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

by John Vaillant

  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.

  The Masset courthouse is located inland in the centre of New Masset on a side street lined with low shops. Playing fields stretch away to the northeast and beyond them lies a sprawling plywood warren of a building that houses the rec centre. Five kilometres to the northwest, along a narrow beachfront road, lies Old Masset, the Haida reserve. The courthouse itself is a postmodern ziggurat of aluminum and plate glass whose interior is defined by white linoleum and fluorescent lighting. It is one of the Crown’s most remote and modern outposts.

  To this day, one is charged not just for violating the criminal code, but for disturbing “THE PEACE OF OUR LADY THE QUEEN HER CROWN AND DIGNITY.” However, standing in front of the Masset courthouse while ravens clack like ratchets as they rifle through the garbage cans and the feeble morning light fights a losing battle with a North Pacific gale, the queen, not to mention the capital, might as well have been a million miles away. Even so, the rule of law appeared to prevail. The anticipated lynch mob was nowhere to be seen. Instead, a line of people in heavy coats and hats were queued up at the courthouse door, backs to the wind. Metal detectors aren’t a regular feature of life in Haida Gwaii, but on this day everyone was getting scanned. Inside, the hallway and waiting room would soon be packed to capacity, with the overflow spilling outside. Meanwhile, in the small courtroom, made smaller still by the dense crowd and damp, close air, the sense of anticipation was palpable. A cross section of the islands was in attendance: chiefs and elders, loggers and fishermen, housewives and shopkeepers sat in stiff rows on wooden benches waiting to lay eyes on the man many felt had attacked each of them personally.

  Because of the islands’ remoteness, there is no resident judge; instead, a provincial judge is flown in once a month to hear cases. For this reason there were, packed in among the people waiting for Hadwin, other islanders who also had hearings scheduled for that day. Normally these would be discreet, semiprivate affairs, but this morning, those accused of stealing an outboard motor, or driving drunk, found themselves under the scrutiny of nearly a quarter of Masset’s adult population. It was embarrassing and a bit surreal.

  Thomas Grant Hadwin was called at nine-thirty, and there was a collective indraft of breath as a hundred eyes swept the room. Since few islanders knew what he looked like, most people weren’t quite sure who they were looking for beyond some unfamiliar movement, the face of a stranger, or some vision of the man they carried in their head. In the end, no new face or energy field presented itself; the room remained the same, so everyone ended up looking at each other while the five syllables of his name simply hung in the air. What had begun as a haiku ended as a koan. Even after it was clear that Hadwin wasn’t in the building, no one left. Everyone waited, wondering where he might be: was he in custody, in hiding, on the run, dead—or just late? Hadwin’s name was called again at ten, and this time someone stood up in the aisle. For a brief moment some in the room thought it might be Hadwin, but it wasn’t; it was a Gitxsan man named James Sterritt who claimed that Hadwin had retained him as his agent. They had agreed to meet on his court date, Sterritt said, but he hadn’t heard from Hadwin in two weeks. When the judge asked him if he had been authorized to act on Hadwin’s behalf, Sterritt allowed that he hadn’t. It was at this moment that Hadwin became a fugitive.

  WHEN HADWIN’S ESTRANGED WIFE first heard that Grant had gone missing, she wasn’t all that concerned; he had disappeared before, and apparently he hadn’t always been truthful about where he was going. Armed, now, with another warrant for his arrest, the RCMP were taking more of an interest in this character, particularly when his wife described him as “indestructible.” The test of his well-being, claimed Margaret, who had many reasons to be skeptical, would be whether he called their daughter on her birthday. Hadwin may have been in big trouble, but he was still a father, and in his own unusual way, a loyal one. When March 1 came and went with no phone call, Hadwin’s wife began to fear the worst, and the Canadian Coast Guard began searching in earnest; meanwhile, U.S. authorities had also been put on alert.

  For some in the U.S. Coast Guard, there may have been a strange sense of déjà vu because they had searched for Hadwin once before. In the spring of 1993, while on his paranoia-induced sojourn through the north country, he took an open-ended side trip to Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago, which lies about three hundred kilometres north of Haida Gwaii; though tightly packed into the fragmented coastline, it looks like a mirror image of its Canadian counterpart. Hadwin landed in Sitka, the former capital of Russian America. Once a major fur-trading station, it remains one of the most beautifully sited communities on the coast. In addition to being the origin of the Sitka spruce tree’s name, the fort town was the site of the greatest single massacre of the fur trade era. Redoubt St. Michael, as Sitka’s predecessor was known, was built on Tlingit territory, and in 1802 warriors clad in animal-headed helmets and armour attacked the town, killing four hundred inhabitants and enslaving the rest. Only a handful of people escaped. Two years later the Russians retook
the site with the help of ship’s cannon. As out of the way as it appears now, the settlement was once known as “the Paris of the Pacific;” for the first half of the nineteenth century, it was the most important port on the West Coast.

