The Golden Spruce

by John Vaillant

  By the time Grant got into it, the look, sound and feel of West Coast logging had changed forever. The soft chuff-chuff-chuff of the wood-fired boiler had been replaced by the clanking roar of the diesel engine and the era of truck logging, the kind most people see today, was in the ascendant. And yet, as sophisticated as the industry had become in terms of mechanization, it was still almost completely unaware of environmental issues; there was only sporadic replanting of logged areas, and conservation, as we know it today, was of negligible concern. On both sides of the border the forests of the Northwest were still being treated like a kind of inexhaustible golden goose. The relationship between local governments and the timber industry was generally one of self-serving collusion with the emphasis being on volume and speed; the working motto was “Get the cut out.” It was nothing to clear-cut both sides of an entire valley and simply move on to the next; in fact, it was standard procedure—decade after decade, and valley after valley. After all, there were so many, especially in British Columbia.

  By any measure, British Columbia is an absolutely enormous place; it occupies two time zones and is bigger than 164 of the world’s countries. All of California, Oregon, and Washington could fit inside it with room left over for most of New England. From end to end and side to side, the province is composed almost entirely of mountain ranges that are thickly wooded from valley bottom to tree line. Even today, it is hard country to navigate; the drive from Vancouver, in the southwest corner, to Prince Rupert, halfway up the coast, takes twenty-four hours—weather permitting. There are only two paved roads accessing its northern border, and one of them is the Alaska Highway. B.C.’s coastline—including islands and inlets—is twenty-seven thousand kilometres long, and all of it was once forested, in most cases down to the waterline.

  Like Alaska, this landscape exudes an overwhelming power to diminish all who move across it. A colony of 500-kilogram sea lions might as well be a cluster of maggots, and a human being nothing but an animated pouch of plasma for feeding mosquitoes. That something as small as a man could have any impact on such a place seems almost laughable. In a geography of this magnitude, one can imagine how it might have been possible to believe that the West Coast bonanza would never end. And the numbers bear this out; British Columbia’s timber holdings were truly awe-inspiring: in 1921, after more than sixty years of industrial logging, an estimate of the province’s remaining timber came in at 366 billion board feet—enough wood to build twenty million homes, or a boardwalk to Mars.

  GRANT, TRUE TO FORM, didn’t stay with his uncle long. After a brief apprenticeship, he headed deep into the Coast Mountains to the former mining town of Gold Bridge, four hours north of Vancouver. Hadwin already knew the area well: his family had owned a cabin on Big Gun Lake, just outside of town, since he was a child. Insulated from the outside world by a natural fortress of high, rugged mountains, Gold Bridge has always been a marginal place. The rivers there run glacier green, and the only access is via rough logging roads lined with fatal drop-offs. Several kilometres to the south lean the ruins of the Bralorne-Pioneer mine, the most lucrative gold mine in British Columbia. In its heyday it employed thousands of men who worked as much as two kilometres underground, breathing dank, recycled air that was in excess of forty-five degrees Celsius. When the mine closed in 1971, it caused the local population to plummet to fewer than one hundred souls. Today, grizzly bears, wolves, and mountain goats outnumber people.

  Before finding his calling as a commercial timber scout and layout engineer, Hadwin worked variously as a logger, prospector, heavy-equipment operator, blaster, and hard-rock driller. Between jobs, he spent a lot of time on his own, hunting and exploring the surrounding wilderness. In the evenings he seemed to oscillate between the two poles represented by his father and his uncle: the surprisingly suburban pastime of contract bridge, and rowdy nights in the local bars. One of Hadwin’s neighbours recalled him and a man named Franklin stretching their penises across a bar table in order to determine whose was longer while a Native woman named Big Edith refereed. No doubt similar contests went unrecorded in Dodge City a century earlier.

