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Book Review
| The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed. By John Vaillant. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005. xii + 255 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography. $24.95.
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| The Golden Spruce primarily focuses on the biography and subsequent mystery surrounding the disappearance in 1997 of a British Columbian logger, Grant Hadwin, who, in a fit of psychological mania and misguided eco-activist fervor, chopped down a celebrated old-growth spruce tree in the forests of the Queen Charlotte Islands, just off the west coast of British Columbia. The venerable 165-foot tree, K'iid K'iyaas (Elder Spruce Tree) to the indigenous Haida, was not just any old tree. It was a tribal icon—part of the tribe's rich mythology as a tree-centered civilization. Its amazing three-hundred-year survival (as a luminous orphan strain of spruce) served as an additional reminder to twentieth-century Haida generations of the tribe's rootedness and the antiquity of their regional presence and cultural traditions. |
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Because of its glowing, halo-like appearance, the tree also enthralled white pelt traders, settlers, and loggers, resulting in its informal and eventually more official protection, even as massive clear-cutting began to devastate the region's forests by the late 1970s. Such actions spotlight the long-standing contradiction in Western culture between forest use and preservation, or, as Vaillant intuits Hadwin saw it, "the contrast between the vestigial grove containing the town mascot and the free-range saw log farm that surrounded it" (p. 121). |
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The story of the golden spruce is many-spoked, and, to his credit, Vaillant persuasively offers its compelling background. In the first five chapters and others scattered throughout the last ten, he explores the region's geography and the intriguingly entwined cultural and resource-use history of the Haida people; summarizes Western historical attitudes toward the forest; and details the region's logging history, primarily through profiles of local loggers and the dangerous work they do. Unfortunately, he persists in following the search for Hadwin. This, plus tangential sidebar topics (like researchers' attempts to graft the tree), thins out the book's last two-thirds. Also, it is an enormous surprise that the volume includes only one photograph of the living, magical spruce itself; indeed, the photo credits do not indicate whether the color of the tree depicted in the stunning cover photograph has been electronically enhanced. |
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Although the Tony Hillerman-like intrigue surrounding Hadwin's story initially pulls in readers, it pales in comparison to the larger theme, about transformation: of the tree (from upright to fallen; icon/artifact to memory; wild species to commodified graft), of Hadwin (from logger to would-be activist to eco-criminal to dead or alive?), and perhaps, of humankind (to transform abuse of the forest to stewardship). The thematic thread of transformation might have held the jam-packed approach together better. The result is a well-written account of human interactions with and valuations of nature, but one plagued by disorganization and frustrating sidetracks. Still, it is an enjoyable and highly informative read for a less-demanding general audience. Much like the coastal forest setting—whose "darkened room," he warns readers, "easily" obscures "the trail of a person, or the thread of a story" (p. 8)—the narrative wanders, trying to pick up the trail so promisingly embarked upon from the beginning. |
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Lori Vermaas is a production editor with the Journal of Paleontology, holds a doctorate in American Studies from the University of Iowa (2000), and is the author of Sequoia: The Heralded Tree in American Art and Culture (Smithsonian , 2003). Her research interests include American environmental attitudes (primarily revealed in expressive culture). |
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