The Golden Spruce

by John Vaillant

  In addition to this version of the story about the making of the Haida’s golden boy, there are variations. One tells us that the snow came as a punishment from the creator for intratribal fighting; another attributes this freezing flood to a general lack of respect for nature, demonstrated symbolically by the boy laughing at his own feces. Another version describes the two lead characters as the sole survivors of a smallpox epidemic who wanted to live forever. Yet another take on this tale maintains that the tree would live as long as the Haida Nation, and that its death would herald the end of the tribe. “Regardless of how you state it,” observed the elder Robin Brown, “people are going to contradict you.” While people who have grown up with the written word might view these variations as inconsistencies, it is worth remembering that prior to the publication of the first English dictionaries in the seventeenth century, even spelling was a highly subjective business; each rendering of a word was the result of an individual’s personal decision in the moment. Oral traditions are not so different; each version of a story is highly dependent on a given teller’s memory, integrity, agenda, and intended audience, but it also depends on the current needs of the teller, the listeners, and the times.

  At the root of the golden spruce story, though, is a very simple message: respect your elders, or you’ll be sorry. However, beneath this surface layer of meaning, the parable could also be read as a lesson on how to survive the loss of one’s entire village to a massacre or smallpox or, for that matter, how to weather a stint in residential school: don’t look back; don’t try to return to that dead place. But everyone in a position to deny or confirm this, or any other theory, is dead. Even the grandmother who heard this story as a girl and passed it on to her granddaughter has passed on. Like the tree and the man who cut it down, the story is a puzzle or, more accurately, a piece of a puzzle, the whole of which can never be fully known.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Hecate Strait

  What’s that he said—Ahab beware of Ahab—

  there’s something there!

  —Herman Melville, MOBY-DICK

  AFTER A BRIEF STAY in Hazelton, Hadwin returned to Prince Rupert in order to prepare for his trip to court. While Cora Gray was shocked by what he had done, she remained loyal to him. “He did wrong,” she told a journalist at the time. “He feels bad about what he done. He could only see MacMillan Bloedel. He didn’t see no legend about the Haida when he did that.” Gray went so far as to try to book Hadwin a room for his upcoming stay in Haida Gwaii. According to her, everyone she spoke to there said they had no vacancies, though this is rarely the case, even in high summer. Given that Gray was calling in darkest February, it is more likely that no one wanted Hadwin under his roof. By this time Hadwin’s options were becoming stark and few: he could face the music, or he could run. His situation would be most people’s idea of a nightmare, but for Hadwin it may well have provided a kind of perfect opportunity. For the first time in his life, he had an awful lot of people’s attention and, given his convictions and his previous willingness to go on the record, there is every reason to suppose that he saw the courtroom as an excellent forum in which to air his grievances. He just had to get there in one piece. Hadwin’s solution to this problem, like his solution to MacMillan Bloedel’s timber practices, was filtered through a complex—and to most people baffling—mix of pride, personal integrity, paranoia, and absolute conviction. In this sense, he was not so different from people such as Joan of Arc or Ted Kaczinski; he even had a certain charisma, though like the Unabomber he lacked the ability to persuade and inspire. However, there were two crucial ways in which Hadwin differed from these other committed, radicalized, and egocentric individuals: first, he was neither a killer nor an advocate of killing, and second, he had unassailable credentials in the area of wilderness survival. It was this unwavering self-confidence in the face of the elements that led Hadwin to attempt something no one had before: a mid-winter crossing of Hecate Strait by kayak. There are compelling reasons why this has never been tried, and Pat Campbell, who was working the desk at the Moby Dick Inn, where Hadwin stayed, summed them up pretty well: “The water in Rupert is boiling, rough water,” she explained, “and that’s just by the dock. I’m sure [Hadwin] would have known. He would have seen the weather—what it can do. It’s vicious that water, just vicious.”

