cold trip, and according to her doctor, if not for this padding, she almost certainly would have died—either on impact or later, of exposure. Cora’s ankles had to be repaired with screws and plates and now she must use a walker to get around. Hadwin visited her in the hospital every day until he left again for Haida Gwaii two weeks later, on January 12, 1997. “I’ve always wondered if Grant was trying to kill us both,” she said, “so he wouldn’t have to be alone.”

  ONCE IN HAIDA GWAII, Hadwin gave every impression of being a man on a one-way trip. While staying in a motel at the sparsely inhabited north end of Graham Island, he gave away all his possessions, including a number of things that had once belonged to his father. “Take whatever you want,” he told Jennifer Wilson, the twenty-year-old daughter of the motel’s manager “because I’m going to burn the rest.” Hadwin went on at length about university-trained professionals, referring to them as “an incestuous breed of insidious manipulators.” According to Wilson, he advocated terrorism as the most effective means of bringing about change, and he talked a great deal about trees. “I learned a lot from him about the forest,” she recalled. “He seemed so passionate—like he wanted to do something good. I got the sense he had found his purpose.” At one point Jennifer and Grant visited the golden spruce together. To a passerby, they might have made a pleasing and romantic picture: a handsome, youthful man and his attractive blonde companion—both of them clearly at home on the wild western rim of the continent. Grant was carrying a camera, and he asked Jennifer to take a picture of him with the golden tree towering above. In his hand is a beaded eagle feather, a gift from a Native elder.

  After buying a gas can, falling wedges, and a top-of-the-line Stihl chainsaw, Hadwin relocated to Port Clements, where he checked into the Golden Spruce motel. The last time Jennifer Wilson saw him, he was wearing earplugs; he had to wear them, he told her, because every word he heard felt like a direct insult. Hadwin was travelling with medication, but it is pretty clear that by this stage he had either run out or simply stopped taking it.

  Hadwin had replaced his totalled Honda, and during the night of January 20, 1997, he drove to the head of MacMillan Bloedel’s Golden Spruce Trail. Having sealed his saw, wedges, gas and oil, and presumably his clothes into inflated garbage bags, he packed them down the short trail and descended the steep bank of the Yakoun. While it freezes over occasionally, the twenty-metre-wide river was open now and flowing more quickly than usual as it had been swollen by winter rains. The temperature was near zero when Hadwin slipped into the current and swam across, trailing his equipment behind him. The bank on the far side is equally steep and slippery, and it would have taken some doing to get himself and his gear up into the forest, particularly in pitch darkness. There was no one around for miles, and as usual, clouds hovered low over the islands, enveloping everything in a miasm of mist and rain. Whatever light there was, Hadwin would have had to bring with him. The tree stood just back from the riverbank as it had for the past three centuries. It would have been a looming presence in the darkness, its golden qualities invisible in the sodden gloom.

  HADWIN HAD CUT DOWN hundreds of trees in his life, but he had never tackled one this big; the golden spruce was more than two metres in diameter at its base, and it is rare to find trees this size around Gold Bridge, or elsewhere in the interior. By island standards, however, it was only of average size; there are specimens of Sitka spruce still standing on the coast which are four and a half metres in diameter, but even larger ones have been reported in the Yakoun Valley. Like the redwood and red cedar, big Sitka spruce often grow “buttresses”—thick ridges that fan out from the trunk to help stabilize the tree on mountainsides and in shallow, rocky soil. In the early 1960s, a forester named Wally Pearson measured a spruce stump a short distance upriver from the golden spruce that was seven metres across—a diameter comparable to that of a giant sequoia; a tree measuring eight metres was reported farther south in Sandspit. The only way to fell huge trees like this is to “dismantle” them: first by cutting the buttresses off and then by tunnelling inward by cutting out what are called “window blocks.”

  In 1987 a Vancouver Island faller named Randy felled a red cedar more than six and a half metres in diameter. Using a Husqvarna 160 chainsaw with a forty-inch bar, it took him six and a half hours. After cutting a wedge all the way around the outside of the tree, he cut window blocks and tunnelled into the centre. The noise from his saw was so loud inside the chamber he had made, and the exhaust so thick, that he didn’t know the tree was falling until daylight, let in by the lifting trunk, lit up the smoke around him. When a tree this big hits the ground, it doesn’t sound like a tree; it sounds like a building collapsing at your feet. To those experiencing it for the first time, it gives new meaning to the expression “fear of God.” When he examined the stump afterward, Randy recalled that “the [tree] rings were so tight you couldn’t fit a piece of paper between them. That thing had to be—fuck—thousands of years old.”

  The response most fallers have to bringing down a massive specimen like this is similar to that of a hunter when he bags a trophy animal: it is at once beautiful, terrible—and immensely satisfying. But it is a rare occurrence nowadays. Randy’s cedar was very likely the last of the truly huge coastal trees to be cut legally in British Columbia. “But even dropping the little ones—I still get a thrill,” he added. “I’ll never get tired of it. I’ve been hurt; I’ve had guys killed right next to me. But I guess that’s why they pay us the way they do.”

  In British Columbia, a typical faller works a six-and-a-half hour day, for safety reasons, and until recently, a faller working for MacMillan Bloedel could make $800 a day. But since Weyerhauser took over, company fallers have been replaced, increasingly, by contract labour, with the result that day rates have dropped about 30 percent. Even so, it’s still serious money for a job that appeals to only a tiny sliver of the general population. “Fallers are loners,” explained Bill Weber, one of the few bullbuckers (falling supervisors) to survive the Weyerhauser takeover. “You’re the master of your own destiny—you’re not at the mercy of the machines. If you get whacked, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.”

 
There is no question that fallers, like high riggers, or helicopter pilots, are attuned differently than other people; you can see it in the way they move their heads. A conscientious faller will keep a close eye on the tree above him for the same reason—and with the same reflexive jerks of the head—that a feeding bird will: because in the forest, death generally comes from above. The top of the tree is where much of the information is; everything happening at the base is exaggerated at the extremities, much the way the end of a fishing rod will exaggerate the smallest movements of one’s casting hand. Thus, the first indication that a tree is about to go can be seen in the quivering of the branch tips. These early vibrations can also shake loose dead branches, some of which can be the size of small trees; such deadly bolts from the blue are called “widowmakers.” Should a faller happen to be hungover, looking straight up a long, gun-barrel trunk with its tapering perspective exploding into a kaleidoscopic spray of branches ten storeys up will not only set his head spinning, it can induce nausea as well. Even when he’s sober, the experience can be disorienting, and it is exacerbated by the tremendous amount of flex evident in a long trunk on the verge of falling. Unfortunately, this effect is easiest to see when mistakes have been made.

  Standard procedure for falling a tree of any size, once the direction of fall has been chosen, is to cut a deep, grin-shaped wedge into that side of the tree; on the coast, this is called a Humboldt undercut. Occasionally a faller will cut his wedge too shallow or misjudge the tree’s natural lean and, instead of falling over in the intended direction, the tree will settle back on the saw as it cuts through from the back side. This presents an extremely dangerous situation because it renders the saw useless and it means the faller is no longer in control. Now, the tree can do anything. Not only does it have 360 degrees of falling possibility, it can also kick out at the bottom, and even a glancing blow from that much mass will kill an elephant. Once a tree has settled back like this, falling wedges are the only way to persuade it to tip over in anything resembling a controlled fashion.