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

by John Vaillant

  There was ample evidence to support Marsh’s thesis. With the westward push fully under way, the great oak and pine forests of the Great Lakes basin were melting away before a no-holds-barred assault of fire and steel. Within a decade, government and scientific bodies were sounding regular alarms, warning any who would listen about the dangers of timber waste, fire, and soil erosion that dogged logging and land-clearing operations the way vultures and coyotes followed the buffalo skinners. Those working closest to the land, in the nascent sciences of geology and forestry, were horrified by what they saw. “Nearly the entire territory has been logged over,” wrote one forester in 1898, describing the woods of northern Wisconsin:

  The pine has disappeared from most of the mixed forests and the greater portion of pineries proper has been cut…. Nearly half of this territory has been burned over at least once, about three million acres are without any forest cover whatever, and several million more are but partly covered by the dead and dying remnants of the former forest.

  Farther west, on the Great Plains, the buffalo population was meeting the same fate: by the 1880s, the most numerous herd species on earth—once numbering in the tens of millions—had been reduced to fewer than three hundred individuals. It was as if the New World had been invaded by legions of sorcerer’s apprentices: while they were able to summon up the world-changing energies of the steam engine, the circular saw, and the Sharps .50 caliber rifle, they failed—or simply refused—to grasp the greater implications of such superhuman capability.

  Europeans had been through this before, and though it had taken them centuries to accomplish what the North Americans were doing in decades, they had fared no better. Their own native bison had been wiped out long since (the current population of around 3,500 European bison was generated from just 5 survivors). As it turned out, many European forests were brought back the same way the bison were—by systematic breeding. Silvaculture, the science of farming trees, was born in England in the mid-seventeenth century; its principles were quickly adopted by Europe’s scientific community, and by the mid-nineteenth century tree plantations were becoming widespread throughout the continent (stands of Douglas fir have been growing in Belgium since the 1880s). Silvaculture then made the jump across the Atlantic, but while “new” forests were soon sprouting up in city parks, and even on the treeless Plains, the science wasn’t applied to the New World’s stump fields until the 1920s, and then only in tentative, experimental applications.

  In the early 1890s, while John Muir was founding the Sierra Club, “cut and run” logging communities were already turning to ghost towns in Idaho as their former residents pushed westward to the coast. By 1919, just as a group of wealthy Californians was forming the Save the Redwoods League, the first portable chain and circular saws began appearing on the cover of Scientific American. Six years later “lady conservationists” were actually tying themselves to doomed redwoods while huge machines such as the Washington Flyer were hauling trees out of the Northwest forests as fast as chokermen could cable them up.

  What the chainsaw and its mechanical attendants—the bulldozer, log skidder, and self-loading logging truck—have done is to reduce the great trees of the Northwest down to objects that a man of average size and physical condition can fall, buck, load, and transport. Today, a tree three metres across the butt can be felled in ten minutes flat, and bucked up in half an hour. Afterward it is a matter of moments for a grapple yarder—essentially a huge mobile claw on caterpillar treads—to pick up the multiton logs and load them onto a waiting truck (no need for a spar tree anymore). In theory, then, a two-hundred-ton tree that has stood, unseen, for a thousand years and withstood wind, fire, floods, and earthquakes can be brought to earth, rendered into logs, and bound for a sawmill in under an hour—by just three men. In 1930 it would have taken a dozen men a day to accomplish the same thing. In 1890 it would have taken them weeks, and in 1790 it would have been a matter of months—assuming they were even able to fell the tree.

  Meanwhile, smaller timber can be harvested by feller-bunchers—logging’s equivalent to the combine harvester. These frighteningly efficient devices can drive through a forest, cutting, limbing, and stacking trees in a single continuous motion. When first introduced in the 1960s, they worked only on open, level ground—a type of terrain that is in short supply on the Northwest Coast, but lately models capable of handling metre-thick logs on 30 percent grades have been developed. Equipped with powerful headlights, they can operate twenty-four hours a day. Safely belted in behind the joystick of such a machine, a logger can now roll through a mountain wilderness in air-conditioned, stereophonic comfort, harvesting the forest at a rate—and at a remove—that his grandparents never would have dreamed of.