  A NUMBER OF PLACES lay claim to the title “Graveyard of the Pacific,” and the west coast of Vancouver Island is one of them, but it would be more accurate if its limits were extended to include all of coastal British Columbia. Well over a thousand vessels have gone down here during the past two hundred years, and Hecate Strait is arguably the most dangerous body of water on the coast. The strait is a malevolent weather factory; on a regular basis its unique combination of wind, tide, shoals, and shallows produces a kind of destructive synergy that has few parallels elsewhere in nature. From the northeast come katabatic winds generated by cold air rushing down from the mountains and funnelling, wind-tunnel style, through the region’s many fjords, the largest of these being Portland Inlet, which empties into the strait fifty kilometres north of Prince Rupert. Winter storms, meanwhile, are generally driven by Arctic low pressure systems born over Alaska, and they tend to manifest themselves as southerlies along the coast. It is because of these winds that the weather buoy at the south end of Hecate Strait has registered waves over thirty metres high. One of the things that makes the strait so dangerous is that these two opposing weather systems can occur simultaneously. Thus, when a southwesterly sea storm, blowing at 80 to 160 kilometres an hour collides, head-on, with a northeasterly katabatic wind blowing at similar strength, the result is a kind of atmospheric hammer-and-anvil effect. Veteran North Coast kayakers tell stories of winds like this lifting 180 kilograms of boat and paddler completely out of the water and heaving them through the air.

  But this is only one ingredient in Hecate Strait’s chaos formula. Tides are another; in this area they run to seven metres, which means that twice each day vast quantities of water are being pumped in and out of the coast’s maze of inlets, fjords, and channels. The transfer of such volumes in the open ocean is a relatively orderly process, but when it occurs within a confined area like Hecate Strait that is not only narrow but shallow, the effect is of a giant thumb being pressed over the end of an even larger garden hose. The scientific name for this is the Venturi effect, and the result is a dramatic increase in pressure and flow. A third ingredient is a frightening thing called an overfall which occurs when wind and tide are moving rapidly in opposite directions. Overfalls are steep, closely packed, unpredictable waves capable—even at a modest height of four to five metres—of rolling a fishing boat and driving it into the sea bottom. They can show up anywhere, but their effects are intensified by sandbars and shoals like the one that extends for thirty kilometres off the end of Rose Spit between Masset and Prince Rupert. Under certain conditions, overfalls take the form of “blind rollers,” which are large, nearly vertical waves that roll without breaking; not only are these waves virtually silent, but under poor light conditions they are also invisible—until you are inside them. If one then factors in the prevailing deep-sea swell that in winter surges eastward through Dixon Entrance at heights of ten to twenty metres, and the fact that a large enough wave will expose the sea floor of Hecate Strait, the result is one of the most diabolically hostile environments that wind, sea, and land are capable of conjuring up.

  Most sailors who survive storms do so because they orient themselves to the prevailing wind and waves, get into the flow, as horrendous as it may be, and ride it out. But on a bad day in Hecate Strait, you can’t get into the flow because there is no flow to be found; a seventy-knot gust or an apartment building’s worth of water can hit you from any direction. There is no rhyme or reason; all around you, the elements are at war with themselves. Because of the manic-depressive weather and the fact that this part of the coast remains as dark and featureless as it was when Pérez came through, mariners must navigate the
se waters the same way a mouse negotiates a kitchen patrolled by cats: by darting furtively from one hiding place to the next. If the conditions aren’t favourable, you simply sit tight and wait—maybe for a long time. As one local kayaker put it, “The worst thing you can do is be in a hurry to get somewhere.”

  Gordon Pincock is an expert kayaker and one of the people who pioneered the sport in Haida Gwaii. Over the course of twenty years he has paddled the length and breadth of the archipelago, including numerous trips along the extremely exposed and isolated west coast. On one occasion, he survived a day in ten-metre storm swells, during which he was nearly killed by a West Coast phenomenon called clapitos. Clapitos occurs when a large wave bounces off a cliff face and collides with the wave behind it, turning the sea into an aqueous trash compactor. It is hell on small craft: a ten-metre wave ricocheting off a wall will head back to sea as a five-metre wave, but when it butts heads with the next ten-metre wave, the two will merge into a thirteen-metre mountain of confused hydropower—over and over again. It is significant, then, that Pincock has never attempted a crossing of Hecate Strait. “Go out there alone?” he said. “In February? No way! I would never risk my life doing that, not even in the summer.”