  On another occasion, a man in the Bralorne bar bet Hadwin a hundred dollars he couldn’t climb three hundred vertical metres in an hour. This is no mean feat in the Coast Range, which is composed of steep, slab-faced mountains where forty-and fifty-degree slopes covered in loose rock and snow are commonplace, but Hadwin left the bar and returned shortly with the money. When asked where his money was, the man, realizing with whom he was dealing, reneged. But Hadwin went out and timed himself anyway, just to prove that he could do it. Hadwin was a person who threw himself fully into every undertaking; his stamina and competitiveness were the stuff of local legend and he was well known for running his co-workers into the ground. “Even with his hands in his pockets, he could scamper over stuff like you wouldn’t believe,” a former assistant, who now works for the Ministry of Forests, recalled. “You needed a jet pack to keep up with him.”

  “He was in the best condition of any man I’ve ever seen,” explained Paul Bernier, a longtime colleague and close friend. “We’d run in the bush; we’d race each other. He didn’t like to lose.”

  The legendary American frontiersman Daniel Boone reportedly was able to cover sixty kilometres a day when travelling in rough country; Hadwin would have had no trouble keeping pace. The experience of travelling overland with a fit West Coast logger would leave most people breathless and struggling. Laden with a heavy chainsaw, tool belt, and cans of gas and oil, they can move through a steep mountain forest—cougar country, as it’s sometimes called—with remarkable grace and speed. Some of this is due to experience and work ethic, but there is also an element of necessity: the country is so vast that unless you move quickly, you simply won’t get anywhere. Often loggers will travel on catwalks they have made by felling trees end to end, enabling them to walk above the boulders and brush for a kilometre at a stretch. Because of the rough terrain, these elevated walkways can take you ten metres off the ground in no time, and the transition from one tree to the next is usually made by jumping or dancing across a slender splintered branch; they can be lethal in the rain. This is one of the reasons most West Coast forest workers wear calk boots, but Hadwin could take them or leave them. Even in winter he could be found cruising the tree line in jeans, a wool under-shirt, and slip-on romeos while his colleagues would be hustling to keep up with him in a heavy parka and calks.

  There is, in the life of an alpine woodsman, a heady combination of possibility and physical intensity unequalled by few other occupations. For Hadwin, the mountains around Gold Bridge offered a kind of optimum challenge, a steady diet of what another B.C. timber cruiser would describe as “the unexpected heaped atop the unforeseen.” Even by a forester’s standards, Hadwin’s work as a remote operative for the timber industry allowed him an enviable freedom; if he wanted to detour up a three-thousand-metre mountain, he could, and if it presented an appealing snowfield, he could do a kilometre-long glissade back down to the tree line. In the process, he might find a lake that had never been mapped. If he thought there might be game around, he could pack a rifle along with his compass, altimeter, and notepad. Hadwin’s confidence in the woods was complete; as a result, he felt perfectly comfortable doing things that would seem suicidal to other people. Paul Bernier was with him when they ran across a pair of grizzly bears on a rockslide above Lone Goat Creek, about fifteen kilometres south of town. Instead of watching them quietly, or heading in the opposite direction, Hadwin started clapping his hands and yelling to get their attention. He succeeded, and the bears charged. Grizzlies are surprisingly fast, and once provoked, they will descend on a target with the terrifying inevitability of a furred and clawed locomotive. Lewis and Clark described encounters with these bears in which they were forced to shoot them simply to keep from getting attacked; one animal absorbed ten musket balls before it finally collapsed. Neither Hadwin nor Bernier was armed, and they had only a matter of seconds to d
ecide what to do before the bears arrived, possibly to tear them apart. Hadwin assessed the wind direction and, with Bernier hot on his heels and the bears gaining rapidly, he dodged across a stream and feinted downwind where the short-sighted animals couldn’t find them.

  On another occasion, late in the fall, Hadwin set off into the mountains on a spontaneous hunting trip; despite an early snow, he was equipped with nothing but a jean jacket, a half-empty “forty-pounder” of vodka, and an open-sighted Mannlicher rifle. Two days later he returned with a mountain goat over his shoulders. Mountain goats are far more difficult to get close to than, say, deer or elk. To hit one with open sights (as opposed to a telescopic sight) is impressive under the most favourable circumstances, but even then a hit does not guarantee a kill. Hadwin, despite being not only half drunk but also near-sighted, was able to track, kill, and recover the ninety-kilogram animal alone, in winter conditions.

