The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

by John Vaillant

  By this time environmental groups had already been fighting to save big coastal trees for years, but as far as the less photogenic alpine timber around Gold Bridge was concerned, Hadwin’s was a lone voice in the wilderness. “He was out of time,” recalled Brian Tremblay, who has known Hadwin since they were teenagers. “He was on his own trajectory; he was talking environment and proper forest management before anybody.”

  One of Hadwin’s duties was to prepare detailed reports on the areas where he had done reconnaissance. These documents are traditionally dry, utilitarian, and pro forma, but Hadwin began using them as a platform for critiques of logging methods and recommendations for areas he thought should be set aside. However, Evans Wood Products had hired Hadwin for his stamina and layout skills, not for his personal opinions, and his sometimes strident challenges to the status quo were not appreciated at the home office. Office politics were never Hadwin’s strong suit and he could hardly be called a team player; despite their respect for his work, friction developed between him and his supervisors. His independence and isolation worked against him here, and as ranks closed in Lillooet, Hadwin found himself outside the circle. “I was one of the last people to see these areas before they were logged,” he would later tell a reporter. “At various times I stuck my oar in to try to save this piece or that piece without any success. So I guess I started to get pretty cynical.”

  It could be said that Hadwin’s misgivings were an occupational hazard. Timber cruisers and surveyors are avatars of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: woods-wise and tree-friendly as they may be, their observations are destined to have a dramatic, if not catastrophic, impact on the landscape. They are the last people to see the forest intact. And yet, to try to alter this course, or even to question it within the industry, was out of step—not just within the culture but with the current era. Paul Harris-Jones was one of the lucky few who got to see Vancouver Island’s legendary Nimpkish Valley in all its glory. The Nimpkish represented one of the largest stands of big timber in the province: kilometre after kilometre of hemlock, fir, and cedar trees two to four metres in diameter and growing as thick as corn-stalks. Harris-Jones spent an entire summer cruising the valley for Canadian Forest Products in the early 1950s. “I was astounded by these forests,” he recalled. “It was very exciting: you’d fly into the camp on a floatplane, take a log train to the end of the line, and then hike off into the wilderness. The forest was so dense that our skin was paler when we came out than when we’d gone in; for three months we never saw the sun. The mosquitoes were god-awful; there were floods; we fought fires. We were always trying to find a way across the Nimpkish [River], fighting our way through this terrific jungle.”

  Today, the Nimpkish Valley is unrecognizable. “It was so dark and dense and gorgeous,” remembered Harris-Jones. “I came back, and it was all gone. I couldn’t believe that they had logged all but forty-four acres—acres!—of the Nimpkish Valley.” (Harris-Jones is now an environmental activist and writer; in addition to finding the first marbled murrelet nests*8 in British Columbia, he is credited with spearheading the preservation of the Caren Range old-growth forest outside of Vancouver that includes Canada’s oldest known trees.)

  Suzanne Simard is currently a professor in the Forestry Department at the University of British Columbia, but when she was a student she spent her summers in the mountains around Lillooet, occasionally assisting Hadwin with road layout. Her experience was similar to many others who worked with him over the years: she found him to be quiet, thoughtful, and extremely good at what he did; she was particularly struck by his almost atavistic comfort in the bush. “We’d be stumbling along, and he’d just be gone, like a coyote,” she recalled. But Simard also saw what Hadwin found so upsetting. In addition to general despoliation of the landscape, landslides and the fouling of streams are among the most common side effects of mountain logging, and in an environment like coastal British Columbia, where the topsoil is thin and the rains are heavy, these problems are compounded. Evans Wood Products had a poor record in this department; in the words of one veteran forester, they were “a bottom-tier company; they gave the industry a bad reputation.” In the early eighties, when Simard was assisting Hadwin, Evans took a “Bowron” approach to the forests around Gold Bridge. “It was like this big machine moved in,” recalls Simard, “and began mowing it down. I can’t bear to go back there now.”

