The Sacred Tree

Your humble Xmas tree is the latest incarnation

Monika’s version of the Christmas tree

As we struggle to enjoy a ‘normal Christmas’ in a time of deep disquiet, I thought it might be helpful to step back from our current malaise. We’re just beginning to publicly acknowledge that the damage done during the pandemic is crying out for healing and admissions of wrongdoing slow in coming.

This process is likely to last for the next decade and maybe it will never be fully resolved, like questions still swirling around the assassination of Kennedy or for that matter, who and what was really behind 9/11.

So, let’s think about something else. How about the Christmas tree you just decorated? Seems like a fine subject and not too depressing, right?  Let’s take those pundits urging us to ‘get back to our roots’ at their word and just do a deep dive on trees, sacred and profane.

The roots of the Xmas tree as a sacred tree reach back into prehistory when the northern peoples went quietly crazy during the dark cold winters in the primeval forests. Would the light ever return, they wondered. Would the sun ever shine again? And when it did, when the days got longer after the Winter Solstice, they set fires to the trees and gave thanks. It was all about light, then as now. All kinds of people who are not especially Christian have adopted the Xmas tree with its lights because it awakens a primordial memory, the sense of an ancient connection. Trees not just trees; they are part of our mythic heritage: Adam and Eve eating from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, Buddha sitting under the Bhodi Tree, the Tree of Life called Yggdrasil in the tales of the Nordic peoples. Even Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust evokes it when he says: “All theory is gray, my friend. But forever green is the tree of life.”

Closer to home, there is a story as powerful as any of these ancient tales from the mystical islands of Haida Gwaii lying north of Vancouver Island. The Golden Spruce, A True story of Myth, Madness and Greed according to the bestseller John Vaillant wrote in 2005. is one of those twisted, agonising tales that once you’ve heard, you can never quite forget. A quintessentially Western Canadian story with global environmental implications, the book became a national bestseller and a movie, called Hadwin’s Judgment, was released in 2015.

The anti-hero of this story is Grant Hadwin whose connection to The Golden Spruce was as mythic and fated as the tree itself. He was descended from three generations of loggers and timber cruisers; his grandfather founded a logging supply company and everyone in his family was somehow connected to the timber industry in British Columbia. His uncle, Angus, started working in the logging camps when he was a teenager, eventually becoming a high rigger, the most dangerous and best paid job in the woods. Hadwin adored this uncle and he became as famous in logging circles as he was. Hadwin, the well mannered son of an electrical engineer living an upper middle class life, was the product of a private boys’ school he despised. Respected for his exceptional skill in scouting timber stands and designing logging roads in impossible terrain, he was also known for his almost superhuman resilience in the bush where he was happiest and at ease. Hadwin seemed impervious to cold and according to those who knew and worked with him, he was the best there was in terms of running through the woods and surviving under rough conditions. Hadwin was as unique as the Golden Spruce that would determine his fate.

This enormous 50 meter high Sitka spruce grew quietly in the Yakoun river valley on Haida Gwaii for 300 years. It was already in existence when Captain Cook disembarked on Vancouver Island’s northwestern shore in March, 1778, searching for trees to replace his broken masts. He left astounded by the size and abundance of trees on the island. He would have been amazed at the Golden Spruce because it is a true freak of nature; a one-off mutation never seen again and in spite of professional and persistent efforts, never duplicated. It stood out like a beacon in the woods, its topmost needles a pale yellow that caught the light in such a way that the tree seemed to literally glow in the misty valley where it rains practically non-stop. It was so rare that it rated its own scientific category: Picea sitchensis ‘Aurea’, meaning golden or gleaming like gold.

This tree is sacred to the Haida people who have lived in these islands for thousands of years. They named the tree K’iid K’iyaas or Elder Spruce. According to them, the tree was the embodiment of a boy who disrespected Nature. It’s a strange and slightly scatological story of how a boy shat standing up on a winter day because it was just too cold to squat. And then laughed at the frozen turd he had produced. You might call this a metaphor for what the human race does every day: shit on nature and then laugh. The Haida knew that this was the ancient problem haunting humans. It’s only lately that we have stopped laughing. Weeping and wringing our hands while destroying our culture to ‘save’ Nature doesn’t seem to be moving the needle (sorry) either. But I digress.

