The Pickup Truck Diaries: The Logger Gurus
How do you explain a core fundamental of your life to a world that has no possible metric for the value of that thing? What happens if you miss your opportunity to hold onto it?
A question that could echo across the aeons, I expect.
In this round of “The Pickup truck Diaries,” we’re going to explore the notion of “The Logger Guru”. I coined the phrase off the top of my head one day, of course. There are likely dozens of different possible expressions of the same thing strewn across the world. That’s the whole nature of simultaneous invention!
So… How the fuck can a logger be a guru? How do I avoid jumping on every cult stereotype from the past 70 years? How do I make traditional wisdoms and forms of knowledge valuable again in the 21st century? How do I get the angry 50+ year old christian women who run “Squamish Speaks” to stop censoring me?
Well, as I am eternally craving to do in trying to utilize my history major, and make all that student debt worth something, we need to sift back through local history a bit for some context, first. (I’ll send you a bill after you finish reading this article, it’s for 44,000 or so in any currency you wish to pay, thanks.)
You may remember from previous articles that I live on the stolen land of the Squamish Nation. I say stolen because unceded is just a fancier and more politically correct way to say “stolen” as if you can’t call a spade a spade, a cat a cat, or stolen land, well… Stolen land! I mean, really, I’d much rather pay rent to the Squamish Nation than some capitalist pretending to actually make anything of value by being a landlord and profiting off of my labor! And that isn’t a bit, I’m 100% serious. I have a feeling that with the vibrant and youthful new leadership the nation has on council, they’d likely utilize the cash far better than any colonial system made up by racist assholes could.
Anyways, for this deep dive, we have to talk about the context of the frontier. And what we know in modern day as “the frontier” is exactly the sort of stolen land, (sorry, “unceded” land,) that I’m talking about. Similar to that old expression – one person’s “frontier,” is just another person’s ancestral home. This story will sound familiar to many of you from rural small-town Canada or America. Or at least I hope so, otherwise what the fuck was my life? I guess I’m just a novelty. And it’s nice to be wanted, so I have that going for me which is nice.”
(Anybody know if Bill Murray is secretly a shithead?)
I come from at least three generations of loggers, who lived on what they viewed as pristine and mostly untouched land. Logger, Forestry Worker, Lumberjack, hell there are a dozen ways you could explain the act of chopping down trees to mill into timber. Having only the colonial European context, they had no clue about seasonal rounds or land stewardship, only the exploitative capitalist system that eternally extracts resources to convert into wealth. At least forests grow back, mind you. See… My family along the Galbraith line showed up over a century ago back in 1904, and set up shop – first as The Galbraith hotel where the Yacht Club currently stands in Squamish, and from there, my family – The McRae line, got into the forestry profession.
Just in case you were wondering about that whole “McRaeWrites” thing.
Nowadays, a large swath of this whole colonial north american system we all live in is the various associations administering key social services, and the subsequent areas of control along various lines and for various colonial systems and areas of influence. Logging and Forestry has been both under Federal and Provincial jurisdiction over the centuries, (usually only wartime for federal,) but very rarely and only extremely recently timeline-wise has it had any sort of local presence.
Still with me?
Smart cookie.
The colonial system has always been a very hierarchical “arms reach” sort of system. As long as there is some sort of chain consisting of bureaucrats from the bottom of the local level all the way up to the top of government, most parliamentarians could give two shits whether the resources have been managed effectively, ethically, or sustainably. My experience with bureaucracy has often been that it sucks dick. I’d take first nations and local community stewardship over natural resources any day of the week, as they’re the ones directly affected by it.
Sorry dad, (this is where you come in, I know you want to keep your head down).
Growing up, I was always taught to respect nature. Weekend after weekend, me and my brothers would be hauled out to the bush somewhere – sometimes just to walk a timber sale block that was up for bidding to be logged. Sometimes it would be because there was extra work to be done that there was just no time in the week for. And at times it was just to go for a drive, to disappear into the wilds for a short while or to drive around town chatting to people. My dad was one of those green-wave new-agey loggers that believed in things like the aforementioned sustainability, of minimizing your impact, and of doing no harm as best you could as one maneuvered around the stolen territory we lived and worked on. We spent thousands of hours out in the bush. Fucking new-age hippie loggers!
