The Walbran - CHAPTER 7 - Part 8

As Autumn came in the family hosted one last gathering, inviting every protester who wished to come for Thanksgiving. Randy’s development was full to capacity with 32 people for three days, a combination of protester and family friends, including the Johnsons. He had a full sound system and his black light theme in operation, plus a chain of Christmas lights on a blinker that ran the span of the rope that suspended the tarps on the center, as well as on both sides. There was a cross on the end with blinking red lights hanging from the same rope, not quite life size. Birthdays were celebrated, Jon’s included. Breakfast was an operation involving the cracking of over 60 eggs that were spiced with sautéed veggies and scrambled. Randy recruited the entire group to bring an inch thick steel cable over 100 feet in length down to the bottom of the valley where the South Walbran joined with the East using a new trail the family had built. He planned to erect a cable car there high above the river, so that the two camps would be joined by a trail. They even envisioned cliff jumping out of the cable car into the pool, at least 25 feet. It was more than sufficient depth. The pay off for the descent was the opportunity to swim in one of the most beautiful swimming holes in the world, if you could take the cold. Or you could just come there to look at it. Your option.













The last project for the weekend was a swing of bungee jump proportions. The camp on Glad Lake 9 at this time was also next to a steep roadside ridge, much like Rolly’s ridge but a little less steep and without any trees. Off in the distance at the top of the camp there was a tall tree that had fallen so it was wedged tightly between two others. It ran directly parallel to the ridge. It was perhaps 15 feet above the roadside and maybe about 25 feet away. Randy had decided that from this limb reaching into space they were going to build a swing. He even made a platform at the roadside so that when you got on the swing you jumped off at the edge and, after grazing the ground on the descent, you cleared a stump and at the top of the swing’s trajectory you were staring off into the woods with a gradual descent below you, a vista of an over 100 feet drop. If you fell at the top of the swing’s trajectory, you were looking at possibly lifelong injury or even death, for the drop into the jagged rocks and ruined trees below could easily be 40 feet depending on how you fell. Obviously it was going to be terrible. To build the swing Randy and a young man named Colin had to climb to the very end of the suspended log to hang it.



Jon put some of his personal carving on the base. (The swing still exists as an art piece.) Many of the protesters tried the swing and so did family members. Rahab’s foot caught underneath the swing on the way down between the swing and the ground, probably tearing a muscle internally. She was in unspeakable pain and by the following day blood had visibly pooled in her ankle, not a bruise but red.

People kept using the swing after she was injured. Randy tried it for a third time after that, and one of the ropes snapped on him at the top of the trajectory, when the swing was out at its highest point. He was sailing into space. The rope that snapped whipped past him and he had the wherewithall to grab it under his armpit, which enabled him to grab it with his other hand. He to managed to swing back to the ridge like Tarzan. Though he hit a rock face first in the process, he was relatively unhurt apart from the fact that he nearly passed out. Rahab’s injury in comparison was permanent. Jon was angry because he knew Colin had done the knots wrong for friction and abrasion; he had questioned Colin on whether he knew the proper technique going in. Colin had assured him he knew what he was doing. Undeterred Randy repaired the swing doing the knots correctly and as winter came in both Judah and Zeb had the moxy to try the swing on their own in the snow and made a point of filming what it was like to be on it.

After that weekend Randy, Sylvia, Rahab and Jon went into town for more supplies. Rahab could not walk. In town she had a dream that the camp was flooded under three feet of water and that the tarps were all gone. A windstorm came the next night. In the Walbran it was of such ferocity, in the range of 120 kilometer winds, that the entire camp was blown away. It was a dreadfully traumatizing experience for those who were still there, who were Jim W., the Johnson family, and the five younger Cummins children, a situation so overwhelming that they were helpless and nothing could be done. The tarps blew so wildly that night that Talitha was lifted off the ground trying to hold one of the lines. Children were sitting in the tents to keep them from blowing off the edge and they were still moving, edging closer. The next day they were going down the ridge to fish for things like cutlery, not to mention tarps and tents. They hadn’t had any sleep and were soaked through. When the storm hit the family in town got ready to go back as fast as they could, only to find devastation.

Randy was still determined to winter there that year and had agreed on Jon’s bender design. Boughs were being gathered for the purpose but it was getting cold enough coming into the start of November that Rahab and Sylvia took all the younger children into town. When the first traces of snow fell four RCMP officers appeared up the road and evicted the family for the last time.

The RCMP and Fletcher-Challenge had not kept true to their word, even though they went on the record. Even though the family were now in a clearcut where no logging activity could possibly take place. They evicted them on the pretext that they were going to put the road to bed, taking out culverts and replacing them with open ditches. This was a new ‘environmental’ measure that wasn’t done consistently (had more to do with recycling culverts), and it certainly wasn’t done by digging a 16-foot deep trench at the mouth of a spur line with 8-foot sides piled high. They made a particular point of digging up the entire length of road where the camp had been located for the 110 foot span so it could never be used as a camp site again. It was also done on the line of the ‘bridge to no where’, which insured many intrepid vehicles coming to the Walbran for the sake of recreation would pay a heavy price.

Only Judah, Randy and Zebedee remained in the camp when the RCMP came down the road. Judah filmed the exchange while they were given a deadline that forced many of the family to pull over 36 hours without sleep in order to pack the camp, as anything left after the deadline imposed was going to be destroyed. Randy bartered for time. The deadline was in three days at 6:00 am. At the close of the conversation the RCMP Corporal noticed the swing suspended at the side of the road, hooked for the next run. He did not know what to make of it and had to ask, "What is that?"

"Why, it’s a swing. Want to try, go for a ride?"

The RCMP officers stared at it in visible shock.

"What’s the matter? The protesters did it. We did it. Don’t have the____?" That is blank because Randy did not actually say "balls"; he said it through body language with a light chuckle. Even on cold blue pale film caught on a wintry day it was readily apparent that the Corporal turned a nice tinge of green.


Postscript: In 1998 a passive blockade in the Walbran was violently attacked.

The foreign multi-national Fletcher-Challenge divested its name by creating the Canadian subsidiary ‘TimberWest’ that intrinsically wrapped itself in the lives of local communities by such incentives as creating share packages for all of their workers. They set records for raw log export in 2005, and in 2006 the share dividends from this amounted to $76.3 million cash, which is how you buy community cooperation while simultaneously shutting down local saw mills and a thriving economy.

Incidentally the Canada-US softwood lumber agreement, which was arrived at because stumpage fees are so punitive in BC that it amounts to a massive public timber subsidy, just happens to exclude raw logs from the agreement, meaning the export taxes of %15 that apply to all products once quotas are reached do not apply to raw logs exported to the US. In effect the treaty is designed to depress value added manufacturing in Canada and creates a hefty incentive to export raw logs to the US, generating work for saw mills and pulp mills in the United States rather than Canada.

The decades long battle to make Canada’s economy a base function of ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ dependent on raw resource export has met with great success.

There are more photos of the Walbran Valley here.