Writer Aaron Williams opens his latest book back when he was an 18-year-old kid about to join his Dad logging at Eden Lake.
Williams grew up in Prince Rupert with ties to Haida Gwaii. As a teen, he worked summers at his grandmother’s small salvage mill at Naden Harbour.
But fresh from highschool and heading to the Eden Lake camp in 2004, Williams was already telling his dad he wasn’t sure he wanted to follow the family business.
“Of course you don’t, buddy,” his dad said. “You shouldn’t do this.”
The Last Logging Show: A Forestry Family At the End of an Era is a family memoir that also sets out to capture the working lives of loggers.
It starts in 1974, before Gwaii Haanas, when Williams’ father Kelly first arrived on Haida Gwaii to log on Louise Island. It ends with his dad’s last years working as a foreman for Husby Forest Products — years that included a 2018 blockade at Collison Point.
But most chapters focus on the day-to-day work done by people in different parts of the industry.
In the first of these, Aaron trades chainsaw undercuts with a faller — the classic image of a logger. He also spends time with a grapple-yarder crew, a tugboat operator, even some business-lunch log traders as they make sales down by a Fraser River sawmill that can cut 100,000 board feet per shift.
A guy working in the cab of a processor machine gives Aaron and the reader an image of modern logging.
With Aaron at the controls, the machine clamps a tree, fells it, then slices it into one high-priced “saw log” bound for the Fraser River mills and a cheap, skinny one that will get piled into a ship bound for Japan, Korea, or China.
Speaking to the Haida Gwaii News after a book reading at the Port Clements library, Williams that so far reception of the book has good — maybe even too good.
Across Canada, there have been favourable reviews. Excerpts ran in both the left-leaning Tyee and the right-leaning National Post.
Williams said sales are good — maybe not quite so strong as for Chasing Smoke, his 2017 memoir about forest firefighting, but this book seems more meaningful to those who read it.
But if you’re writing a non-fiction book about logging and pleasing everybody, he asked, are you really doing your job?
On Haida Gwaii, one tiny hint of backlash came in the form of a Sticky Note someone stuck to a poster for Williams’ book reading in Port Clements. The note said the poster only went up because the manager said so.
Seeing that was almost a relief, Williams said.
Williams said he tried not to romanticize logging, but is upfront about his strong family ties to it, and his own point of view.
In the book, he writes that the late 1950s Sloan Commission was B.C.’s first and best chance to make forestry sustainable, and it failed.
After a second commission and the advent of faster logging technology, he writes, “the province was more or less logged into oblivion in an increasingly globalized world looking for the best timber at the cheapest price.”
Williams also writes about how deadly logging was and still can be.
The book tells the story of a 26-year-old killed by a falling limb. One of Williams’ uncles nearly died when an anchor cable on the grapple-yarder he was working snapped, sending it crashing down a slope and leaving him trapped for 15 minutes in the smashed-up cab covered in diesel and terrified he would burn.
While the book captures the lives of many forestry workers, Williams said it would have been a bridge too far for him to interview the protestors who joined the Collison Point blockade. Their side of the story isn’t told here.
At the core of the protest was an allegation that Husby had logged too many monumental cedars at Collison in violation of the Haida Gwaii Land Use Objectives Order.
The issue went to court, where a judge eventually found Husby had done its due diligence.
Still, Williams said that since the blockade, cutting permits have come so unpredictably to Husby that the company can only run a skeleton crew on Haida Gwaii.
Williams did try to speak with CHN leaders for the book but couldn’t get an interview before the publisher deadline.
“That was tough,” he said. “That would have made the last chapter so much better.”
Although B.C. forestry is a fraction of its former size, still subject to whipsawing wood prices, protests over old-growth, and now the growing challenge of wildfire, Williams thinks it will eventually find a balance.
Young loggers who never knew the high-volume years that peaked in the 1990s know it’s an industry that needs to be regulated, he said, and they are tired of feeling like a public enemy.
In the book, Williams quotes a logger friend from Sandspit who sums it up.
“It just sucks we’re the generation between the old and new,” he said.