  In addition to consuming prodigious quantities of chewing tobacco (half a tin at a time, sometimes soaked in rum), Hadwin was known for buying whiskey by the case and going on spectacular binges that, even in freezing weather, would leave him unconscious in the back of his vintage Studebaker pickup, or passed out in a snow-filled ditch, dressed only in slacks and shirtsleeves. There was a local joke: “Look, that snowbank is moving. Must be Grant.” In the morning he would lurch to his feet, shake himself off, and stagger home. It is unclear why he survived (alcohol doesn’t actually help a person stay warm, it merely dilates the surface blood vessels so you don’t feel the chill as keenly). Early photographs show a slender, fine-boned man slightly less than six feet tall with high cheekbones and a lantern jaw; thick brown hair is parted to the side above penetrating blue eyes. Later in life he would still bear the deeply etched musculature of a man who was built for speed and distance, like a cross-country runner, or an Old World messenger.

  Some who knew Hadwin during his Gold Bridge days likened his lean, sharp-eyed appearance and remote manner to James Dean’s and Clint Eastwood’s. There were women who admired him, usually from afar. Quiet and courteous though Hadwin generally was, he possessed an almost tangible intensity, a piercing, in-your-face conviction that some found alarming. “He always had to be the best, had to be first,” his Aunt Barbara recalled. “It always had to be Grant’s way. There was never any room for compromise.”

  And yet, compromise—of an ugly, elemental kind—lies at the root of the timber business, particularly if you are a person like Hadwin, who thrives on nature in her rawest form. The forests he and his colleagues saw in British Columbia during the 1960s and 1970s were the same ones Alexander Mackenzie encountered nearly two hundred years earlier. They were dark, dense, apparently endless, and filled with frightening creatures; because most of the B.C. coast is inaccessible by road, it remains among the wildest regions in North America. With the exception of the occasional hunter or prospector, surveyors and timber cruisers were often the first Europeans ever to set foot in these daunting forests. Most of those who came later were only passing through because, despite its abundance of raw materials, there are very few ways to make a stable living in a place like Gold Bridge; successful mines are a rarity and most loggers were brought in from outside. But Hadwin found a way to do it: as Paul Bernier put it, he “was the de facto divisional engineer in charge of cutblock layout and design” for a vast swath of the surrounding forest. His employer was Evans Wood Products, a midsized lumber company based in Lillooet, a hundred kilometres away. They gave him a title—Layout Superintendent—and a company truck. It was a plum of a job and one of a very few contemporary occupations that could suit a person as ferociously independent as Hadwin.

  He also managed to find a woman who would put up with him. In 1978 Hadwin married a fundementalist Christian nurse from Lillooet named Margaret, and she changed his life. He quit drinking and chewing tobacco overnight, an achievement that, given his slavish addiction to both drugs, represents an incredible feat of willpower. But what is more amazing is that he never went back. Margaret was private, retiring, and territorial; she and Grant had three children, and she was a devoted mother. The next decade would be the happiest, most stable time Hadwin had ever known. In order to house his new family, he built the most imposing structure in Gold Bridge. It was three storeys tall and made entirely of hand-hewn logs; Hadwin constructed it himself from materials that had been cut, milled, and gathered locally by him or under his direction. The capstone on the oversized river rock chimney is a mattress-shaped slab of granite weighing more than four tons; the front steps, too, are a thing of massive beauty: chiselled from a single log set on an angle, the grain flows from riser to tread like a waterfall.

  By the time he was 32, Grant Hadwin was settled with a wife and children in a beautiful home, doing work he loved on a landscape he knew intimately. Not only had he righted himself, he had managed to construct what appeared to be an enviably full and well-rounded life.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The People

  The island was nothing but saltwater, they say. Raven flew around. He looked for a place to land in the water. By and by, he flew to a reef…to sit on it. But the great mass of supernatural beings had their necks resting on one another, like sea cucumbers. The weak supernatural beings floated out from it sleeping, every which way, this way and that way. It was both light and dark, they say.