  WITH HIS BELONGINGS LIQUIDATED and his safety in doubt, Hadwin was down to the contents of a single suitcase and a Visa card. Among the last items charged were a sea kayak, emergency flares, two paddles, and a bailing pump—standard equipment for a paddling trip on the Northwest Coast. Hadwin’s stated destination was Masset, and he was leaving in good time to make his court date. He had told people that he was travelling this way because he was afraid he would be attacked by locals if he took the ferry or a plane, and he had legitimate grounds for concern. “People were going to see that he didn’t get on the ferry,” explained Constable John Rosario, who handled the case at the Masset end. “The feeling in Masset was that there was going to be a lynching if he came back.”

  But on this matter Hadwin seemed both lucid and resolved. Shortly before he left, he telephoned the Haida leadership and announced his intentions: if they wanted to, he said, they could meet him out on the water where there would be “no uniforms [police] around.” After notifying Cora Gray, his estranged wife, Margaret, and the Daily News, Hadwin launched his kayak on the afternoon of February 11. Both Gray and his wife notified the Mounties, who dispatched an inflatable powerboat and intercepted Hadwin as he was leaving Prince Rupert Harbour. But Constable Bruce Jeffrey, one of the officers on the scene, was unable to dissuade him from going. “He wasn’t irrational,” recalled Jeffrey. “He wasn’t suicidal, but I could tell he was a few fries short of a Happy Meal. Unfortunately, you can’t arrest someone for being overconfident or foolish. If he’d said, ‘I’m not going,’ we’d have flown him over, but he was determined to go under his own steam.”

  At dusk, with his gear stowed in fore and aft compartments and an axe and a spare paddle lashed to his forward deck, Hadwin paddled out of Prince Rupert Harbour and directly into a storm. Weather reports for that night show breaking waves over three metres, winds gusting to more than fifty kilometres an hour, and rain. Keeping one’s bearings along this anonymous coast is difficult even in broad daylight, but it is impossible at night, in those conditions. It would have been so dark that even white-capped waves would have been barely visible. The temperature was just above freezing, but the windchill factor would have driven it down to minus twenty; under these circumstances, an ordinary person would be at risk for frostbite within half an hour. Hadwin was wearing only a slicker and dishwashing gloves; he was not an experienced kayaker, but even if he had been, it was unlikely that he could have survived a night in such weather. And yet, somehow, he did. Sometime around midnight, he found his way back to Prince Rupert.

  “He was waiting at the door when we opened,” recalled Marilyn Baldwin, who co-owns SeaSport, where Hadwin had bought his kayak and equipment the previous day. Baldwin remembers Hadwin seeming surprised at how cold he had gotten in the night; he told her that he had paddled for hours in heavy seas and had been unable to make any headway. He could handle the breakers, he said, but he had returned to buy some warmer clothes and (on Constable Jeffrey’s advice) a chart for Hecate Strait. When the topic of the tree came up, “he wanted to argue,” recalled Baldwin. “I think he wanted his day in court. He got very agitated. His muscles were vibrating— like something taut, ready to snap.”

  Baldwin wasn’t sure if this was because he was stressed or hypothermic, but as soon as he left, she phoned the police. However, Hadwin was acting within his rights, they said; there was nothing they could do. At dawn on the thirteenth, with five days left to make his court date, Hadwin set off again. This time, he didn’t come back.

  CLOTHES NOTWITHSTANDING, Hadwin had equipped himself well for the task at hand; his kayak was a Nimbus “Telkwa,” a high-end model made from laminated strips of Kevlar and fibreglass that is designed to carry heavy loads on long trips in rough conditions. In addition to being considerably longer than a whitewater kayak, a sea kayak such as the Telkwa has a V-bottom which enables it to track across the wind, rather than get blown sideways like a beer can or a raft. It is also equipped with a foot-operated rudder which allows a paddler to devote all his energy to driving the boat forward rather than steering. Hadwin’s kayak was eighteen feet long, and while big, heavy boats like this offer more stability in rough seas, they also present more surface area to crosswinds and waves, which will tend to grab the bow and push the boat off course. Even though a kayak’s low centre of gravity can be a great asset in bad weather, there is no getting around the fact that they are small and fragile craft; a metre-high wave, properly timed and shaped, can flip one with no trouble.

