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

by John Vaillant

  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.

  In addition to calk boots, many loggers today wear Kevlar pants to mitigate chainsaw accidents, held up with the logger’s trademark red suspenders. Around their waist is a heavy leather belt with holsters and pouches containing chainsaw tools, compression bandages, a cruising axe, and falling wedges made of high-impact plastic. A wedge, usually several, is inserted into the cut on the back side of a reluctant tree; some wedges are less than three centimetres thick, but in many cases, that is all it takes to shift a tree’s equilibrium. At this point, the only things keeping the tree upright are a slender strip of holding wood, the downward pull of gravity, and the tree’s own exquisitely balanced architecture. But a gust of wind or a snapping fibre can change all that in an instant, and as the wedges are driven home, a tree’s flexibility becomes alarmingly apparent. The faller’s rapid skyward glances will follow shock waves from each blow as they roll up the trunk, exiting through the topmost branches in rhythmic shivers. To some, this might seem gratuitously provocative—like kicking a giant in the shins—and they would be right. It takes a certain kind of person to bang on something wider than his front door, heavier than his whole house, and twenty storeys tall when it’s doing a snake dance.

  Dennis Bendickson discovered early on that he wasn’t that kind of person. Bendickson is a third-generation logger from a family that pioneered on Hardwicke Island. Silver-haired and solidly built, with forearms that still look powerful, he is now a senior instructor and program director in the Forestry Department at the University of British Columbia. Like most loggers, Bendickson went into the woods young; in his late teens he began falling big old growth. He knew he didn’t have what it takes to keep at it when he asked himself, “Do I want to live to twenty-one?” “Cutting big trees, they usually need wedging to get them to go over,” Bendickson explained. “I’d wedge and wedge, and they’d pop their holding wood; they’d be like a ballerina, spinning around on the stump. And you’re down there running around like a squirrel trying to figure which way it’s going to go, and you don’t commit until the tree commits.”

  Referring to the academic joke about being “educated beyond your level of intelligence,” Bendickson said, “There are some jobs where that’s dangerous. I tried to think too much about what would happen. I’d try to work out the physics of it rather than rely on that sixth sense that good fallers seem to have.”

  This unmeasurable, nonintellectual awareness—what some call “bush sense”—is probably what keeps woodsmen like Randy, Bill Weber, and Grant Hadwin alive. Not only will a good faller have a better feel than most for how a tree will behave in a given situation, he may—like a gifted athlete—also have more “time” in the crucial moments to take in and process information and then determine the correct course of action—not by thinking, but by intuiting at a hyper-or extrasensory level (though dumb luck is a factor too). In the case of logging, the test for who has this gift, and who doesn’t, is a terminal pass-fail. As Donnie Zapp, a Vancouver Island faller with thirty-five years in, put it, “It’s not a job you want to bullshit your way into.”

  But chainsaws make it look easier than it is. Of all the technological advances that have taken place in the forest, the most radical has been this one. Chainsaws have been in development since at least 1905, when a two-man prototype was successfully tested in Eureka, California. After the logging frenzy of World War I, an amazing variety of devices was tested, but most of them, including one that used a red-hot wire to burn through trees, proved impractical in the rugged coastal forests. The chainsaw as we know it today—essentially a motor-driven bicycle chain armed with sharp teeth—didn’t become a common feature in the woods until after World War II, but by the early 1950s, the last axemen had been converted. However, these early power saws weren’t much of an improvement; in addition to being mechanically cranky, the steel and magnesium machines had seven-foot bars and could weigh 140 pounds. Tree falling fifty years ago would have been kind of like climbing mountains all day while carrying a Harley-Davidson motorcycle engine, along with its chain and rear sprocket. By around ten in the morning, a five-pound axe must have looked pretty attractive. But the power and appeal of the chainsaw is undeniable, and it was clear they were in the woods to stay. Since then they have evolved into sleek, light, and devastatingly efficient cleavers of the forest. Today, even a big chainsaw like a Stihl 066 weighs under seventeen pounds and, with with a forty-inch bar and a chain speed of a hundred kilometres an hour, it has the same searing, attention-grabbing power as an AK-47 or a Gibson “Les Paul.” Like a machine gun or an electric guitar, a chainsaw is a handheld deus ex machina: a supercharged extension of masculine will that is impossible to ignore. They are thrilling tools to use. Some B.C. fallers, not content with stock performance, have their saw engines souped up to the point that their enlarged exhaust ports need spark arresters to prevent them from starting forest fires.