A funny irony, that!
See, this is kind of the first real experience I ever had with Forestry. It was encountering wildlife, hiking through thick moss-coated second or third growth forests, and being taught to respect the land and the stewards of that land that allowed us to exist as we did. Owls, Coyotes, Eagles, Deer, Bears, even the odd Bobcat. Wildlife. Cool. I’ve seen it all, which is why whenever I take my British girlfriend to the bush and she fawns over second-growth timber like a forest-nymph of some sort, it makes me laugh.I was chasing black bears off piles of coffee grounds with skid-steers and coyotes with sticks in my teens! Those motherfuckers eat your pets and garbage. Fed bear is a dead bear, remember? My father has always been a feverish amateur ecologist. I don’t think there is another living person who has watched as many hours of “Animal Planet,” “Discovery Channel,” or “History TV” as he.
He’s a good guy.
I guess that growing up I never really realized how “new-age” his philosophies around sustainability were, even back in the 90’s and early aughts. Pretty progressive for the time and place, considering this was twenty to thirty years ago!
I think my dad, in his own way, is one of the last living “Logger Gurus” to exist.
Keep that sustainability-minded, progressive, logical thinker in the back of your mind as we meander a ways further back. We’ll circle back around to that eventually.
Remember when I mentioned those various jurisdictions? Federal, Provincial, and Local?
The long story short is that the Federal and Provincial “keepers” of things have often been some myriad of those bureaucrats with various different ideas on what constituted good management. As history states fairly clearly, the majority of these “keepers” of our public ministries and institutions have been absolute dogshit. No, seriously. Go look at history. There’s a recurring history of locals, both of the frontier colonial and first nations varieties – trying to give insight and feedback on local matters and largely being ignored by someone in an office building in provincial (state) or federal capital. It’s a large part of why we’re looking at ten years give or take until extinction is guaranteed. It’s why we now need to work hard and fast to save ourselves. The resources were so plentiful throughout history that they are almost always taken for granted, and usually they’re wasted in excruciating fashions from there as the narrative went.
A good example is the cedar tree.
Cedar is one of the best types of tree there is. It grows quickly enough, and the bark is fibrous and capable of being stripped from the tree for use in weaving, creation, and a number of other things without harming the tree itself much. As colonial peoples and systems didn’t do much cedar weaving, it was the soft nature of the wood and the acidic nature of the tree that was valued for building. Soft meant it was easy to mill as one might desire, and the acidity of the wood meant that unlike many other varieties, it resisted rot extremely well long after being milled. Why do you think that Canada’s “Softwood Lumber” deals with America are always such a hot-button issue?
One of the biggest realizations you can have is while walking through the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Most people never notice it. Hundreds of years after an area has been logged, even if it has regrown back to full-standing forest, the stumps of cedars will still be rotting away quietly in the undergrowth. What many tourists think is pristine, untouched forest is almost never what they think it is.
Anyone can look for the tell-tale signs.
How’s that for looking directly into the eyes of history to have it stare right back at you?
Of course, cedar as a tree only grows near sources of water most of the time. Meaning it’s one of the rarer things to harvest, and that also means it is worth a “pretty penny.” Back when I was still logging on and off with my dad as of six or seven years ago, red cedar was something like one hundred and twenty dollars per metre. A large enough cedar log would be worth something like six grand all by itself.
You can guess where this sad story goes.
Why else do you think I am absolutely against the harvesting of old growth cedar?
Growing up, I always wondered why my dad would get into fights and squabbles over these ideas of things like “sustainable forestry” or “wildlife protection.”