  Even Bill Weber, who has only been working in the woods since the late 1970s, expressed astonishment: “I never dreamed the old growth would be finished,” he said. Much of the wood he is cutting today would have been scoffed at by his parents’ generation. “Twenty years ago, we’d have looked at the wood we’re into now and say, ‘What the hell are we doing in this shit?’”

  One of Weber’s colleagues, Earl Einarson, a fifty-four-year-old tree faller, expressed the logger’s conundrum as honestly as anyone. “I love this job,” he explained, gesturing toward the wild chaos of the old-growth forest he was in the process of levelling. “It’s a challenge to walk into a mess like this and get it looking civilized.” (This child of the atomic age would have won a sympathetic nod from any seventeenth-century settler.) Einarson paused for a moment and Weber, his supervisor, looked over his last falling cut while a big glossy raven lighted on a nearby branch that would no longer be there in another twenty-four hours. Not far away, an unknown and unnamed waterfall tumbled twenty-five metres into a shimmering pool. Einarson had seen elk pass through the day before; his partner noted an apparent decrease in deer and speculated that it was due to predation by wolves and cougars, both of which are abundant here. Einarson picked up his train of thought in air that was heavy with the perfume of cut and broken trees: “Another reason I like falling,” he said, “is I like walking around in old-growth forests. It’s kind of an oxymoron, I guess—to like something and then go out and kill it.” Like a hundred generations of forest dwellers before him, Einarson is also a hunter and a mushroom picker, and in the end he compared his work to hunting: “I’ve tried taking pictures [of animals], but it’s not quite the same because you’re not part of it.”

  In this sense, logging isn’t so different from the Marine Corps, medical school, or even storytelling: for many of us—even the couch-bound readers of books—some sort of blood sacrifice is necessary in order to validate the experience. Of course, any of our lives, closely examined, can be found to hold gross inconsistencies; slaughterhouse workers, loggers, and stockbrokers are simply less insulated from them than the rest of us who benefit from their labours. It seems that in order to succeed—or even function—in this world, a certain tolerance for moral and cognitive dissonance is necessary.

  Einarson and his team were cutting a right-of-way for a logging road that would make this remote piece of Vancouver Island accessible to heavy logging equipment. Right behind the fallers was an excavator attended by dump trucks filled with rock for road building, and less than a kilometre behind that was the world’s largest known yellow cedar tree, a massive thing more than four metres across with a trunk covered in shining, velvety moss. Yellow cedar is the longest-living northwestern tree, and this one could easily predate the fall of Rome. Environmental regulations called for it to be left standing within a tiny set-aside of towering red cedars; Weber’s and Einarson’s boss would later express his regret at not being able to take those trees too. In a matter of days, five men and their machines would transform this S-shaped strip of mountain wilderness that included trees three metres in diameter into a roadway that would be navigable by a grapple yarder, a logging truck, or, for that matter, a Buick sedan.

  By the time these words are read, the centurie
s-old cedar, hemlock, and balsam of the cutblock known as Leah Block 2 will be a distant memory, long since processed into siding, two-by-fours, perhaps even the paper that has been recycled into the pages of this book. It will have been accomplished with unprecedented efficiency, but even that comes at a price—mechanization is, by far, the leading cause of job loss. The men on this crew can see clearly something their fore-bears seemed unable, or unwilling, to envision: the end. “It could be argued that we’ve squandered the resource,” observed Bill Weber. “We don’t have eight hundred years to replace an old-growth forest. In a few years we’ll just have guts and feathers left.”

