issue 11: fall 2006

Goodfellastanis
Dan Gawthrop compares two first novels about South Asian ganster life

issue 10: summer 2006

Feminist Fatales
John Moore reveals Livingston’s authorial bravado

issue 9: spring 2006

Blue Guide to the Apocalypse
John Valliant reconciles with Glavin’s global prognosis

issue 6: summer 2005

Strange Encounter
Terry Glavin brings more twists to the Golden Spruce saga

Strange Encounter

Terry Glavin brings more twists to the Golden Spruce saga

The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed
By John Vaillant
Knopf Canada, 2005
256 pages, $35

John Vaillant is a journeyman in the craft of long-form narrative journalism, a richly talented writer in the tradition of Jon Krakauer and Alex Kotlowitz. In The Golden Spruce, he marshals the full force of his talents to the task of reconstructing the facts of an infamous encounter between two exceptionally strange creatures that occurred on the banks of the Yakoun River, in the Queen Charlotte Islands, on a cold winter night in 1997.

One of those creatures was a man, a deeply disturbed woodsman and former timber cruiser by the name of Grant Hadwin. The other was a tree, a spectacular yellow-needled mutation of a Sitka spruce that Haida tradition maintains is a creature that began its life as a human child. The nocturnal event involved a chainsaw, and ultimately, neither the man nor the boy-tree survived it. Or so it might be said, anyway.

It is a complicated story, and to its mythical beginnings and uncertain conclusions, its moral ambiguities and everything in-between, Vaillant brings a novelist’s eye and a sculptor’s hand. He also comes to the story as an outsider, whose fresh perspective sheds a properly harsh light on the brute savagery at the heart of the macabre industrial underworld of old-growth logging. But as an American, he also leaves certain lingering and troubling questions associated with the painful story of Hadwin and the famous Golden Spruce of Port Clements that a Canadian writer of his intelligence might have more vigorously pursued.

But first, the facts of the story.

At the time of the incident on the Yakoun, Hadwin was a 47-year-old paranoid, delusional, and usually quite heavily medicated man known to police, as they say. He had grown up in West Vancouver and been a successful timber cruiser for Evans Forest Products in Gold Bridge, north of -Pemberton. Blessed with astonishing physical stamina, he quickly developed a reputation for an uncanny bush sense, and then suffered some sort of episode while alone on a mountain. The experience left him convinced that God had forgiven him his sins and appointed him a divine emissary to earth. He was never the same.

Unable to hold down a job in his chosen vocation, Hadwin began expressing his abiding contempt for British Columbia’s notorious forestry practices in a series of incoherent letters to politicians and judges. Then, overcome by zeal for the cause of needle-exchange programs and safe sex, he set out on a round-the-world missionary journey, often wearing an outfit of shorts, boots with spurs, a riding crop and a baseball cap decorated with condoms and hypodermic needles. He traveled to Washington, DC, and then to Moscow. He eventually got arrested in Irkutsk, Siberia.

On the night of January 20, 1997, Hadwin carried a heavy load of falling wedges, an axe, a gas can and a heavy-duty Stihl chainsaw in a sealed garbage bag to the banks of the nearly-frozen Yakoun River. He jumped in, swam across, and went to work. He cut the three-centuries-old tree, just so, leaving it for the next heavy gust of wind to do the rest.

The next day, from the Moby Dick Inn in Prince Rupert, Hadwin faxed off a letter to the forestry giant MacMillan Bloedel, with copies to Greenpeace, the Haida Nation, The Vancouver Sun and the Prince Rupert Daily News :

"I didn’t enjoy butchering, this magnificent old plant, but you apparently need a message and a wake-up call. . . ”

Hadwin described his action as an expression of "rage and hatred" against "university trained professionals and their extremist supporters." The next day was windy on the Yakoun. The tree fell. Throughout the Queen Charlotte Islands, people openly wept, and the Haida, perhaps especially, were filled with fury. The falling of the famous Golden Spruce, a botanical miracle, one of the great wonders of the arboreal world, beloved of logger and environmentalist alike, was reported around the world.

Vaillant, whose essays have appeared in National Geographic Adventure , The Atlantic and Men’s Journal, had recently moved to Vancouver, and he wrote a moving account of the event in The New Yorker. He couldn’t let the story go, and that’s how this book came about.

Vaillant properly saw that there was a grander narrative whirling around the essential core of the story, and The Golden Spruce is lyrically animated by a close study of the role industrial forestry has played in the cultural evolution of North America’s west coast, with particular care taken to expose the raw horror of logging. The narrative is punctuated by vivid and gruesome imagery, and he brings an attention to details that a Canadian writer, certainly a British Columbian, might have tended to overlook. The disemboweling, the amputations, the routine impalements, the regular loggers’ death count in the old Vancouver News-Herald, the thoughtless, craven liquidation of the planet’s biggest and oldest forests--all this is rendered new in his hands.

Still, in his brave attempt to make the case that we might want to consider Hadwin a "visionary," or at the very least properly situate Hadwin’s madness in its wider, insane context, Vaillant overlooks something rather crucial to the central narrative in play here. Comparing him variously to Billy the Kid, Joan of Arc, and even the jihadist cult leader Muhamid ibn Abd al Wahab--the 18th-century founder of Islamo-fascist Wahhabism--is all very well and good. But a glaring question that remains unexamined is whether the whole story might not have happened, or at least might have ended quite differently, if Hadwin had been dealt with, plainly and simply, as a madman.

One of the most compelling aspects of the story is that Hadwin disappeared, and has been the subject of numerous Elvis-sighting kinds of reports, ever since he was last seen heading out from Prince Rupert harbour on a blustery February morning in a kayak, apparently intending to make his court appearance on the other side of Hecate Strait, at Masset. When he’d made an attempt the previous day, Prince Rupert RCMP Constable Bruce Jeffery tried to persuade him not to be so foolhardy, but let him go. Hadwin returned that evening for warmer clothes, as it turned out. But when he set out again the next morning, and the RCMP was called, Vaillant writes: "However, Hadwin was acting within his rights, they said; there was nothing they could do."

Well, actually that’s not quite true. I called the RCMP about this point, and a very helpful Sergeant Gerry Peters, with the "E" Division criminal operations policy section, explained that under the BC Health Act, a police officer is entitled to apprehend a person who is clearly putting himself in danger. An officer’s discretion is expected in such cases, but it is nonetheless the RCMP’s national policy that Mounties should always act in the knowledge that they are expected to step in and apprehend a person who is about to jump from the roof of a tall building, say, no matter how calmly or rationally the person might explain that human beings can fly.

It is impossible to consider the act of setting out in a kayak to cross Hecate Strait on a windy day in February any less than crazy. But no such discretionary intervention was made in Hadwin’s case, and that he was "acting within his rights" is, at least in hindsight, a miserable defence. It is also a distinctly American sort of defence, and one might expect an American to be unencumbered by a desire to question it. But to be fair to Vaillant, there is no evidence that any Canadian journalist thought to question it, either.

In the end, Hadwin is almost certainly dead, but only almost certainly. His kayak was found with his gear on a remote island, but he wasn’t there.

As for the Golden Spruce, that glorious one-of-a-kind tree that was the colour of a sunrise above a green sea, it depends what one means by death. Years ago, some of its branches were retrieved, secretly, and grafted onto shoots of other, more pedestrian spruce trees, and their scions have been growing at the University of British Columbia, for years.

They’re still there.

Copyright © Terry Glavin, 2005

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