We never hunted, of course, but we always fished the September and October salmon run growing up, as my dad had done since his childhood back in the 1960’s. Even in fishing, my dad would always follow the rules and his morals meticulously, teaching us how to use pliers to remove and flatten the barbs from our fish hooks to prevent suffering. How to use a rock to end the last gasping of a fish quick and clean as it suffocated out of water. When he hooked a seal pup in the neck by accident one day as it swam upriver to hunt, he kept tension on a fifteen pound test fishing line and a shitty Canadian-Tire fishing rod that could snap at any moment from the hundred pound seal pup. Being unable to reel, he slowly walked back hundreds of feet to bring the seal pup into shore for over an hour and a half so that the collective fishermen on the banks could remove the hook and prevent that seal from growing up with the hook, lure, and line caught in it’s flesh.
He could have just cut the line.
He didn’t.
So what the fuck is a “Logger Guru?”
Well, now you have some hints at the unseen. I think the first hallmark of such a thing as a Logger Guru is empathy and compassion for the place you live. Sustainability and ethics are merely the tip of the iceberg. Caring about the local environment you live in is one of the most important things you can do. Every time I see green-spaces removed for more concrete and glass buildings, I shrivel up a little bit inside, remembering those spaces as I did in my youth. Once it’s gone, it’s very hard to get those sorts of things back. Removing green space does not magically create more green space elsewhere.
This stretches back to the idea of community.
As a kid, I remember that some of our trips were to the Stawamus reserve by our house, where my dad would go to chat with various members of the nation. Some were old school buddies he grew up with or the people and families he hired on over the years, other times it would be with folks from the hereditary chief bloodlines. Usually it involved asking permission for something, or hiring somebody, or talking through things involving local politics, town happenings, old memories, or coming events. It varied.
While participation in a colonial capitalist system is hardly any sort of solution for the problems we now face as a species, back then I always noticed how my dad tended to hire folks (be they from the nation or otherwise,) who needed a leg up. Exposure to drugs and alcohol was always a constant in my youth, as many of the men who worked in forestry would struggle with addiction. Cocaine, alcohol, crystal meth, it all varied, but the same story would play out in repetition, as the cycle of substance abuse often does. Picking guys up on Monday after weekend benders was a common sight.
Remember, we have the incredible power of hindsight and the progress of human knowledge, now. Back then, we didn’t know that so many of these issues come from a need for love and belonging, and for acceptance and support.
Guess that’s sort of the second hallmark of the Logger Guru.
One needs to know the merits of sustainability and respect for one’s environment, sure. But one must be empathetic and act in good faith, doing their best to help their fellow humans however they can. When someone asks for help, you help them. I can always spot who is acting in self-interest and who is making a decision or choice purely because it is good for one’s local sense of community.
I think a lot about how these things looked to me growing up. Examples that taught me how to be in the world. Some of those things are missing, and I’m trying to pass on as much as I can to hold them tight, before the good parts of all the old ways of doing things are truly dead and gone forever.
One of the people I think about a lot is Chris. He’s gone now, passed away, but when my dad hired him, he had just gotten out of jail. I was seventeen, and Chris was about the age that I am now, plus or minus a few years. He had problems, as we all do, but he was kind, and outgoing, and loved to make jokes and laugh. To a seventeen year old kid, he was a powerful role model and an inspiration. We worked for an entire summer “rock picking” together. My dad was pushing his green-wave sustainability ideas and was trying to inspire people and build a business around biowaste. Trying to make the world better. Our job was to stand on the back conveyor belt of the screener that separated out various materials based on size, and pick rocks out of the wood waste so it wouldn’t damage the grinder teeth. As the job was fairly monotonous, we’d chat as one does with coworkers. I think I learned more from Chris in that summer in terms of sheer lived life experience than most summers in my entire existence. Everything from how he learned to build grandfather clocks in prison, to his various incidents that he told me never to make the same mistakes on.
Alongside Chris, I worked with two other guys and a lady most often, an older guy named Ron, a younger guy just a smidge younger than Chris named Warren, and a lady, Anne-Marie. (I didn’t realize until much later how big a deal it was culturally that my dad hired a lady for any sort of trades job back in the early aughts.)
