Big Lonely Doug by Harley Rustad

Author:Harley Rustad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2018-08-28T15:20:44+00:00

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Less than a year after Cronin wrapped the green flagging around the big Douglas fir, the trees of cutblock 7190 were gone. Throughout the summer of 2011, the grove of old-growth forest stood awaiting its fate. When the October rains turned heavy, a sound erupted in the cool morning air: fallers, contracted by Teal Jones, were starting up their chainsaws. Following Dennis Cronin’s ribbon markers and the map drawn by Walter Van Hell, the fallers began bringing down the trees. The teeth of the saws bit into half-a-millennium-old trunks, casting arcs of sawdust that settled over sword fern and moss. The cut conifer quickly filled the air with a thick, woodsy perfume. The giant cedars and firs hit the forest floor with thunderous thuds, but the trees might as well have made no sound at all.

A crew of hooktenders wrapped cables around the trunks of the fallen trees, attaching the lines to a cable yarder positioned on the road above the clear-cut. One by one the logs were hauled and loaded onto trucks, driven across the bridge over the Gordon River, past a group of anti-logging activists standing next to a grove of old-growth forest, and across the island to the town of Lake Cowichan, where Dennis Cronin lived. From there, the logs were trucked up-island to Nanaimo, where they were dropped into the ocean and incorporated into a boom. Tugboats hauled the boom across the Strait of Georgia, under the bridges of Vancouver, and up the Fraser River to the Teal Jones mill on the mainland. Unlike many logs that are exported whole, or raw, for processing and manufacturing, those of cutblock 7190 remained in the province. They were de-barked and run through a milling machine, which dissected them into timbers of various lengths and dimensions. There are beams of houses or pieces of furniture, windows or doorframes, guitars or works of art, that are made from the wood harvested from cutblock 7190.

After a few months, silence returned to the base of Edinburgh Mountain. The fallers had long since packed up their chainsaws and gear; the trucks, laden with logs, had departed. A faint dusting of snow fell onto the clear-cut. As spring came, any remaining mounds of moss and bushes of salal crackled and dried up in the unfiltered sun. Bears that had called this patch of forest home found other hollows to den, while birds sought other branches to roost. Every wiry cedar, every droopy-topped hemlock, and every great fir that once made up this rainforest grove was gone — every tree, except one.

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