  What loggers like Weber and Einarson are seeing on their immediate horizon is a reality that their counterparts in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California are already living with. Collectively, these states have lost 90 percent of their old-growth coastal forest, while British Columbia, which originally had twice as much forest area, has lost 60 percent. West Coast loggers, who often find themselves at odds with local First Nations, have more in common with eighteenth century Nuu-chah-nulth, Tsimshian, and Haida than they might imagine: while extremely well suited to their environment and the traditional tasks required to survive in it, they are poorly equipped to do much else. Many loggers go into the woods before finishing high school, where “somewhere between a boy and a man,” as Weber puts it, “you’re making a man’s wage.” Like the Haida who rode the heady wave of the otter trade, these men found themselves in a situation that is nearly impossible to resist: here you are with a skill set that anywhere else would condemn you to a life of menial labour, and suddenly you’re prospering—pulling down fifty or a hundred grand a year in a rural area where living expenses are extremely low. But now these able men with their fantastic machines are racing to the finish line, and praying that they don’t get there before it’s time to retire.

  Just as the Haida were reduced to subsistence hunting, fishing, and potato farming after the crash of the otter population, many West Coast loggers have—in about the same period of time—seen their incomes soar to heights commensurate with a physician’s—and plummet to those of a school bus driver, or nothing at all. In this sense, Weber, Einarson, and their long-dead Native counterparts are all expendable canaries in the coal mine of resource extraction. When it’s finished, these latter-day Nor’westmen will sail away, too, while their wealthy foreign backers search for the next big thing. Out here, the otter trade of tomorrow is oil and natural gas (over the past fifteen years, Prince Rupert has lost approximately 25 percent of its population due to downturns in fishing and forestry). Today, as when the sun touches the horizon, you can almost see the industry’s hurtling descent. Even for someone used to the frenetic velocity of urban life, the speed with which this latest logging road unspools across the mountainside and into this rare and lovely corner of the country is sobering. It is like watching the accelerating effect of time-lapse photography on a blooming crocus or a rotting apple, only on a landscape-altering scale.

  WHILE THE LOGGING of old-growth forests in Alberta, Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia’s interior continues at a rapid rate, the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest represent the end of the line. With the exception of the stunted woodlands of the far north—the boreal forests of Alaska, northern Canada, and Scandinavia, and the taiga of Siberia—there is nowhere new to log in this hemisphere. Anyone looking to China for virgin territory will be sorely disappointed: “Soil and water return to their rightful places,” pleads a Chinese prayer attributed to the second millenium B.C., “green colours return to grass and trees.” Most people alive today will witness the end of old-growth—big tree—logging, an industry that has been practised continuously and with undiminished zeal in the Northern Hemisphere for at least five thousand years. By some strange quirk of fate, the largest trees the world has ever known were saved for last—for us.

  As paradoxical as it may seem, the fact that West Coast old growth won’t be seen again outside of a park for centuries—if ever—is just fine with many commercial loggers. To them, these trees are worth more dead than alive. Out here, the frontier age has not yet ended; Weyerhaeuser is not just in the wood products business, after all, they also sell real estate in the form of raw land, freshly cleared for settlement. Within the industry, this practice is known as “log it and flog it,” and it is a short-term investor’s dream: the landowner gets to liquidate his property not once but twice—first for the wood and again for the land—no need for expensive and time-consuming replanting or stewardship.

  Gordon Eason is a senior manager and head engineer at Weyerhaeuser’s (formerly MacMillan Bloedel’s) North Island Division on Vancouver Island. In addition to being a highly respected forester, he is locally famous for having found the “Carmanah Giant.” After hearing an old timber cruiser’s story of a huge Sitka spruce growing somewhere in the Carmanah Walbran forest at the south end of Vancouver Island, Eason set out to find it. Since the old cruiser’s directions were vague and the Carmanah Valley is vast, Eason flew over the area in a helicopter. Whenever he saw a treetop higher than the rest, he would ask the pilot to hover while he hung out of the door and took a measurement by dropping a logger’s tape weighted with a bolt. Most of the taller trees he measured tended to be in the seventy-five-metre range—an impressive height for any West Coast species. As it turned out, these weren’t even close. When Eason let the tape go over the Carmanah Giant, the bolt didn’t hit the forest floor until it had registered over ninety metres—more than twice the height of Vancouver’s Dominion Building which, at the time of its completion in 1910, was the tallest building in the British Empire.