  Under ideal conditions, chainsaws function like noisy butter knives: one can buck up a large tree using only the weight of the saw and the pressure of one’s trigger finger. But they will also take off a man’s limbs as fast as a tree’s. Given the right combination of opposing forces, they can behave like Ninja helicopters, and their tremendous power encourages a dangerously casual attitude toward smaller trees. A faller named Hal Beek discovered this in the worst way imaginable while working a setting on the west coast of Vancouver Island in 1998. Unlike second-growth tree plantations, which are usually monocultural groves all the same age, most old-growth forests contain trees from every stage of life; in between the giants are other aspirants of various sizes, including hundreds of saplings. As he travels from one big tree to the next, a faller will often use his saw like a slow-moving machete, swinging it back and forth in front of him—motor by the hip, blade angled toward the ground—to clear a path for himself. However, by cutting these smaller trees on a bevel rather than flat, the faller leaves a trail of “pig’s ears”—pointed stumplets—behind
him. Beek had cut a trail through a stand in order to get at a windfall cedar about two metres in diameter, and while standing atop the fallen trunk, he reached over and cut off another nearby sapling, leaving behind a pig’s ear about a metre and a half high. It was raining (as usual) and while Beek was bucking up the cedar, he slipped backward on some moss and impaled himself on this living spear; it entered through his rectum and didn’t stop until it reached his spine. At that point, his toes were just touching the ground.

  Fallers who have lost limbs to saws and shearing trees generally describe the experience as feeling like a “bump” the real pain tends to come later. But an injury such as Beek’s is different; the pain he felt was instantaneous and indescribable. Every motion, even his attempts to call for help, would have been an agony unto itself—the kind that would make most people pass out. Making matters worse was the fact that his legs were already fully extended: there was no way to free himself, and every movement risked driving the stake in further. Fallers generally work in pairs for safety reasons, and it is now customary for partners to call out to each other if they don’t hear the other one’s saw running, but Beek’s partner was of the old school and he was oblivious; he heard neither Beek’s shouts nor his emergency whistle. Beek realized that if he couldn’t save himself, and quickly, he was going to bleed to death. Somehow he found it in himself to restart his saw, manoeuvre its thirty-six inch bar behind him, and cut himself free—without amputating his feet, or collapsing back on the sapling or the saw. Then, with the metre-long stave still inside him, Beek crawled a hundred metres up an embankment, through heavy brush to a logging road. By the time the helicopter came, his friends were calling him Fudgsicle. After three months spent attached to a colostomy bag, and another three in rehab, he went back falling. This is not a unique occurrence; Beek’s bullbucker, Matt Mooney, witnessed a similar situation in the Queen Charlottes when his partner fell on a broken branch; it entered by the same path and exited through the man’s belly.

  DESPITE HIS PROPENSITY for envelope-pushing, Hadwin was injured badly in the bush only once—when the pawl on a jack he was using slipped under load, causing the handle to flip up and shatter his jaw. The alarming frequency of accidents in the woods puts Hadwin’s preference for working alone in a different light. Most responsible companies wouldn’t allow it now. Cutting down big trees in total darkness is also frowned on.

  The forest at night, in winter, is a very quiet place, and Hadwin’s saw would have sounded unbelievably loud in that peaceful setting. It roared for hours, unheard, apparently, by all but Hadwin. The bull-bucker for MacMillan Bloedel who later performed what can only be described as chainsaw forensics on the tree, noted that Hadwin knew what he was doing. He employed a Humboldt undercut and then cut a series of “cookies”—small window blocks—to allow his sixty-five-centimetre bar access to the heart of the tree. He had clearly studied his target carefully because he made his cuts and employed falling wedges in such a way that the tree would not fall with its natural lean but rather in line with the prevailing winds and toward the river. Sitka spruce is so strong that two nine-metre logs connected by only ten centimetres of heartwood can be dragged through the forest without breaking, and Hadwin took advantage of this by leaving just enough holding wood so that the golden spruce would remain standing until the next storm blew in.

  But as Hadwin was making his cuts, he was—like every logger—also carving his way into the past. Tree rings that had been hidden since Harry Tingley picnicked there with his father, since the last smallpox epidemic emptied the surrounding villages, since Captain Kendrick was riddled with grapeshot, since a time before Captain Pérez and Chief Koyah were born—all this fled by, unnoticed, in a flickering comet’s tail of sawdust. Hadwin didn’t stop cutting until about 1710, when his own ancestors were still living a near-tribal existence in the British Isles and the masts of the first Nor’westman had yet to puncture the southern horizon. Then Hadwin shut down the saw, packed up his gear, and floated it back across the Yakoun, leaving behind an audible silence and a tree so unstable that it would have shivered with every breath.

