He was a very independent, stubborn person. He went up to live in Gold Bridge, north of Vancouver, and he had many jobs but he got hired to do road layout. His father did it electronically and Hadwin did it across landscapes. HW: But how did he deal with the fact that what he was really, really good at was destroying what he cared about?
JV: Well, at 17 I think he understood how destructive clear cutting could be. In the 60s they were using very heavy amounts of Caterpillar bulldozers and things that just stripped the soil right off and he was concerned that nothing would grow back -- and this was as a 17 year old working with his uncle. Then he went and worked in the gold mines in Gold Bridge, doing blasting and working on the dam and doing all kinds of things, but he was still so drawn to the woods. I look at how I enjoy making my living.
He liked to be in the woods, he liked to be in the wilderness, and this is what we all have to deal with and reconcile with. He was tremendously happy there and he was tremendously gifted and he got to see the wilderness, but he was the last one. The western Europeans came out and started turning things into products but before they got the forests, it was the sea otters. Can you tell us that story? JV: It was an amazing moment in history. The sea otter was highly valued on the northwest coast, mostly for clothing.
The Russians had been trading sea otters to the Chinese since around The Chinese were paying outrageous amounts for these skins. It was a fabulously, deliriously lucrative commodity. Captain Cook arrived in and realized how valuable these skins were. Russian, French, American, British, some Spanish ships descended on the northwest coast starting in It was a true frenzy. The Northwest tribes, the first few times they were fleeced, they gave the pelts away, and then they realized, these folks really, really want these things.
These sailors had traveled all the way down to Antarctica and back chasing these skins, some voyages lasting six to eight months. They had gone around the horn against the wind, and they would trade away anything.
Their guns, their door keys, their clothes, their spoons. The dynamic changed. The North coast tribes already understood trading very well. There were a lot of similarities between the two sides. Each understood wealth, material possession, status. So there was a common language there, a mutual appreciation for it. This remote Chinese market created a sort of madness that you see time and time again throughout history. Globalization started a long time ago but this is sort of one beautiful, encapsulated example of how it can disrupt local industry and trade.
JV: Yes, they were exterminated in about 50 years. They breed very slowly and are easy to kill. There were hundreds of thousands of them. The First Nations did the killing, the European traders did the buying and it was a beautiful arrangement.
From what I can identify, no carved poles were spoken of before All of a sudden there was this extra wealth, this leisure time, you could have an entire class of artists, some might be slaves, some not, and it completely changed everything there. JV: The Sitka spruce was one of the biggest trees in the world, all over the place, tens of millions of them on this coast.
But people were much more interested in Douglas fir and cedar because the Douglas fir was great for floorboards and trim and studs and cedar was waterproof.
In there was this extraordinarily large mobilization of forces in Canada and the US. This was a military operation to go into the Northwest forest and render Sitka spruce for European airplanes.
So fabulous amounts of wood were cut. JV: Pretty much. It was used for fuselages, wings, laminated for propellers. I mean you have metal engines and guns and nails and that stuff, but they were mostly wood. JV: I think Hadwin was a ticking bomb, but I also think he was in a schizophrenic situation. In the sense that he was a guy who was at his best when he was on his own in the wilderness, and the wilderness was receding out away from him. He had built this beautiful house, this three story log cabin that he had made with his own hands, this huge chimney going up 35 feet, the capstone on it is this slab of granite as big as a mattress.
He built this thing in Gold Bridge with a beautiful view of the forest. As the forest melted away before him, because of his own efforts, he found himself in a bind that became untenable, and I think several things conspired.
This moral and ethical awaking that, yes, there is an end to it. His brother was schizophrenic, it came out later in life. He became a recluse and eventually committed suicide. Retaining the green foliage of the rootstock would keep the tree alive, so after 48 years, my contribution has been to save the Golden Spruce foliage from dying. The total size of the plant is only four feet in height and no branch has turned upwards assuming apical dominance, so it has ended up looking like a shrub, not a tree.
My hope is that someone will undertake this paltry but living specimen and strike further grafts from it and then with new material, the puzzle of how to achieve apical dominance might be solved. The job will be challenging and it may not be possible that the horizontal branches may achieve apical dominance, like other specimens as documented in the book, The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant.
At least this Golden Spruce may be kept alive with care. Flying over the Golden Spruce by helicopter in the fall of , I got the pilot to pause over it, so that I could really look at the tree. I could see many grey twigs on the top of the live branches, which I can also observe on my tree. I am not sure if this trait has been reported elsewhere. The original Golden Spruce had golden needles on the upper branches, which were the ones viewed from across the river where most people observed it.
When viewed from across the Yakoun River, this bottom part of the tree was blocked from view by the forest. Therefore, I am presenting the theory that a single cell mutation could have occurred to give rise to the golden foliage in the upper part of the tree.
Furthermore, the tendency for the new golden foliage to drop off was evident on the original Golden Spruce. From the top view, there were all kinds of bare, but not necessarily dead, branches. When foliage on exposed parts of a tree is not staying alive or turning yellowish green, it is a sign that the golden part was very fragile and slow growing. A stem analysis would perhaps show rapid growth for years, and then show slow growth for a very long time after that.
It may be possible to study growth patterns from preserved wood from the stump even now or from the remaining rotting stump. Finally, I would like to add these thoughts after observing the original Golden Spruce and my cutting of it.
The golden color of the original tree was spectacular, but even in the original tree, it tended to lose its spectacular golden color as the growing season progressed. I am sure that there must have been some local people who could attest to that. As the golden needles dropped, the tree was kept alive by some of the shaded under-foliage turned green. Therefore, as a consequence, any cultivar of the original tree will not produce a beautiful nor commercial reproduction of the original.
It is my hope that people will take care of my Golden Spruce and I wish them luck. Any chance of reproducing the original is going to be challenging and may not be successful with the hoped-for results. The Serpentine River must have caused the twisted mind that lead to the felling of the Golden Spruce. It was a heinous act that served no purpose. This is a kind of nature writing best taken in small doses, but Vaillant does it sufficiently well.
Beyond that, the book is thick with natural and human history. Vaillant does not shy away from the complex relationships between natives and explorers.
We learn what a high rigger does and how spruce were used to build airplanes in the First World War. How can loggers claim to revere the forest they destroy?
Why do the Haida name this tree and no other? How can we love a single tree but be indifferent to untold thousands? How can we love a tree at all? Right now, people are focusing all their anger on me when they should focus it on the destruction going on around them.
Or maybe just a harder sell. Unfortunately, this book only skims these questions. Publisher: Knopf Canada. Assistant Professor, Book Publishing Toronto.
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