The Golden Spruce is the story of Grant Hadwin, the man who cut down the ultra-rare Spruce tree on Haida Gwaii in February of 1997.
I’ve never read The Golden Spruce, but a couple recent suggestions changed my mind and I finally read it this year.
With all the build-up, The Golden Spruce had baggage. On top of that, Vaillant was writing about an area I’m familiar with, and it’s hard to read somebody else’s work on a place you know.
And that’s where the book starts, a blanket description of northwestern North America. Vaillant describes a place that is beyond what can be called real. Unfortunately, visitors to the region won’t find killer whales in shallow coves looking you in the eye as a moon rainbow casts light over the Great Bear Sea. It’s the kind of ripe fruit imagery that, if made into film, would look like the screen adaptation of the Life of Pi - all phosphorescence and human-animal fluidity.
Then there is the thorny throne on which Vaillant places Hadwin. He’s described as a rare man of superhuman strength, deftly moving through the woods like a wolf. In truth, the Grant Hadwin is a common sight in rural Canada. Go to any small town logger sports jamboree and you’ll find a dozen Hadwins; competitive but compassionate bush people, many of them have a hard time reconciling their work with their love for the woods.
There’s also Hadwin’s manifesto, a written document he draws up after a (supposedly) sublime moment of understanding while he’s in the bush somewhere near McBride. Valliant sees the manifesto as the work of a misunderstood vagabond who knows Mother Nature better than the rest.
I’d rather just call a spade a spade here - Hadwin was a lunatic, nothing more. He was a capable, skilled nut job and he’s probably dead. And all of Vaillant’s conspiratorial bluster about Hadwin still living comfortably in the woods as nature intended is where the story droops to its lowest.
The “what if Hadwin is alive?” sub-plot is an example of the book’s main problem. The Golden Spruce gathers momentum on the back of long shot statistics, cherry-picked stories of repent and whimsical passages from people enchanted by the islands. Give Valliant a tent and he will perform miracles on downtrodden loggers and starry-eyes hippies. All the one-sided testimonials turn The Golden Spruce into an exercise in myth building, a gift to people who have never been to the region and need something truly wild to fantasize about.
But the Golden Spruce has it’s moments. Vaillant’s stories about the early days of logging, free of the weight of environmental consciousness, grabbed my heart and squeezed. He captured the joy, sadness and fantastic characters that defined the early years of the industry.
He also doesn’t shy away from implicating the Haida as being just as greedy as the early European traders who came to the area. There was no high ground during this chaotic period.
But those are small shelters in the book’s relentless biblical charge. Everything in the Golden Spruce is superlative - its nods to epic literature, from Wordsworth to Moby Dick, its mythic imagery of the West Coast, its moments of repent in the bush.
It’s all too extreme and heavy-handed — no wonder it’s become the Good Book for droves of left-leaning locals and born-again British Columbians. Valliant is God, Hadwin is Prophet, and there are far too many are disciples.