Rugged Individual

Author John Vaillant. Photo Dan Deitch. Courtesy Knopf Canada.

Book Review:

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

For a country with more wilderness than citizens, Canada has a strange dearth of real-life adventure books in its national repertoire. Sure, there are Farley Mowat’s Arctic dreams, the late Pierre Berton’s yarns about swashbuckling railroad magnates, as well as the more recent addition of James Raffan’s Deep Waters: Courage, Character and the Lake Timiskaming Canoeing Tragedy, a truly gripping story of misadventure on a Northern Quebec canoe trip. But there are no contemporary Canadian authors who have hit paydirt writing the sort of whopping true tales that have made American writers like Jon Krakauer and Sebastian Junger into mini-industries unto themselves.

Krakauer, for anyone who’s been holed up in the concrete forest for the past decade, is the wildly successful author best known for Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, the former about a college kid who bushwhacks into the Alaskan woods and dies of starvation, the latter a first-hand account of the disastrous 1996 climbing season on Mount Everest. Junger is the creator of The Perfect Storm, a book that has needed no introduction since it was parlayed into a blockbuster movie (starring George Clooney and Marky Mark) and an education foundation for the underprivileged children of Massachusetts fishermen. These books have spawned a veritable subculture of danger junkies — armchair explorers, mainly — who thrill to the details of gathering storms and the intimate particulars of what it feels like to die of hypothermia. They make utterly compelling reading, a sort of modern literary equivalent of 19th-century dispatches from Africa.

Courtesy Knopf Canada.

It seems appropriate, then, that Vancouver journalist John Vaillant first turned to the well-trod American market when he decided to write about the extraordinary exploits of Grant Hadwin, a B.C. logger-turned-activist who, in a misguided act of protest, cut down a legendary 300-year-old golden spruce on the remote Queen Charlotte Islands and then disappeared before the trial. I remember reading a New Yorker article Vaillant published in the fall of 2002 chronicling Hadwin’s bizarre act, which shocked the Haida people — for whom the enormous spruce with the rare golden needles was sacred — and the rest of the province. I was both captivated by the piece and embarrassed that I was hearing about this ancient tree and its butchery for the first time in a magazine out of, gasp, New York.

Luckily for all of us, Vaillant has expanded that article into a full-length work, one that’s getting simultaneous release in the U.S and Canada and has what looks like a motivated marketing campaign behind it. In fact, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed might even be claimed as Canada’s first great new adventure book.

What makes the book so brilliant and unusual is that it’s not a typical adventure story at all. Out of what is essentially the tale of a man and a tree, Vaillant manages to create enormous narrative tension. In the discursive style popularized by Krakauer and Junger, he builds the suspense with digressions into Haida mythology, the unexpectedly fascinating history of logging in B.C. and the science behind the unique yellowing of the golden spruce’s needles. This technique could easily falter in less sure hands, but Vaillant employs facts so precisely and with such attention to their role in constructing the narrative that it only makes the story more astonishing and the reader’s connection to it that much deeper.

Causing more than a ripple: logger-turned-activist Grant Hadwin. Photo The Prince Rupert Daily News. Courtesy Knopf Canada.

Hadwin’s life is the skeleton onto which all of this is hung. Vaillant follows him from his middle-class childhood in West Vancouver to the B.C. bush where he earned his keep as a timber scout and road layout engineer. Smart, eccentric and very good at his job, Hadwin also had a chip on his shoulder the size of Kamloops about anyone he considered a “university-educated professional,” a species he blithely blamed for most of the ills of the world. Over time, Hadwin began to question professionals in his own industry who, he believed, were orchestrating the gutting of the forests without any thought to the future. In the late 1980s, he began to lose his grip, becoming increasingly paranoid and volatile. In 1993, two years after he and his wife separated, Hadwin took off on a world tour, his bags stuffed with several thousand hypodermic needles that he intended to give out for free, presenting himself as a proselytizer for safe sex and clean needle exchanges. Sporting short shorts, a riding crop, boots with spurs and a baseball cap covered with needles and condoms, he attracted attention — not all of it positive — in Washington, D.C., Miami and Moscow. A few months after his return, Hadwin got into a fight with a truck driver, conking the man over the head with a two-by-four and finding himself checked into a forensic hospital for a month-long psychiatric evaluation.

All of this makes Hadwin sound a few needles short of a bough, but despite the book’s subtitle, A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed, Vaillant plays down his protagonist’s insanity. He even suggests that Hadwin’s breakdown was more of a “spiritual emergency” — a loosely defined term that suggests something between a religious experience and a psychotic episode — triggered, perhaps, by the contradictions of his passion for wilderness and his work helping to destroy it.

The theory is plausible, and Vaillant is convincing when he argues that Hadwin acted with a sort of twisted rationality. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the author was loath to write Hadwin off as simply mad, because it would diminish the intensity of response to the man’s most outrageous undertaking; for Hadwin’s next act was a doozy. On January 20, 1997, after packing his chainsaw, gas, oil and other equipment in inflated garbage bags, Hadwin swam across the icy Yakoun River and sliced into the 300-year-old, 50-metre-tall golden spruce — “an arboreal unicorn,” according to Vaillant — leaving the tree with just enough holding wood to keep it upright until the first storm blew. In a fax he sent to Greenpeace, newspapers and members of the Haida Nation, Hadwin called his barbarous act a “wake-up call.”

The stump of the sacred golden spruce tree destroyed by Grant Hadwin in the Queen Charlotte Islands. Photo John Vaillant. Courtesy Knopf Canada.

Later, he would justify it by saying that “we tend to focus on the individual trees like the Golden Spruce while the rest of the forests are being slaughtered,” explaining that by cutting it down, he hoped to galvanize people’s rage about the hypocrisy of this thinking. Instead, Hadwin ended up uniting native activists, environmentalists, loggers, forestry officials, government and the citizenry of the town of Port Clements — whose economy relied in part on visitors to the tree — in anger and outrage.

The Haida people, whose mythology portrays the golden spruce as the incarnation of a young boy who failed to listen to his elders, mourned its fall like a death in the family. In fact, in the weeks and months after his arrest and release on bail, Hadwin expressed a very real fear that someone from the Queen Charlotte Islands was going to off him before he got the chance to stand trial. Whether or not he was killed, drowned while kayaking across the treacherous Hecate Strait to his trial or — much less likely but nonetheless widely believed — fled civilization to live as a fugitive in the bush is the final mystery of The Golden Spruce and Grant Hadwin’s life.

A dead man who might not be dead, an adventure story that isn’t your average adventure set in a series of islands that Vaillant calls “a threshold between worlds,” The Golden Spruce is a portrait of liminality, an exploration of the adventure that happens in the in-between. In fact, it seems about right that it should be our homegrown answer to the blockbuster danger book: it’s a true Canuck tale, man versus nature, but not too flashy, and hard to define in traditional terms.

More than anything, though, The Golden Spruce is a page-turning read and a reminder to those of us who’ve gobbled up thrillers about shipwrecks and rock climbers and who’ve prayed at the altar of Fear Factor and extreme sports, that some of the best adventures are more quiet altogether.

Into the Blue, Andrea Curtis's book about a Georgian Bay shipwreck, was published in paperback last year. She lives in Toronto.