Sympathy for the devil and to hell with the holy mob

This entry was originally published in the February 2011 edition of Off Centre magazine

"Do you mind if I as a tourist question?"

Cause we've already bought a lottery ticket, a newspaper, some snacks. Mostly I want to ask a question. They don't mind.

"Where's Grant Hadwin's house?"

I already know. Just up the hill from this wee general store. We just drove by the place. The description in John Vaillant's splendid book The Golden Spruce leaves little doubt.

"...the most imposing structure in Gold Bridge," he called the house that Grant built. "...three stories tall and made enitrely of hand-hewn logs... 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 risers to treads like a waterfall."

Hard to mistake. But I want confirmation. She points. Just up the hill.

"So what do you guys think?" I ask the store girls. "About Hadwin."

"Oh. I don't think he's dead. There's no way. He was such a, you know, outdoorsman."

Not what I meant. Of course he's fucking dead.

"Yeah but what do you think about what he did?"

What he did, of course, was cut down a genetically mutated tree. A tree which also happened to be a sacred symbol and a lot else as well, including a pretty damn good tourist attraction and an even better corporate PR prop.

The reaction to this is less definitive.

"Well I don't know if he should have done what he did, but, well, Grant was Grant, and..."

Here I have to interrupt.

"Did you know him?"

'Cause it would have been rather cool to have done.

"Oh, yeah." Like, of course.

Details followed. His wife and kids were mentioned. First names. And Grant. Well, Grant was Grant.

We made it to Gold Bridge on our second attempt. The first scuttled by the inclusion of my mother in the expedition.

They hang their roads where they have to hereabouts, which mostly means they hang 'em high. To high for dear old Mom. Too straight down. Down to a damn busy river, in this case, that fills the distant bottom. And you're hanging there with way more nowhere than you'll ever have to handle disappearing in every direction. The untrod Misty Mountains cold that are the Coast Range. And a little road, gravel mostly. Permanent like a footpath through the snow. Constant rockfall cleared endlessly.

Anyway; vertigo, nausea, panic, etc. So, of course we turned around. Back too Lillooet.

My parents booked it out of the Okanagan in mid-retirement a few years ago and embraced this smaller, quieter, cheaper, boringer neck of the woods. A great place to visit.

The next time we do, we pack up Dad, who's 80 and afraid of exactly nothing. He's made a habit of doing everything a little late in life. Marriage; turning on, tuning in and dropping out; dropping back in; and, yes, mid-retirement.

So we make Gold Bridge with Dad. And, yeah, the lottery ticket was his idea. He's set enough, in a humble way, but he hasn't reached the point where he wouldn't find something to do with filthy fucking rich.

Me, I've reached this point. Standing in this wildly growing, living, dying landscape that is so vividly made alive in Vaillant's book. Standing here aware of how this ecosystem could make you, I and all our traces less than memories in less time than I've been alive. And finding myself tipping my hat to Grant-was-Grant. Who could stand here, of all places, and understand that the smart money's always on the smart money. And, yes Bob, the dogs are barking and what's done is done. Don't matter how many buffalo you can see for now.

Hadwin had been in the logging industry all his working life, a timber cruiser, a logging road engineer. He'd almost literally paved the way for much of what he later came to see as the utterly careless destruction of B.C.'s forests by logging interests. So he walked out on a successful career and devoted much of his subsequent energy to agitating for forestry conservation.. Yes, he walked back to that career briefly, but not without taking the agitation with him. And, yes, all the while he was undeniably struggling with mental illness.

All of which eventually brought him (and his chainsaw) in 1997 to what's now known as Graham Island in Haida Gwaii and to the base of the Golden Spruce which had been standing there for 300 years or so. The strangely, and by all accounts profoundly beautifully colored tree figured importantly in the mythology of the Haida people who continue to call the area home. In recent decades it had also become a popular attraction for later arrivals to the region and for tourists from all over the world. Especially after MacMillan Bloedel, who owned the tirmber rights to the area at the time, put in a footpath and a bench. Now it was an easy jaunt from tour bus to comfortable viewing of this wonder of nature located just across the river from the ammenities.

The bitter irony, of course, was that the real wonder of nature, the splendid forest comprising the rest of that particular tree farm licence, had been logged by Mac Blo with such enthusiasm that, as Vaillant puts it, "...the golden spruce was one of the few mature sitka spruce trees still standing at the north end of the Yakoun River."

Which, it seems, was too much for Hadwin. The theme-parking of this one tree, conserved in a little "set-aside" surrounded by what he saw as the devestation caused by irresponsible logging practices made him crazy. Um, crazier. 'Cause let's face it. Whatever else he was, Hadwin was clearly a bit cracked. Which is too bad. Because the 'bit cracked' bit is a cheap distraction. The same one that's made it just as easy for such wayward but devoted souls as Timothy Treadwell and Chris McCandless to be efortlessly written off by mediocre lardasses incapable of a fraction of what they accomplished.

Hadwin, in addition to cracked, was an intelligent, caring, and hard-working man who had demonstrated at considerable cost to himself, a passionate commitment to preserving, not destroying, trees, and the forests that you'll see them in. Vaillant partially reprints a newspaper article from shortly after the tree came down in which Hadwin makes the following plea regarding the Haida people he had so greviously offended.

"They should see a person who is normally very respectful of life and has done a very disrespectful thing and ask why."

"But this," Vaillant acknowledges, "was asking too much."

Yep. Of everybody. The worldwide outcry following the act was heartfelt mostly, hysterical sometimes, ridiculous in a few cases. The response from the Haida community was one of absolute bafflement, trauma, heartbreak and terrible, sometimes vengeful, rage.

What the responses, almost without exception, had in common was their unconditional condemnation of Hadwin and what he'd down. Nobody really asked why. If they did, they never got past the cheap shot. A bit cracked.

So his protest was wasted. He made no statement, he just made a fucking mess.

What did he expect? More. And I don't blame him.

I doubt he was naive enough to expect to be celebrated but he did, apparently, hope people would take a moment to speculate about his motivation.

They didn't, so now I have a question of my own. Why not?

I'll tell ya. They never do when there's a colorful enough bandwagon rolling by. When there's a shiny enough distraction. Dangerous, that. Get you into wars and stuff.

I'm trying to stay away from the obvious cliche 'cause I usually like to pay a little more for mine, but how the hell do so many people get in such an uproar about one tree when they didn't have a damn word to say about the rest of the forest? Even many who participated in and profited from, the levelling of pretty much every other tree in the area - including many Haida - managed to get their ginch in a knot over this single, albeit oddly colored, tree.

Not that everyone who bitched about Hadwin knocking over the golden spruce was silent during the wholesale destruction of so much of this province's forestry heritage. Or have lapsed back into silence now that the mass outrage over the tree that mattered has died down. Just most of them.

Here's Vaillant one more time. "Hadwin had cut down what may be the only tree on the continent capable of uniting Natives, loggers and environmentalists not to mention scientists, foresters and ordinary citizens in sorrow and outrage."

Sounds pretty unanimous.

Actually, it sounds pretty fucking ridiculous.

I'm not going to offer the opinion that Grant Hadwin did a good thing when he cut down that tree, though I'm not convinced he didn't. But to the Natives, loggers, environmentalists, scientists, foresters and ordinary citizens: you did worse. Again.

You guys are depressing.