Hadwin didn’t know this story or indeed about the sacred nature of the Golden Spruce; he had another agenda that in its own way, agrees with the Haida interpretation. Hadwin decided it was time to teach the public a serious lesson. He was enraged about the terrible transgressions of logging against the vast forests of BC. Done routinely in the name of profit by the big logging companies that drove the entire BC economy at the time. One of these companies was MacMillan Bloedel, or MacBlo, as it was known locally.

The company had decided that the Golden Spruce could be used to polish their rather spotty public image. They left a grove of trees standing around the tree and then told everyone how they were stewards of the woods and how wonderful was that? All the while ravaging the BC forests with clearcuts so enormous that they could be seen from space. It was this dissonance that drove Hadwin into what psychologists call a ‘psychic break’ and religious people know as an epiphany, a spiritual encounter with the divine. He wasn’t the only man in the logging industry who suffered from a simultaneous love of the woods and a highly efficient job that destroyed them. It was just that Hardin was suffering more intensely; he was intense, period, and when he came out of the woods after his ‘encounter’ everyone noticed the change in him. He had a dark, haunted quality that did not bode well.

His previous attempts to change people’s attitudes and to gain some traction for his ideas to mitigate the destruction of clearcutting with the big bosses running MacBlo had all failed. And he was a man who didn’t like to lose. The PR campaign surrounding the Golden Spruce was hypocrisy so deep and so despicable that it called for a public act of some daring. Something that would wake everyone up was needed. And so, one night in winter, Hadwin decided what to do: he had to cut down the Golden Spruce. That would get everyone upset; it would gain him the attention he was seeking. Alone in a winters night armed with an axe and a chainsaw, he swam across the nearly frozen Yakoun river and cut the tree in such a way that the next storm would blow it over. Only Hardin could have done this; nobody else had the stamina, skill or mad intent necessary. He also sent a barrage of letters and made several phone calls informing the people who needed to know of this act. The furious outcry that greeted this announcement was as if he had killed a person, a highly beloved one at that. Nobody was talking about the hypocrisy of MacBlo, as Hadwin had intended. All everyone, including the Haida, was talking about was that this man had to be done away with. Hadwin soon realized that his carefully planned idea had backfired and that his life was now in danger. He also had to get himself to Masset for a court date because he had been charged and it was clear that they would throw the book at him to get him convicted.

To make a long and complicated story short: he never arrived at the courthouse. And when his kayak and some of his belongings were discovered on Mary Island, he was presumed drowned in the vicious waters of Hecate Straight that he had unwisely attempted to circumnavigate while trying to get to Masset without being killed by the enraged residents. Even professional kayakers would never attempt this crossing, so assuming that he drowned seemed likely. Except that he was no ordinary man and after looking at the site more closely, the law enforcement officers began to question this story. They knew that Hadwin had an almost uncanny ability to survive in the woods, that he was in top physical condition and apparently able to withstand cold water for a long time. He could have staged his death and simply walked into the woods. Thereafter, many people claimed to have spotted him in various places including Alaska and California. But nothing was ever proved and he remains missing to this day.

The Golden Spruce was eventually carved into guitars and became even more famous than it already was. Clear cutting is still being done in BC but not at the rate common then. The general public is now unanimous in wanting to protect what is left of BC’s temperate rain forests. In that sense, Harding did achieve a small part of what he wanted. The other dreams, carefully outlined in his many letters and manifestoes, sound somewhat utopian but perhaps not as crazy as they did then. He proposed to do away with capitalism altogether, allow women to rule, and reduce our economy to self sustaining small landholdings. I know of some serious thinkers who have arrived at somewhat similar conclusions. What to make of a man like Hadwin? Perhaps he was far ahead of his time, a kind of unwelcome prophet, perhaps he was a madman, or both. What cannot be denied is that the problem of how to live in harmony with Mother Nature continues to perplex us. We’re struggling with it, arguing about it, but we’re not much closer to a solution.

Several attempts to regrow the Golden Spruce have failed; they just yielded rather stumpy trees that didn’t grow tall and straight at all. Even replanting these cuttings in a similar environment as the sacred valley didn’t work. Apparently the Golden Spruce was indeed somewhat supernatural, perhaps the only sacred tree we will ever see hereabouts. It is gone forever. The Haida sanctified it with an elaborate ceremony. We decorate our Christmas trees every year.

The sacred tree lives on in the retelling of the Golden Spruce tale. Your Christmas tree is a reminder that our connection to trees is a deep bond, providing hope and light even in a time of terrible trouble and spiritual crisis like this one.

Merry Christmas.