  Shortly after he had arrived there, Hadwin rented a kayak from the chairman of Greenpeace’s Alaska chapter; he planned to go paddling for a week but ended up being away for more than two. When he failed to return on the date indicated in his float plan, an extensive search was launched involving Coast Guard vessels and aircraft, local police and state troopers, and a volunteer search-and-rescue team. The first thing they found was Hadwin’s abandoned campsite at the foot of an enormous snow-capped volcano on the south coast of Kruzof Island, which lies west of Sitka, on the outer edge of the archipelago. The camp looked as if Hadwin had simply walked away, leaving behind his tent, cooking gear, kayak paddle, spray skirt, and numerous other items. Bears were plentiful in the area so searchers immediately wondered if he had been attacked, but rescue dogs found no sign of him. Meanwhile, an aerial search discovered Hadwin’s kayak floating upside down near St. Lazaria Island, a small bird sanctuary off the south end of Kruzof. Hadwin’s backpack was strapped to the aft deck and inside it they found what they believed was a suicide note. However, on closer inspection it turned out to be something far more unusual.

  Ordinarily Coast Guard search-and-rescue reports are rigidly formulaic—dense with the highly technical shorthand of aviators, mariners, and meteorologists. At the end of these forms is a place for “Remarks,” and it was here that the officer charged with writing up the Hadwin report broke out of role for a moment and scrawled, “THIS WAS A DOOZIE.” When you turn the page, you see what he means; this is where Hadwin takes over. The appended document is entitled “THE JUDGMENT” it is fifteen pages long and impeccably typed. Considering it was written by a high school dropout who had felt compelled to leave first his country and finally his campsite because he believed he was under surveillance by the CIA, the contents are surprisingly cogent and considered. But what is more remarkable is that, unlike the writers of most manifestos, rants, screeds, and religious harangues, Hadwin begins, not by telling the reader what to think, but by asking him a series of questions, in effect, employing the Socratic method to put the reader in the Creator’s shoes.

  “I ASK YOU,” begins the introduction,

  If you had the power, to create all matter, including life, and you could synchronize, those creations, perfectly, what would you do, if one life form, was apparently abusing, all other life, including themselves?

  If the original “INTENT,” of your creation, had apparently been twisted, from “RESPECT,” to hatred, from compassion, to oppression, from generosity, to greed, and from dignity, to defilement, what would you do?

  How would you convince, people, that material temptations, social status, and education institutions, are used, to preserve and perpetuate, the status quo, with very little real, consideration, for the future, of life, on earth?

  …How would you, as “THE CREATOR OF LIFE,” show your contempt and revulsion, for the institutions, and the individuals, who are supposed to protect life, but are apparently, doing something quite different, instead?

  Hadwin then goes on to give a brief history of the world, focusing on the transition from hunter-gatherer to settled agrarian, and from there to our current dependence on global commerce. He stops along the way to offer a thoughtful analysis of how relations between the “female nurturer” and the “male hunter, killer, gatherer and provider” conspire to encourage degradation of the environment. And he takes great pains to outline our progressive disconnection from nature and its negative effects, both on human beings and on the planet. Not only is this development contrary to the Creator’s will, writes Hadwin, it is undemocratic:

  A democratic society is morally responsible, for the actions of its institutions and elected or appointed representatives, at home or away. It is the responsibility of all individuals, in democratic societies, to resist any crimes against life or suspected crimes against life. Ignorance, abuse or lack of physical presence, at the scene of the crime, are not necessarily valid excuses, unless there are severe, mitigating circumstances….

  Finally, Hadwin outlines a radical solution to what he sees as a world gone horribly wrong: dismantle society as we know it, abolish all currency and religion, and remove all men from power. Replace the status quo with small, agrarian villages run by women and restricted to pre-industrial technology. The sole purpose of these matriarchal communities would be to repair the damage wrought by the past two thousand years of male-dominated civilization. It should be noted that Hadwin’s was a hyper-masculine world in which women played very traditional, housebound roles; his wife was a quiet, dedicated homemaker who cooked from scratch and kept close watch over the children. His mother, too, was proud of her support position (even when addressing children, she would introduce Tom Hadwin as “my husband the engineer”). That Hadwin would wish to fire his own gender from all positions of authority is unusual, and his decision to forgo apocalyptic vengeance—a staple of most cosmic housecleaning scenarios—is equally radical.