I consider them all to be “Logger Gurus” in a way.
Ron was a family man, and as I was the youngest on the screening crew, I learned a lot from him, too, as he often played the calming middle ground in issues, using occam’s razor and big picture thinking to de-escalate things and to teach folks things in non-stressful ways. Which was very ironically funny. He was also the safety guy, so when I accidentally punched a hole in my stomach with a 6 inch dock-spike, he was the guy that helped patch me up. There’s a safety in knowing that someone will even be there to patch you up at all. There’s also something to be said for the wisdom of having an “elder statesman” of sorts to help guide folks and keep order to things. From a supportive distance anyways, as usually it was over the radio.
Warren was a fireball. And I mean that in a kind way. Another lost stray that my dad picked up along the way, he struggled with neurodiversity and substance abuse issues for much of the time I knew him. Alongside Chris, he’s also gone now, as the numbers of “Logger Gurus” dwindles further, many being taken from the afflictions of depression and substance.
Of course, in forestry, death is a constant. It is an expectation that you pray is never fulfilled. One mistake can, and will, cost you your life. Those that don’t pass away while working are often victims of the afflictions above.
One learns to accept death in strange ways, sometimes.
Even despite his struggles, Warren had a good soul. To a kid with ADD, seeing Warren move at triple time, all the time, was a bit of an inspiration. He was always chomping at the bit to get things done, to accomplish stuff. With him, you never had to worry about work ethic. The last time I worked with him, as a logger, he would spend time waiting for us between turns to practice his chainsaw art, crafting chairs and the like out of log ends. I always remember him by the scent of the blackstone cherry cigarillos he chain smoked. I laugh because that’s how I started smoking from sixteen to twenty, with good old blackstone cherries and grape primetimes. It’s terrible for you. Don’t fucking do it.
Warren was also brilliant, and was an example of how neurodiverse outside the box thinking could solve almost any problem with sheer ingenuity. I couldn’t count the number of times he would jury rig a broken machine back together, or come up with some clever means of simplifying or speeding up his work.
Having Chris and Warren around was like having older brothers, which for me was a first, being the oldest amongst my own siblings. I could finally watch and learn, instead of having to try and fail at everything for the first time before I could ever master it. They were both “Logger Gurus,” in that they taught me how to see simple solutions to things. They taught me how to problem solve in new ways, and they taught me a lot about life and growth. There was always some friction, as there is in most groupings of people, but I’d be a damned liar if I didn’t respect and honor them in my own shitty seventeen-year-old-boy-angsty “I’m-too-good-for-this-shit” way. Kindness, honesty, empathy, and work ethic. All things I learned while close to these gurus.
Anne Marie ran the office, and between her and Ron, the younger three of us grunts were for the most part kept in line. When we moved sites, there were many days where we’d have a lunchtime bullshit chat and Anne-Marie would offer some crucial piece of insight I was missing in my limited teenager mindset that could help solve the problem. She and Ron always had wisdom to share, and between the four of them, no matter how shitty of a mood I was in, they could always put things into perspective for me, and at the very least, help me gain some self-awareness, at least.
I think that’s the second part that everyone I’d class as a Logger Guru shares. Patience. Wisdom. Mentorship. Not one of the people I worked with that summer had a degree as far as I was aware, but they were all brilliant and capable in unique ways, and knew how to work hard and get a job done with creativity or work ethic. Work smart, not hard, was a common phrase. Touch things once, never twice. Be efficient.
Let it stand for the record that when I go – I’m buying the first round for Chris and Warren. It’s the least of what I owe them for sharing their learned existences with me. For teaching me what the lowest lows could look like, and what digging yourself out of those sorts of situations could look like. I will owe them forever for my growth.
When you live in a small community, everybody knows everybody. There’s a community you have to learn to find a part of. One of the things I appreciate far more now than I once did is acknowledging the power of knowledge and wisdom from a place other than book-learning or lectures. There were people in town that had a shitty reputation for being greedy, corrupt, and self-centered, and it often overlapped with “the old boys club” of ancient white men, but I was always inspired to be honest, humble, and to do the right thing. It’s easy as society gets bigger and bigger to lose sight of some of the things that truly denote this sort of simple wisdom.
