In the tradition of Krakauer's Into the Wild, The Golden Spruce
tells an astonishing true story of a furious man's obsessive
mission against an industrial juggernaut, the struggle of the Haida
people to save their world, and the mysterious golden tree that
binds them all together.
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
thewilderness 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.
"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 theYakoun. It was a creature that
seemed more at home in a myth or a fairy tale: a spruce tree with
golden needles.
--excerpt from The Golden Spruce
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