  It is in this unique and strangely appealing document that Hadwin the forest-loving woodsman and Hadwin the conscientiously objecting visionary merge and integrate. Paul Harris-Jones, the timber cruiser turned forest rescuer, and Professor Simard, the forest tech turned researcher and educator, had similar awakenings, as have countless others. But the big difference between most of them and Hadwin is one of intensity and context. Hadwin wrote that he had a spiritual experience on a mountain near McBride, British Columbia, during which he was not only forgiven for his prior sins but chosen to represent the Creator of all Life and carry a message to the rest of humanity. An event such as this goes by different names depending on when and where it occurs. One or two thousand years ago it would have been called a vision or a revelation, and the person who claimed it might be ignored like a fool, revered like a god, or killed like a heretic—sometimes all of the above. In more recent times, many of those who have entered religious orders were not hired or head-hunted, but called—as by a voice, hence the term “avocation.” Nowadays someone who gets blindsided by such a sudden and mind-altering experience might call it an epiphany, an awakening, or a religious experience while a professional might call it a delusion, a hallucination, or a psychotic episode. The truth is often somewhere in the elusive middle, and yet billions of people continue to be guided in their lives by just such liminal figures, most of whom—like Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, and Brigham Young—are long and safely dead. Were they alive today, they might be languishing in a heavily medicated limbo, or, if they were lucky, they might be sent to Dr. Lukoff.

  Dr. David Lukoff is a psychologist who has taught at Harvard and UCLA and who is now at the Saybrook Institute in San Francisco; he has made a specialty of treating people with stories like Hadwin’s. In so doing, Dr. Lukoff has also coined what may prove to be a more useful term for these cataclysmic personal events: he calls them “spiritual emergencies.” During a spiritual emergency, one is often granted access to what Michael Harner, a well-known anthropologist and expert on shamanism, calls “non-ordinary reality.” While most of us find the idea of such experiences alarming, shamans actively seek them out. Wade Davis, the noted ethnobotanist, once commented to a journalist that “I never met a shaman who isn’t somewhat psychotic—that’s his job.” Like Harner and Davis, Lukoff is intimately acquainted with this neighbouring universe because he has spent time there himself; in fact, Lukoff had an experience that bore striking similarities to Hadwin’s—right down to the benign, planet-repairing utopia he envisioned and the compulsion to write down his vision and disseminate it to the world (Hadwin’s “Judgement” has been distributed on at least three continents). It took Lukoff, then in his twenties, months to regain his equilibrium and realize that his was not a central place in the universe but rather one among many. However, it was this experience, and its painful f
allout, that allowed him to hear his avocation, which was to help the latter-day Ezekiels, St. Anthonys, and Hildegard von Bingens who are swept, unprepared, into states of searing, otherworldly awareness.

  In 1985 Lukoff proposed adding a new category to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM); he wanted to call it “Mystical Experience with Psychotic Features.” One reason Lukoff and his colleagues were pushing for this addition was because recent surveys were revealing some surprising data about psychiatric patients and the people who treat them. Despite the fact that nearly three-quarters of patients surveyed indicated that they had at some time addressed religious or spiritual issues in treatment, and that two-thirds of them used religious language when discussing their experiences, fully 100 percent of surveyed clinicians indicated they had received no education or training in religious or spiritual issues during their formal internship. When Hadwin was interviewed at the forensic hospital in Kamloops, these findings were borne out; while one doctor noted that Hadwin saw himself as having a “special role” in the world, another simply determined that he had “very overvalued ideas about the environment and fighting the establishment.” This is a decidedly sinister assessment: how, one might well ask, is it possible to “overvalue” air and water? Perhaps a truer indication of mental illness (or, at least, psychospiritual disconnection) can be found in the far more common tendency to passively accept the abuse of the very systems that keep us alive. In any case, this experience might explain some of Hadwin’s hostility toward “university trained professionals.” As Lukoff wrote, “Ignorance, countertransference, and lack of skill can impede the untrained psychologist’s ethical provision of therapeutic services to clients who present with spiritual problems.”