  —from “Raven Who Kept Walking,” a Haida creation story

  SEVEN HUNDRED KILOMETRES northwest of Gold Bridge, the Haida village of Old Masset hugs the beach on the eastern shore of Masset Sound at the upper end of Graham Island. The sound is a broad channel that winds through dense forest and swampland, and in the course of cutting the island almost in half, it links the Yakoun River to the sea. Big, determined tides push and pull along its serpentine length, and are felt as far upstream as the golden spruce, more than fifty kilometres to the south. Just past Old Masset’s graveyard, this brackish two-way river makes a final dogleg turn around a spit of sand before emptying into the broad gap between Graham and Prince of Wales Islands, a nasty stretch of water called Dixon Entrance. Fully exposed to the Pacific, it is one of several gateways for the sudden tempests that plague Hecate Strait. Even on the calmest days, the sea rolls by in long hillocks, the lumbering, whale-backed memories of storms that once wracked Hokkaido, Kamchatka, or the Aleutians.

  Along the beachfront at Old Masset, monumental poles—the elaborately carved spines of trees—stand vigil. Many have been raised to honour the dead, but at the north end of the village, in front of a prominent chief’s house, there is one with a different purpose. The chief himself is a master carver, and his house is an imposing structure of broad cedar planks and heavy bevelled beams. It stands apart from the other village houses, which have been built in orderly rows, closely following the contours of the shore. Most of the houses and all of the poles are oriented toward Masset Sound, but this pole and the ferocious creatures that compose it are angled away, toward the open sea. The pole is around twelve metres tall and more than a metre through at the base. Its lower section is carved in the shape of an enormous grizzly bear, and cradled in its forepaws is a dugout canoe. To get an idea of the weather that blows through here on a regular basis, one need only look inside this canoe; though it is three metres off the ground, it must be emptied periodically of windborne sand and seaweed. There are other animals higher up on the pole, and there is an eagle on the top—an indicator of the chief’s lineage—but it is the bear and its carefully held canoe that grab the eye and hold it. There is something strangely familiar about them, but it takes a moment to realize what it is.

  On the opposite side of the continent, in another small fishing town, there is a statue of a human being named Mary who can be seen holding a boat of her own. What is difficult to determine with certainty about either the spirit bear in Old Masset or the spirit woman in Gloucester, Massachusetts, is whether they are truly protecting these vessels, or simply preparing to offer them up. In any case, generations of Gloucester fi
shermen and their families have knelt before Our Lady of Good Voyage and prayed for the safe passage of their ships, their loved ones, and themselves. And on a soft spring afternoon in 2003, in the parallel universe of Old Masset, a similar ritual is taking place at the foot of the chief’s pole. If you had been there that day, and happened to close your eyes, relying solely on your remaining senses, time would have slipped out from under you. You would have found yourself grasping at centuries.

  In a pit nearby, a driftwood fire is burning, and a cedar plank arrayed with slabs of carefully seasoned salmon and halibut has been laid upon the flames. But none of the people who stand and sing around the fire has any intention of eating this rough feast; these delicacies are not for them. The smoke moves from quarter to quarter in the testy wind like a broken compass needle as the fish incinerates, its essence corkscrewing into the cloud-streaked sky on its way to feed Skilay. Skilay was the spokesman for the golden spruce, and now he is dead. Today the people have gathered by the hundreds to fill the dark hole he has left behind.

  IN 1859, WILLIAM DOWNIE, a successful American gold prospector, travelled to British Columbia, where he worked both as a prospector and as an explorer for the British colonial governor. In the course of his travels Downie visited the Queen Charlottes, where some large gold strikes, including a single six-hundred-gram nugget, had been found. In his report to the governor, Downie wrote that he had found the Haida were “first-class prospectors, and know all about gold mining.” But he was even more impressed with their seamanship: “They are the best boatmen I have ever met, and in saying this I refer to both sexes. They have, indeed, an amphibious-like nature, for they seem to be as much at home in the water as they are ashore, and for feats of diving and swimming their equals are not easily found.”