  “We basically gutted the place,” explained Al Wanderer, a second-generation logger who worked with Hadwin. “I’ve made a good living,” he added, “but sometimes you wonder if it’s all worth it.”

  In 1983, shortly before Evans was bought out by another company, Hadwin quit on bitter terms and went to work on his own, struggling to find a way to remain gainfully employed in the woods without “gutting” them. For three years after leaving Evans, he ran his own logging operation outside Gold Bridge where he made railroad ties by salvaging trees that had been killed by a beetle infestation that had also damaged much of the surrounding forest. “That guy worked hard,” his neighbour Tom Illidge said. “It would have taken three normal men to do what he did up there.” But the late eighties were a terrible time for the West Coast timber industry; the Japanese market—crucial to British Columbia—collapsed, and prices fell through the floor. Despite his superhuman efforts, Hadwin couldn’t make his business pay, so he started doing freelance reconnaissance work, cruising timber and laying out roads in various places around the province. Things went fairly well until late in the summer of 1987, when, shortly before his thirty-eighth birthday, his life took a disturbing turn.

  Hadwin had been doing contract work for a timber company up in McBride, near the Alberta border; he had come highly recommended and Gene Runtz, the company’s woodlands manager, was impressed. “He’d been doing exceptional work,” remembers Runtz. “Then he left for about ten days between jobs, and when he came back it was like he was a different person—like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The eyes looked like they weren’t there anymore. It’s one of the most shocking things that’s happened to me in the forest industry. He talked to us and put this religious bent on the fact that what we were doing was wrong. He said he didn’t want to work for us anymore. I thought the world of the guy, but when I looked at those weird eyes peering at me—staring at me—I thought, ‘Holy crappo, if this guy wants to leave—fine.’”

  What Runtz didn’t know was that while he had been away, Hadwin had had a vision. Like the monks and anchorites who once roamed from the deserts of the Middle East to the remotest outposts of the British Isles, Hadwin had ventured into the wilderness and received a message that he could not ignore. As the theologian Benedicta Ward wrote, “The essence of the spirituality of the desert is that it was not taught but caught.” Hadwin was not searching for such an experience, it came up from behind and clubbed him over the head. The episode passed as mysteriously as it had come and Hadwin went back to freelancing, where he continued to receive excellent work reviews, but his supervisors could see there was something different about him. “The amount of work he could do on his own was incredible, and his plans would be great, but at times you’d think he was sort of obsessed,” recalled Grant Clark, who supervised Hadwin a year later outside of Kamloops, a three-hour drive east of Gold Bridge. “He would stay out there; he wouldn’t come back to town. He was always at arm’s length: you could say he was doing great work, but it didn’t mean anything to him.” To Clark, it seemed as if Hadwin was operating at a different level. “He seemed to be in tune with actual nature; he always knew exactly where he was. Animals would stay close by; he wouldn’t spook them.”

  But as competent and in tune as Hadwin may have been, the implications of the incident at McBride were ominous; it appeared that after a twenty-year hiatus, the family ghost that had killed his brother had set its sights on him. It was hard to imagine the impervious Grant being vulnerable to anything his brother had been because, in every other way, the two couldn’t have been more different. Where Grant was alwa
ys lean and wiry, Donald, who was twelve years older, was almost pretty, with full red lips, round cheeks, and wavy blond hair. He had been an altar boy while Grant had been a hellion. Grant’s first day of kindergarten ended early when he was sent home in a cab with a note pinned to his sweater that said, “Do not send this boy back.” “He was like twelve kids,” recalled a cousin, “and smart as a whip.” But he would never be the white-collar professional his father had hoped for. Donald, on the other hand, appeared to make the grade. He was more submissive, toeing the same line that Grant would continually push against, and with his father’s stern encouragement, he tried to follow Tom Hadwin’s tough act, entering the University of British Columbia’s electrical engineering program. He did well enough, but the satisfaction was short-lived; Donald left home as soon as he could, seldom returning for visits.