  Gordon Eason has spent his entire working life in the logging industry. “I like spending time in the woods,” he explained; “that’s why I got into it.” His only complaint with his current job is that it doesn’t allow him enough time to be in the forest. In addition to having the highest density of mountain lions in North America, his territory represents one of the richest remaining reserves of big old-growth timber. By Eason’s rough estimate, based on an average annual cut of a million cubic metres, the “allowable” old growth remaining in his region will be gone in thirty-five years. However, it is important to note that all coastal old growth does not necessarily fit the stereotypical image of broad trunks and skyscraping tops. Particularly on mountainsides, old trees tend to be smaller due to shorter growing seasons and poorer soil. The most impressive trees tend to grow at lower elevation and in the best soil—valley bottoms, etc. These areas also happen to be the easiest to log and most of them already have been. Therefore, the twenty-five million cubic metres that Eason believes will be spared due to inaccessibility or environmental restrictions is likely to be some of the poorest quality—from both an aesthetic and an economic point of view. Furthermore, there is no reason to suppose that Eason’s estimated rate of cut won’t fluctuate over time, depending on the timber market and changes in harvesting policies and practices. In any case, it is almost certain that technological advances will enable cutting to proceed even more rapidly and efficiently than it already does.

  Still, some things never change: in spite of the enormous power and influence wielded by big companies such as Weyerhaeuser and Canadian Forest Products (Canfor), the timber industry continues to ride the same roller coaster of boom and bust that it always has. Wars, prosperous times, and urban catastrophes like earthquakes and fires all signal banner days for the industry, while recessions, depressions, market gluts, and international tariff disputes result in mass layoffs and mill closings. Meanwhile, old-growth forests continue to be viewed with the same combination of awe, appreciation, greed, and contempt that they were in William Bradford’s, and even Plato’s day. In the timber industry these ancient woods are known as “decadent forests” because their days of rapid growth are long past and rot is often present—two reasons the industry is in such a hurry to get rid of them. Gordon Eason summed up the prevailing attitude with the same battle cry that logge
rs—and leaders—have been using for the past five thousand years: “Get that old shit off the landscape so I can get a decent crop out there!”

  This is a more complex statement than it appears. It is intended, in context, without any particular malice; it stems, rather, from an unsentimental pragmatism. In fact, it’s no different than one of us driving past our local hardware store, as quaint as it may smell and as knowledgeable as its silver-haired proprietor may be, to get to a Wal-Mart. Most of us are led to believe we have more freedom and choice than ever before when in fact we are driven by the real, if shortsighted, demands of our wallets, sophisticated advertisers, increasingly large and powerful conglomerates, and a reactive response to the clock. In this way, tree farms and big-box stores have a lot in common: what they lack in long-term character, beauty, or “soul,” they gain in alleged efficiency and cost-effectiveness. It is a side effect of capitalism, the roots of which reach down into our collective attitudes toward nature and the life cycle.

  In the modern forest as in the modern retail outlet, the emphasis is—now more than ever—on volume and speed. The “crop” Eason is referring to isn’t hay or corn, as it would have been a century ago, but trees—planted in tidy rows, and often in stands of single species rather than the mixed forests that nature prefers. These are the real biological deserts. Today, trees are bred for speed and are harvested on tight rotations of twelve to eighty years, which is, depending on species and region, the period of the most rapid—read: short-term-investment-friendly—growth. These small, easy-to-manage farm trees tend to be of inferior quality (ask any woodworker); they are often pulpy and loose-grained, and many of them will never be milled into boards at all.