One of those things is the simple act of talking things out. No matter how pissed Chris or Warren might get with me, I always knew that we could talk it out, and somebody would help me see what I wasn’t seeing or to know what I didn’t know.
One of the hallmarks of a Logger Guru is oral tradition, because of all that.
Oral tradition is when stories are passed down from mentor to mentor, or elder to youth. I don’t want to speak for cultures other than my own, so I’ll speak to the kind I know. There was simply no written record of local knowledge or of the social contracts that bound the community together that had been formed over time. Be it a bar-room hero like my grandfather, having bullshits with his war buddies, or my dad spending hours upon hours (to my childhood boredom) talking with Raj in the Tru-Value, oral tradition is how small communities bonded and found consensus. I never understood why my dad spent so much time in our youth just… Talking to people. It didn’t matter if it was Mr. Drenka in his shop as we played in the parts warehouse out back, or someone on the reserve, he was always talking to people. God he talked for so goddamn long. No wonder I now love having a bullshit with new people, about new things, whenever I can.
Because I think that’s the third trait of the Logger Guru. An open mind.
No matter what happened, everybody around me would always take the time to talk things out. Seeing the point of view of “the other” was important, because otherwise that was how deep-seeded grudges could form, which poisoned and toxified the community. The grudges that did run, ran deep, because there was never any consensus or compromise. No one talked it out. The grudges just sat and festered.
But people like Chris, Ron, Anne Marie, my dad?
They were always willing to talk it out.
Maybe that’s the simple wisdom we’re missing in this ever faster modern world of ours. Sides divide, and then stay divided, because it’s easier to call names, cancel, or ostracize than to educate, to converse, and to find common ground. To forgive, to help, to change. To pay penance.
See, the whole reason for this article is exactly that.
Two of the people I’ve mentioned thus far? I can’t sugar coat it. They’re dead. And no matter how much I wish I could bring them back, to give them a second chance to find happiness and hope… Well, I can do many things, but I can’t resurrect the dead. I’m stuck promising them drinks in the afterlife.
The Logger Guru – those like the people like I’ve mentioned in this article? Patience, Honesty, Wisdom, Foresight, Compassion, Community, Consensus, Mentorship, Sustainability, Simplicity, Creativity, and Empathy for their fellow humans. They at some point or another have demonstrated them all. Living or dead.
See, the problem is that they’re dying off. And every time I stop and take a second look, someone else I know, somebody I would consider one of these Logger Gurus is gone.
My grandfather, for all his issues, held many of his stories unto death. Some of his war stories, for example, were only ever told verbatim on his deathbed, as he died from cancer. The ones that were not recorded are gone forever. Lost knowledge. Lost community.
Many people are happy with this. They see all of the old ways as obsolete, backwards, or wrong regardless of what it is. The speed and desire for self-fulfilling their destiny comes first and foremost. The things that a Logger Guru might value? Gone. Sustainability, Empathy, Mentorship, all gone. All that is left is the hunger for power and success.
I sit and watch as they go.
It’s painful, knowing you are witnessing entire histories and wisdoms disappearing in the snap of your fingers. I think that’s why I try to emulate what I witnessed growing up. If any of the lovely elders from the local community or the nation take the time to share their knowledge with me, if I ever hope to be like the Logger Gurus of my childhood, I must stop. I have to. I owe the time and attention to listen and learn all I can. To commit it to memory. To ensure that every speck of the older generations can be preserved as best I can. This series is part of that. So that maybe when I go, bits and pieces can still filter down to those who look to me for mentorship in my own way.
That sounds nice, to help people even when I’m dust and ashes.
Maybe when I go, by that point I’ll have become a Logger Guru, too.
…
Now.
Let’s get the fuck out of here.
-McRaeWrites
