Talk of the Town

The Golden Spruce, A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed

Thu. May 12, 7:30 - 9:00 pm

With: John Vaillant, Author and Journalist

When journalist John Vaillant journeyed to the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia, for an article he was writing on kayaking, he didn’t know that he would end up writing a book that is part mystery, part anthropology and social commentary and nothing about kayaking. Here is how the publisher describes The Golden Spruce:

“ When a kayak and camping gear are found on an uninhabited Alaskan island just north of the Canadian border, they re-ignite a mystery surrounding a shocking act of protest that made international news. On a winter night in 1997, a logger-turned-activist named Grant Hadwin plunged into the frigid waters of the Yakoun River in the Queen Charlotte Islands, towing a chainsaw behind him. When he was done, a unique spruce tree -- 50 meters tall and covered with luminous golden needles -- was teetering on its massive stump.

The tree, which baffled scientists, was sacred to the Haida on whose land it had stood for over 300 years. It was also beloved by local loggers who singled it out for protection in the midst of vast clear cuts. Since the 1970s, the mist-shrouded archipelago -- one of the continent’s most pristine and vibrant ecosystems -- has been a battleground with government officials and logging companies squaring off against the Haida and environmental groups. The loss of the mythic golden spruce united loggers, natives and environmentalists in sorrow and outrage. But while heroic efforts were made to revive the tree, Grant Hadwin, the tree’s confessed killer, disappeared under suspicious circumstances.

John Vaillant’s article on the death of the golden spruce was published in 2002 in The New Yorker, and this book has grown out of it, dramatizing the destruction of a deeply conflicted man and the wilderness he loved; in so doing, it traces the rise, fall and rebirth of the Haida nation, and exposes the logging industry -- the most dangerous land-based job in North America -- from a point of view never explored in contemporary non-fiction.” Random House Canada

http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display.pperl?067697645X

Excerpt From The Golden Spruce

To look at this seedling -- if one could see it at all -- and believe that it had every intention of growing into one of the towering columns that blot out so much of the northwestern sky, would have seemed far-fetched at best. In its first year, the infant tree would have been about two inches tall and sporting a half dozen or so pale green needles. It would have been appealing in the same abstract way that baby snapping turtles are, its alien appearance transcended by the universal indicators of wild babyhood: utter helplessness and primordial determination in equal measure. Despite its bristling ruff and a stem as straight as a sunbeam, the seedling was still as vulnerable as a frog’s egg; a falling branch, the footstep of a human or an animal -- any number of random occurrences -- could have finished it there and then.

Down there, in the damp darkness of the under story, the sapling’s wonderful flaw was a well-kept secret. With each passing year, it dug its roots deeper into the riverbank, strengthening its grip on life and on the land. In spite of the odds, it became one of a handful of young trees that would survive to shoulder their way into the sunlight, competing with giants a dozen feet wide and hundreds of feet tall. In the end, it would be the sun that exposed this tree’s secret for all to see and, by the middle of the 1700s, it would have been abundantly clear that something extraordinary was growing on the banks of the Yakoun. It was a creature that seemed more at home in a myth or a fairy tale: a spruce tree with golden needles.

Join us at Talk of the Town for a conversation with John Vaillant about his “true story of myth, madness and greed”.

The discussion will take place at UBC Robson Square. Attendance is free of charge, but please pre-register at info.talkofthetown@ubc.ca or phone 604.822.5675.

Reviews of The Golden Spruce

"Writing in a vigorous, evocative style, Vaillant portrays the Pacific Northwest as a region of conflict and violence, from the battles between Europeans and Indians over the 18th-century sea otter trade to the hard-bitten, macho milieu of the logging camps, where grisly death is an occupational hazard. It is also, in his telling, a land of virtually infinite natural resources overmatched by an even greater human rapaciousness... Vaillant paints a haunting portrait of man's vexed relationship with nature."
-- Publishers Weekly

"John Vaillant has written a work that will change how many people think about nature. His story is about one man and one tree, but it is much more than that. Logging is a brutally dangerous profession that owns the dubious distinction of having killed and maimed even more men than commercial fishing. Loggers’ work is both heroic and sad, and only a writer of Vaillant’s skill could capture both aspects of their dying world in such a powerful way."
-- Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm

Biography

John Vaillant has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic–Adventure, Outside and Men’s Journal. He lives in Vancouver with his wife (an anthropologist and a potter) and their two children. Of particular interest to Vaillant are stories that explore collisions between human ambition and the natural world. His work in this and other fields has taken him to five continents and five oceans. The Golden Spruce is his first book.

Links & Readings

Links

The Golden Bough

John Vaillant’s book on the golden spruce began with this article in the New Yorker.

Picea sitchensis

This discussion at the UBC Botanical Gardens site summarizes the attempts to re-grow the Golden Spruce from cuttings.

Paddling in a Ghost World

This is an article by John Vaillant about kayaking in the Queen Charlotte Islands, published in Outside Magazine, July 2002.

Overkill

This is a short piece from the Atlantic Online written by John Vaillant.