  Marilyn Baldwin, like Constable Jeffrey, felt confident that Hadwin didn’t have a death wish. Hadwin had told a journalist that he could do the trip in twenty-four hours, implying a nonstop crossing of Hecate Strait. Baldwin, however, was under the impression that he knew what he was up against in attempting such a trip, and that rather than heading due west and directly into the overfall zone off Rose Spit, he would island-hop, as the Haida once did. Such a route would have taken him in a northwesterly arc up and over to Prince of Wales Island, or perhaps even farther west to Cape Muzon at the south end of Dall Island. From there, he would still have to sprint the last sixty kilometres across Dixon Entrance, but, in taking this longer route, he stood a better chance, both of travelling in a following sea and of avoiding overfalls. Under ideal conditions, this last leg would take close to twenty-four hours on its own, but ideal conditions don’t present themselves in Dixon Entrance in the month of February, especially in total darkness.

  The following morning, February 14, a white kayak identical to Hadwin’s was sighted off Port Simpson, forty kilometres north of Prince Rupert. It was almost certainly him because no one else would have been out paddling in such conditions. The wind was out of the south that day, and gusting into the fifties; the waves rolling in from Dixon Entrance were pushing five metres. This was no kind of weather for kayaking, but Hadwin had the wind at his back and he was making excellent time—the question was, where? To a casual observer—and there were several that morning—Hadwin appeared to be bound for Alaska, but this is also the route a cautious (a relative term here) kayaker might take if he was island-hopping to Masset. Port Simpson marks the southern entrance to Portland Inlet, which traces the U.S. border. However, the forty-kilometre run from there to Cape Fox on the American side is locally notorious: in addition to being a point of collision for katabatic outflows and inbound southerlies, the tides here can reach five knots—riptide speed—which will defeat the efforts of the strongest paddler. Furthermore, when southerly winds like those blowing at Hadwin’s back hit an outgoing tide, the inlet’s mouth is churned into what local boatmen call “river chop”—steep, sloppy waves that are, essentially, aspiring overfalls. Sometimes they seem to defy the laws of physics: imagine breaking waves three metres high but only two metres apart. “We can�
��t haul in that stuff,” explained a Prince Rupert tugboat captain named Perry Boyle. Boyle’s biggest tugboat has 1,200 horsepower and weighs 100 tons; Hadwin’s kayak, in comparison, might as well have been a Popsicle stick powered by a goldfish. While there are definite advantages to being light and manoeuvrable, even in bad weather, they may well have been outweighed by the continuous exposure to wind and waves that a journey like Hadwin’s would have entailed—no matter where he was going. The moon was at half and waxing, which meant successively larger tides with each passing day, and the high winds and low barometric pressure that accompanied the storm systems now pulsing through the strait would have made the tides even higher than normal. Over the next four days the weather would deteriorate steadily.

  HADWIN HAD FORCED his way into the local consciousness barely three weeks earlier and yet he had already acquired a quasi-mythical aura; like Billy the Kid or the Scarlet Pimpernel, he seemed capable of turning up anywhere at any time. Even though there had been no sign of him—at sea, or on land—in four days, many residents of Haida Gwaii fully expected the killer of the golden spruce to appear in the Masset courthouse at nine-thirty in the morning on February 18. No one seemed too concerned about the weather that morning, despite the fact that out in the strait, gale-force winds were driving horizontal rain through a cloud ceiling you could just about reach up and touch with your hand. Once again, the islands were concealed. Had Captains Pérez, Cook, Vancouver, or Dixon been searching for land that morning, they would have sailed right on by. Hadwin may have had trouble finding the islands too, and not simply because of poor visibility; in Dixon Entrance, the seas were mounting to nine metres.