  Then, a year before Grant went logging, Donald resurfaced. He had no friends and no job, only a diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenic. Despite his family’s best efforts, he refused treatment of any kind. There is little doubt that this horrific undoing of his formerly successful brother helped to drive Grant away from the professional mainstream and into the woods. Indeed, subsequent events may have made the forest seem like a far safer—and saner—place to be. In February of 1971, the same year Hadwin went back to school for his forest technician’s degree, Donald had a final dinner with his parents in their West Vancouver home. Afterward, he headed back downtown across the Lions Gate Bridge. Halfway across the span, practically within sight of his parents’ house, Donald paused. Surrounded by hulking mountains and shimmering water, he climbed over the railing and jumped. He was thirty-four years old.

  When Hadwin quit his job at Evans, he was in his mid-thirties, too. He was opinionated and eccentric, but he was also a strenuous provider, a helpful neighbour, and “a hell of a nice guy.” He was the kind of father who remembered his children’s birthdays when he was away; when he was home, he would take his kids fishing and snow-mobiling and help them with their math homework. As Tom Illidge, put it, “He wasn’t lazy and he wasn’t crazy.” Illidge is one of Gold Bridge’s oldest and most successful residents, one of the few who stayed put, stayed sober, and prospered there. He sympathized with Hadwin’s growing disdain for the company men who wield so much power over the forest without knowing their way around in it: “Half of those assholes have never been four feet from a parking meter in their lives,” he said.

  But while Illidge, Al Wanderer, and Hadwin’s other colleagues were able to swallow their irritation and press on, Hadwin eventually found it intolerable. Late in 1989 his mill was vandalized and this exacerbated an emerging tendency toward paranoia. Sensing that his neighbours were turning against him, he moved his family out of Gold Bridge; shortly afterward, his freelancing contracts dried up. The Hadwin family relocated to Kamloops in the high, dry ranch country of south central British Columbia. With eighty thousand people Kamloops was barely a city, but compared to Gold Bridge, it was a teeming metropolis. While it had better schools for the children and more job opportunities, it was a terrible place for Grant; as his former assistant, Suzanne Simard, put it, “Moving [him] to Kamloops would be like taking a bear and putting it in a zoo.” Out of his element, Hadwin struggled to find meaningful work, sending out letters and résumés, and advocating on behalf of friends and neighbours he thought were being ill used by the system. Unemployed except for sporadic volunteer work at a local retirement home, he had a lot of time on his hands, and he began writing letters on a wide range of issues to political figures all over Canada and the world. In a letter to a provincial supreme court judge he wrote:

  The Forest industry in british columbia, appears to be one example, of economic remote controlled TERRORISM, on this planet, with professionals leading the way, in “severe symptoms of denial, that there is any problem.”

  Later, in a widely distributed two-page memo entitled “A Few Thoughts About University Trained Professionals and Their Equivalents,” Hadwin enumerated his observations about the professional class, including the following:

  3. Professionals appear to “DENY” or ignore “The Negative,” particularly about themselves or their projects.

  4. Professionals appear to create and positively reinforce facades and perceptions until these facades and perceptions are “perceived” to be fact (media do this all the time).

  7. “NORMAL” today appears to be “professional values” rather than say “Spiritual Values” or a reverence for life.

  In 1991 Grant and Margaret separated, and she got custody of the children. In early 1993, increasingly frustrated and unable to handle the pressures he felt in Kamloops, Hadwin headed north on a rambling hegira through the Yukon and Alaska, where in early June he sought refuge on a remote island. A month later Hadwin was stopped at the United States border with three thousand hypodermic needles in the trunk of his car. He talked his way through customs and proceeded to Washington, D.C.; once there, he presented himself as an advocate of needle exchange and safe sex, distributing needles and condoms to anyone who wanted them; he also donated thousands of dollars to a local food bank and homeless shelter. In July, with two thousand needles remaining, he proceeded to Miami, where he caught a plane to Moscow; from there he continued eastward, donating needles to children’s hospitals as he went. He was arrested by the police in Irkutsk, Siberia, but apparently finessed the interview and parted on good terms. Hadwin, however, wasn’t simply on a goodwill mission, he was also looking for work; Siberia is one of the few places in the Northern Hemisphere whose forests rival British Columbia’s.

