The Golden Spruce

Haida Gwaii or the Queen Charlottes is a place of myth, awe, and superlatives where the normal laws of nature seem not to apply. Trees in the West Coast Rainforest grow to colossal proportions and ages. As Churchill is quoted as saying to cut these trees to make newsprint seems a crime but logging companies see dollar signs and Natives in areas of high unemployment see jobs.

This may be the story of a specific Golden Spruce but it is also the tale of the West Coast Forest, the logging industry it supported, and the way of life of the men who worked it, the home of the First Nations People who honoured it.

Early settlers found the primeval forests of North America a thing that had to be beat back to enable civilization to follow. Those forests were believed to be limitless. The logging industry has found their limits. Environmentalists now fight to preserve the last remnants of Old Growth Forests that remain. Just as the Japanese Whaling Industry would say, what's the point of a whale if we can't hunt it a logger finds a tree pointless if he can't fell it. Somehow they're like Canada's Symbol the Beaver who upon hearing the sound of running water is determined to dam it.

So the book goes on to document the trade between the Haida and Europeans, a history of exploitation, deception, and destruction. First in sea otter pelts and then in wood. For anyone being an environmentalist such as myself this makes depressing reading.

With regard to the specific mutant sitka spruce whose legend the book describes it is symptomatic of the forest as a whole. As to the whereabouts of Grant Hadwin, alive or dead he has become as mythical as the tree in which he has become bound.