  THE NEXT DAY, Hadwin gave the saw away to an acquaintance in Old Masset and caught a plane back to Prince Rupert. While he was there, he stayed in the Moby Dick Inn, a high-rise motel three blocks from the water, and it was from here that he sent his final blast fax, copies of which were received by Greenpeace, Prince Rupert’s Daily News, the Vancouver Sun, members of the Haida Nation, and even Cora Gray. But it was clear that the message was intended for another recipient: MacMillan Bloedel. It read, in part:

  RE: The Falling of Your “Pet Plant”

  Dear Sir or Madam:

  …I didn’t enjoy butchering, this magnificent old plant, but you apparently need a message and wake-up call, that even a university trained professional, should be able to understand…. I meant no disrespect, to most of The Haida People, by my actions or to the natural environment, of Haida Gwaii. I do, however, mean this action, to be an expression, of my rage and hatred, towards university trained professionals and their extremist supporters, whose ideas, ethics, denials, part truths, attitudes, etc., appear to be responsible, for most of the abominations, towards amateur life on this planet.

  A day later, the golden spruce came crashing down.

  Locally, the reaction was overwhelming, particularly within the Haida community. “It was like a drive-by shooting in a small town,” John Broadhead, a longtime resident of the islands explained. “People were crying; they were in shock; they felt enormous guilt for not protecting the tree better.” Broadhead paused for a moment, trying to express the true impact in language someone who wasn’t Haida would understand. “It was as if someone had done a drive-by on the Little Prince,” he said at last. According to Haida legend, the golden spruce represented a good but defiant young boy who had been transformed, and because of this, some among the Haida saw the crime not as an act of vandalism, or protest, but as a kind of murder. “At a certain level it was real hurtful in the same way that New York [9/11] was,” explained a Haida elder named Diane Brown. “A piece of our community was rubbed out.”

  As soon as they received the news, the Council of the Haida Nation issued the following press release:

  The Haida people are saddened and angered by the destruction of K’iid K’iyaas, also known as the “Golden Spruce,” in the Yakoun River Valley on Haida Gwaii. The loss of K’iid K’iyaas is a deliberate violation of our cultural history. Our oral traditions about K’iid K’iyaas predate written history.

  We declare to the world that the Haida Nation takes full ownership of the remains of K’iid K’iyaas, and that it is declared off limits to everyone. The Haida will conduct a private ceremony at the site to reconcile the loss.

  The Haida expect that justice will prevail, and that the person responsible for the act of destruction will be punished. The Haida people will be watching every detail and if there is no apparent justice, the Haida will take appropriate action.

  …The Haida have long regarded K’iid K’iyaas as a sentinel of the Yakoun Valley, and now that it has been destroyed, the Haidas will escalate protectionist measures for our land.

  For several days after leaving the islands, Hadwin remained in Prince Rupert at the Moby Dick Inn, where he stood out from the usual clientele, but not for the reasons one would have suspected. “There was a big difference between him and the fishermen and divers who come in here,” recalled Pat Campbell, who worked the front desk. “He was more of an educated person, dressed sporty, neat and tidy.”

  Prince Rupert is literally the end of the line; it marks the mainland terminus of the transcontinental Yellowhead Highway, and once you are here, there is nowhere to go but out to sea, or back where you came from. The nearest town is 130 kilometres inland. Long the centre of Canada’s North Pacific fishing industry, Prince Rupert earned a reputation for speed-and cocaine-driven crews who would send tidal waves of cash washing through the bars, restaurants, and motels every time they
hit town. It rains so much here that locals often don’t bother wearing raincoats, and like most northern fishing communities, it has fallen on hard times. This is where one catches the ferries to Ketchikan and Haida Gwaii, and it was here that the Mounties caught up with Hadwin.

  But they weren’t the only people looking for him. Guujaaw, the future president of the Council of the Haida Nation, wanted a few words with him as well. Guujaaw, a singer, carver, activist, and politician, is one of the most powerful and charismatic figures in Haida Gwaii—a latter-day warrior. Descended from the legendary carver, boatbuilder, and storyteller Charles Edenshaw, he has about him the aristocratic air of a Balinese artist-priest, exuding the bone-deep confidence of one who is “to the manor born.” Guujaaw managed to track Hadwin down before any deadline-bound journalist did, and the two men spoke on the phone. “He didn’t seem crazy,” Guujaaw recalled. “He sounded normal—neither excited, nor scared, nor regretful—as if what he’d done was no more than throwing a rock through a window. I asked him why he did it, and then I told him the story of the golden spruce and he said, ‘I didn’t know that.’ He gave the impression that he probably wouldn’t have cut it down if he’d known.”

  Philosophically, the two men weren’t all that far apart; Guujaaw had been battling logging companies for twenty years, and as a result, he was sympathetic toward Hadwin’s frustration. “He could have taken out a few [logging] machines; then he would have been respected,” he said. In the end, though, Guujaaw compared Hadwin to John Lennon’s killer: “a little man with, otherwise, nothing.”