  When Hadwin returned to Kamloops, people who knew him were alarmed by what they saw. The guerrilla-theatre dress he sported on his travels (running shorts, riding crop, boots with spurs, and a baseball cap festooned with needles and condoms) raised some questions about his mental state. His apparently stress-induced paranoia had also begun to blur with reality as he found himself in situations in which people really were out to get him. That October, on the same day he was served with papers limiting his visitation rights to his children, Hadwin got into a running altercation with the driver of a semi on the Trans-Canada Highway. It degenerated into an almost comic scene with the mammoth Peterbilt tractor chasing after Hadwin in his little Honda Civic. The truck driver refused to give up and rode Hadwin’s bumper all the way back to his wife’s home, at which point both men jumped out of their vehicles and got into a violent argument. The truck driver was four inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than Hadwin; his hands were balled into fists and a fight seemed imminent. Hadwin ran up the driveway, snatched up a two-by-four, and shouted at the driver to “get the fuck out of here!” Then he clubbed him once in the head. The man collapsed, at which point Hadwin proceeded, immediately, to help him back to his feet. When the truck driver and his wife waved him away, Hadwin drove to the police station and turned himself in. It was his first-ever brush with Canadian police.

  Hadwin was sent to a forensic hospital for a month-long psychiatric evaluation where he was interviewed extensively by several doctors. Although all of them found evidence of what one psychiatrist termed “paranoid reaction,” the only diagnosis they could agree on was that he was mentally competent and fit to stand trial. He was given a prescription for a low dose of antipsychotic medication and his condition improved dramatically. It is hard to say whether it was the medication or Hadwin’s internal cycle that was responsible for the improvement because it is unknown how often he took the medication, if at all. Within a couple of months he had secured a job at a local lumber mill, working as a veneer peeler (for plywood), and he turned in a twenty-page report for a proposed logging road. Hadwin worked on the project alone, and when his boss, Pat McAfee, asked him if he had an emergency contact person in case of an accident, Hadwin replied, “If I can’t get out of the bush on my own, I don’t want to come out.”

  “He was very proud of his work,” recalled McAfee. “He was one of the best layout contractors I’ve seen.”

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nbsp; That September, just short of his forty-fifth birthday, Hadwin placed second in a fifty-kilometre cross-country “ultra-run.” When his trial date came up, he was offered a plea bargain; he pled guilty to assault and was placed on a year’s probation, during which he mananged to regain custody of his two oldest children. He took the two teenagers to visit Cathedral Grove on Vancouver Island, where they posed for pictures in front of giant cedar trees. It was during this period that Grant Clark, Hadwin’s former supervisor, had a harrowing encounter. “I saw him downtown around 1995,” Clark recalled. “The eyes looked hollow, like they were looking through you. He didn’t know who I was. It was eerie to see a guy with so much bloody talent sunk to those depths.”

  By now Hadwin had been riding a neurochemical roller coaster for at least seven years. In spite of this, he managed to honour the terms of his probation, but being kept on such a short leash put enormous strain on him. As with a lot of men who feel their freedom and purpose have been somehow denied, Hadwin began casting about for other ways to manifest his competence and make an impact. He stayed up-to-date on local and international news and became increasingly involved in environmental and Native issues, both of which are highly contentious topics in British Columbia. During an armed standoff between First Nations activists and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) that took place during the summer of 1995 at Gustafsen Lake, 150 kilometres north of Kamloops, Hadwin went so far as to travel there and offer his services as an intermediary. Not surprisingly, his offer was declined. The Gustafsen Lake standoff, during which two RCMP officers were shot in the back, was one of a number of such skirmishes occurring throughout the country at this time, and it received national news coverage. The impasse, which ended in a surrender after three weeks, made a deep impression on Hadwin, and he sent dozens of faxes and certified letters to Native groups, politicians, and the media. To CNN, he wrote: