The Man, the Tree, the Tribe & the Loggers
Meet the man behind the story of the one-in-a-billion tree
BY Bill Reynolds
Illustration: Falling, by Hazel Wilson, Courtesy Marion Scott Gallery
Earl Einarson, a 54-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.… “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.”
—from The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed by John Vaillant
We’re sitting in the backyard of John Vaillant’s place, located in the Kitsilano area of Vancouver. It’s a gorgeous day in late August and the flowers and fruit trees are lovely and lush. All is perfect, really, except for one thing—a guy in the opposite yard has been trying to start his car’s engine for two days. It’s beginning to annoy the normally sanguine writer. Over and over it turns. Rest. Over and over it turns. Rest. It never fires up. Meanwhile, the children of the American-born, Vancouver-based author, Roan and Isla, take turns bouncing around the deck in a good-natured way, creating more distractions for Dad. Eventually Nora, their mom, coaxes them away.
Vaillant is a little frustrated. His first book, The Golden Spruce (Knopf), was issued in May to generally positive reviews. The book tour went well and, three months later, interview requests are still trickling in. His editors, Louise Dennys at Knopf in Toronto and Starling Lawrence at W.W. Norton in New York, believe he delivered the goods—but the sales engine is sputtering. “I assume they would love to have me do something else,” he says, “but this will probably affect future advances—and that sucks a lot.”
But Vaillant hasn’t given up. In fact, it’s more like he can’t let go, even though the story has been with him four years and counting. He became entranced by the golden spruce while on assignment for Outside magazine in 2001. Along with seven others, he embarked on a punishing kayaking adventure around the southern tip of the Queen Charlotte Islands, off the coast of northern British Columbia. This is where he heard for the first time the heartbreaking tragedy of the fallen mystical tree. His book greatly expands an earlier version of the tale, a feature published in the New Yorker magazine in November 2002. In the original, Vaillant (whose name is pronounced Val-i-ant, as in brave and steadfast, or the old Detroit car), tells the tale of a rogue surveyor named Grant Hadwin, the man who cut down the Sitka spruce. With its golden needles, it wasn’t an everyday Sitka spruce that Hadwin dispatched. It stood out like a beacon in a sea of green, or at least what remains of the old-growth forest in the northern part of the Queen Charlottes. The Haida peoples, as well as nature lovers and loggers, were in awe of this genetic oddity’s shimmering qualities.
Hadwin, a gifted logger for many years, considered his act a protest against what he came to decide were unsustainable clear-cutting practices, which were then under the stewardship of forestry giant MacMillan Bloedel. Vaillant makes it clear, though, that the story of the golden spruce is about more than one logging company maximizing profit or one unhinged worker making a statement—it’s about humanity’s tragic relationship with the forest.
The narrative line of Vaillant’s story is relatively simple: A man chops down a tree illegally, which upsets a great number of people; he turns himself in, but then disappears before trial (and is never to be seen again). Specifically, the man, Hadwin, swims across a just-above-freezing Yakoun River in the middle of a January 1997 night, with a chainsaw attached to his belt. Once across, he fires it up and makes strategic cuts to the base of the golden spruce. The tree, measuring about six metres in diameter, doesn’t fall immediately. Instead, as Hadwin correctly anticipated, it succumbs a couple of days later, when the next major wind gusts blow through.
The golden spruce was 50 metres tall. Its height wasn’t unusual for old growth, but its colour was astonishing. The tree couldn’t produce enough chlorophyll to survive, yet had remained healthy and resilient through three centuries. The Haida called it K’iid K’iyass, or Old Tree. According to the band, the tree was originally a boy who was transformed after defying his elder and served as both a signpost and a warning. It may have been sacred to the Haida, but it had also become a tourist attraction. MacBlo allowed it to stand even as most of the old growth around it was harvested. Almost universally, the golden spruce was deemed to have a transcendent aura and its demise was shocking to the various communities that coveted its many properties—tourist attraction, archetypal myth, environmental wonder and, to Hadwin, MacBlo’s little pet. “The tree was so weird,” says Vaillant, “and people love reading about implausible things.”
Hadwin was an expert woodsman and the son of a senior engineer from BC Hydro. For many years, he plotted logging routes through BC mountain ranges in advance of clear-cuts. At some point, he came to the conclusion that what he was doing—what the forestry companies were doing—was shortsighted. For a while, he attempted to convince his superiors to try a more selective approach to logging. His suggestions went nowhere. Then, in the early 1990s, while deep in the woods, he underwent an epiphany. The vision left him emboldened with a devastating critique of forestry, but also an unhinged need to blame “university trained professionals.” Vaillant’s curiosity was piqued—he empathized with Hadwin to a degree, as his own father, being a professor of psychiatry at Harvard, is also a university trained professional—but it was a major challenge to write about his subject’s mental illness without entirely discrediting his analysis of modern forestry. Vaillant says, “His perceptions were accurate and sane, but the details and the ways in which he expressed them were extreme and over the top.”
Hadwin’s tortured background and uneasy relationship to his profession are prominent elements of the story. But there are others. Hadwin, for example, apparently had not considered the Haida’s perspective on the golden spruce before committing his eco-terrorist act. And this mythological reality, so much a part of the Haida’s life force today, also had to be balanced against the tribe’s warrior past—they were as ruthless in their own domineering way as any captain sent by the English crown with a mandate to return with riches. The tree itself, and the botany required to produce such a gorgeous freak of nature, had to be shown in the context of the history of logging in BC and indeed the rest of the world. The same lamentable acts of resource extraction, which have been rehearsed over and over since humans began farming, accelerated with technological revolution and the discovery of the New World.
The original magazine piece, which ran under 6,000 words, concentrated on Hadwin. It was tightly constructed and barely flicked at Vaillant’s other themes. He says he sold the book based on the idea of its having a multiple platform. The proposal was ambitious and it worried him whether or not he could pull it off. On top of fretting over length and depth, the main character—the glue for the story—turns out to be this amorphous thing, the forest itself. Vaillant’s editor, Lawrence, encouraged him to put the reader in awe of the forest first and then grow the tree. Vaillant dug back to his love of children’s stories for inspiration and Holling Clancy Holling’s Tree in the Trail came to mind as a model. The book describes the history of the Great Plains and the Santa Fe Trail from the point of view of a cottonwood tree. When the seed sprouts, the Indians live there. When the conquistadors arrive, a steel point from one of their spears is imbedded in the trunk. Later on, settlers in their wagons use the tree as a marker to find the trail. “That was the supreme challenge,” Vaillant says, “to find the drama in this static place. It was like listening to be-bop jazz for the first time and just hearing a barrage of notes. There was genius in there, but I had to discover what it was.”
Vaillant likened his struggle to find the story in the trees to looking at the entire eco-system of what produced the story, rather than simply expanding the narrative of Hadwin’s premeditated act. “Not something so linear,” he says, “but as this four-dimensional hole that dealt with how Hadwin was an organic outgrowth of what was happening on the West Coast. Not just with his family, but also with the industry and the way the Coast was and is perceived. And the tree is this strange, natural outgrowth of that system on Queen Charlotte Islands.”
Vaillant got his start relatively late in journalism. Now 43, he’s been a magazine writer for eight years and has written about 20 articles, most notably for the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly and Outside. In the late 1990s, he got his break working at Sports Afield, an outdoor magazine that had been in existence since the 1880s. “The editor was trying to turn it into a working man’s Outside,” he says. “I got to write about whatever I wanted to write about and that’s how I cut my teeth.”
It never occurred to Vaillant that his stories—a cruise ship that goes down in a hurricane; guys who spend an unhealthy amount of time building mutant machines for pumpkins chucking competitions; an extreme hunter whose uncommon ability to kill animals would have once made him a tribe leader, but is now simply a lawbreaker—might have a common theme until someone asked him directly what he liked to write about. “That collision between human beings and their environment,” he answered. “Most of my stories are about people interacting with nature in these ingenious but far-out ways. There is often hubris at the end of it.”
This unusual take on how the world works began forming immediately after Vaillant graduated with a degree in English from Oberlin College, near Cleveland, Ohio. While most of his classmates coveted internships at New York magazines, he headed in the opposite direction—fleeing continental America entirely, he hitchhiked to Alaska’s Bristol Bay. He says he felt the need to engage himself in the physical world and the North offered that and not much else. “To me, the idea of having to put on a necktie and sit in some cubicle just sounded like premature suicide.”
Alaska was a harsh place, one where a degree in English was a hindrance. “I was 22 and I didn’t know how to do anything that was important to people there,” he says. “It was a great place to learn about the mechanical, physical world and it certainly influenced my writing.”
Vaillant worked on salmon boats for a few years. He managed to go south occasionally to visit his girlfriend, as the work was seasonal, but mostly he worked in a harsh world. “I shared a 10 by 14 foot cabin with two guys for months. All our tools were in there, our dynamite was in there, a dog was in there, food. Not a tree in sight for 50 or 60 miles. The wind blows hard and everything’s frozen. It was intense.”
If anything, Vaillant’s formative experiences on the fishing boats made him begin to feel more comfortable in his own skin and more confident moving through the world. He began to feel like he could handle himself in a variety of situations—whether it was the leg of a ship’s journey (which he undertook for a feature), or keeping pace with loggers deep in the forest.
At a certain point during the research for The Golden Spruce, this kind of experience paid dividends. Vaillant decided he had to see for himself how loggers felled old growth. To buttress the storytelling, he felt he had to report what was actually going on out there, not what the he thought was going on there. It was dangerous in the forest—at the time of this writing, 42 BC loggers have been killed in 2005—but he was more in awe than anything. “You’re walking along fallen trees, but they’re 30 feet off the ground,” he says, “with boulders and scree and broken branches down below you. And the loggers aren’t slowing down. One said a couple of times, ‘Wow, you seem to move pretty comfortably in here.’ It’s a rarefied, weird little domain.”
At a certain point in the process of just hanging out and “being a barnacle,” a eureka moment occurred. Vaillant started to understand where the golden spruce had led him. The real story came into focus while he was listening to Earl Einarson explain the brute fact of his trade—that you kill the thing you love. “To be standing there,” says Vaillant, “the sawdust perfume in our nostrils and these huge carcasses lying all over the place and the saw rumbling away—that’s the pivotal moment in the book. That’s the point of the book.”
And here are the brute facts that Vaillant timed with his watch while in the forest: in 10 minutes flat, one man can bring down a tree that is 500 years old, 200 feet tall and 10 feet in diameter. An old-growth tree, which he thought was about the size of Boeing 747 airliner, is the largest living thing that can be brought down. And the sound of one old-growth tree falling hits the same decibel level as a plane crash. Once Vaillant sat down to organize his research, it became clear what was at stake—nothing less than the world as we know it.
But this appraisal of the forestry industry isn’t quite so simple. Yes, the Europeans arrived and ruthlessly exploited the natural riches of the continent, but Vaillant also includes numerous passages about the history of the Haida to show that the Europeans had no exclusivity on greed. In their heyday, the Haida were fiercely warlike. Nothing but woe came to other tribes along the Coast that crossed them—they were not to be trifled with. In a run-up competition to the frenzied harvesting of old growth, the Haida directly competed with English traders in a cutthroat race to the bottom to harvest the otter to near-extinction by the 1850s. The overall theme—that there might be a fundamental flaw in the hardwiring of human beings—is already crying out at this early point: “Once the market for skins had been created, [the Natives] really had no choice but to participate.… Once aboard a juggernaut like this, it appears suicidal to jump off—even if staying on is sure to destroy you in the end.”
Vaillant’s investigation into the logging business doesn’t omit laying blame at the feet of its end users. Eventually, readers become all too aware how far they are from the reality of the forest and how little they understand the depth of its commercialization. The outpouring of collective grief from the various stakeholders over the loss of the one and only golden spruce reinforces Hadwin’s bone of contention about what he derided as the logging company’s pet: “People fail to see the forest for the tree.”
Now it’s a sunday morning in december and vaillant is on the telephone. Not much has changed in his home life—Roan and Isla are still vying for his attention—but something has changed in his professional life, which is the reason for the call. He’s won the Governor General’s award for nonfiction book of the year. Vaillant says it was “quite a buzz” to be feted in Montreal and Ottawa—not to mention picking up $15,000 of taxpayers’ goodwill.
On the West Coast, the engine finally starts, and he says sales of his hard covers have been “brisk.” Why not? As Vaillant pointed out during his speech in Montreal, it’s the first story by a BC writer about BC to win a GG since Emily Carr’s Klee Wyck took the prize 64 years ago. Even Vaillant’s neighbours have changed. One told him, “Well, now that you’ve won that award I’ll read your book.” Funny anecdote and it rings so true. Vaillant says it’s silly, but the shiny gold stickers that are now stuck to his books—and the win they represent—aren’t dissimilar to teachers in Grade 4 handing out gold stars for work well done. “It’s a bit of a stretch,” he says half-jokingly, “but people like shiny objects, whether it’s the gold star on the cover of The Golden Spruce, or the golden spruce itself. They want to be a part of it.”
Even Hollywood seems to want a little part of the radiance. Well, maybe not so little. Vaillant has flown to Los Angeles a couple of times since the summer, hoping the option that’s been picked up on his book will get the green light. And the writer himself can’t seem to let go either. “I’m not tired of the story at all,” he tells me, even though he’s starting to push a half-decade working on it. As if to prove the point, he’s just filed a newspaper feature for the Vancouver Sun about a one-woman show at a Gastown gallery that features 15 of Haida artist Hazel Wilson’s ceremonial robes—all based on the tragedy of K’iid K’iyass, the golden spruce. Of course, there is trepidation involved in not letting go, because Vaillant is uncertain he’ll ever find another golden spruce. “I despair of ever finding another story that combines the industrial with the mythological,” he says. “Reality is a composite and they really should go together.”
