A middle aged pear-ish woman with a demeanor and jolly appearance to match stepped out of the forest and came walking across the bridge to ‘no where’. She was not part of the group; the group had not been invited to step inside. All she could say was ‘you have to go in there. You have to see it. It’s amazing.’ Rahab expected a blissed out reaction such as this from going into the grand woods. She knew that was what it would be like, and had a sense of distance within her self that made her indifferent to the appeal, categorizing it the way she would a drug trip with the same sense of dismissal. She did not attempt to cross the bridge. Though obviously there was no time to do so, she felt immune to the experience as well, even though there was an interior tug that identified the woods with her childhood. All re-entered the bus without stepping across the bridge. The bus driver had clearly driven logging trucks all his life, was hardly decelerating to corner, and driving as if he was at the wheel of a jeep. He ripped them there and back at an incredible speed; Rahab noted at one point he averaged between 60 and 65 km. The only other driver she saw take the back wood roads like that turned out to by Syd Haskell, who had also been a logger in another life. That Syd’s rejoinder was about having three tire blowouts in one trip was no surprise at all. But that followed much later. The tour guide also promoted the second growth and how great it was doing and dismissed alder in the main stretch of Cowichan Valley. He also mentioned this happened to be some of the best growing territory in the country, as well as that the Cowichan Valley was recorded as receiving the most rainfall in all of Canada. Over the course of the next decade the stands he pointed out to them as doing so well were all clearcut.
Cowichan Valley
In 1991 they did the exact same road trip again in June with a small difference. This time they were going with Pam and Ted, who were part of an orienteering club, and grabbing the opportunity to take a hike with someone who knew the Walbran Valley (and how to get there). (If you zoom out on TJ Watt's google map, you can see how the Carmanah/Walbran is surrounded by clearcuts.) The hiking party consisted of Pam, Ted, Randy, Rahab, Judah and Zeb, and a foster kid of Pam and Ted’s named Jason. Phil H. was their guide. There was a difference going in; the main road was gated now. Maintaining a locked gate is illegal on logging roads because part of the deal for access to timber on Public Crown Land was/is that the logging companies build and maintain the roads to allow uninhibited access by the public into the backwoods. They are not permitted to cordon off public land from the public; approximately 2/3's of the land in BC is Public Crown Land and is considered to belong to the public. Despite this regulation the logging company had security at the new metal gate. They only let vehicles pass once they had counted the number of occupants, gotten the driver’s first and last name, and verified how long the group would be staying. (Needless to say they had ample time to take down license plates.)
Without any further ado they arrived at ‘the bridge to no where’; this time there was a camp at the end of the road, and people were being trained to rappel off the bridge. The first person Rahab saw and remembered turned out to be Kansas, who was American and studying to be a librarian. It was Rahab who recognized that this was the exact same place the logging tour had concluded the year before. This time the intent was to hike to ‘Maxine’s tree’, a giant Sitka Spruce (Canada’s second largest), that Syd had discovered himself, built a trail to and named after his daughter. Midway to the tree they ran into a large group of hikers from the main camp, who were camping at a site called Giggling Spruce. They later learned that this group had a lot of foreigners who had taken off into the woods because Canadian Immigration literally flew to the bridge by helicopter in order to check everyone’s visa’s and green cards, with the intent of deporting anyone who wasn’t supposed to be there. Some commitment considering this was 45 kilometers off road into the back woods.
While they’d experience no inclimate weather the entire drive up, it rained for most of the hike, which lasted more than five hours. The cable car at the water crossing was ‘down’ (a two person affair manually operated hand over hand with a rope), and they had had to cross the Walbran ‘Creek’ by building stacks of rocks in the water to hop across. Needless to say everyone got pretty wet by the time the day was out. In their usual venturesome way, the kids from the family who were on the hike decided they were going to try and trek down the giant cascade sequence of the waterfall they had encountered on the way up, rather than take the trail down. With the rain slick on what turned out to be a brown algae on nearly all the rock surfaces, this turned out to be dangerous, and the trek was longer than anticipated; the falls were a cascading series that lasted over 100 meters. As a pun they had been named for the logging company in the area, a foreign multi-national named Fletcher-Challenge who was actually from New Zealand but whose logging practices were so environmentally degrading they were banned from working in New Zealand. So the waterfall had been dubbed ‘Fletcher Falls’, in the hope of being predictive.
Despite all this the family had the time of their lives, and unanimously decided where they were going to be that summer. Having foregone camping the year prior they were pretty determined to make a summer of it, and now they knew where; there were no camping fees and thanks to Syd, an excellent set of trails it would take days to finish. They had never seen a place so magnificent. They walked out converted just like the woman Rahab had encountered the year before. It was original Old Growth, the real forest, and they were going to camp there. They had never seen so many big trees in their lives; it was a redolent place, an ‘Explosion of Life’ as her sister would say. To Rahab it felt like coming home. It was like getting to return to what she had loved about living in the country as a child, which was wandering solitary, except amplified because this was the original country.
They went out as a family the following week with the ancient camping trailer that had cost $50 and taken Randy a great deal of fixit time. It ran the danger of fish-tailing on the highway if you got to a speed between 80 and 90 km, which trust me had been a very exciting moment accompanying on a motorcycle. It had come into its own housing their great grandma on a previous camping trip. They also brought a few more tents, as it would take three to house the entire family. The first morning they awoke to find an RCMP officer (Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada’s national police force under federal jurisdiction) with a large video camera taking video footage of their campsite, to the extent of filming the interior of their car (it was an old green Ford Grand Torino). He went through the entire camp applying the same level of scrutiny to everyone there. The morning after that, the first arrest at a logging road blockade in the Walbran took place; Mira was arrested for chaining herself to the underside of a broken down car. The first day she and Dana had chained themselves to a stump, and the RCMP and loggers had left taking no action. Mira was the first in a series of 69 (anyone else have a different official number then please tell me as I am not sure) people arrested there. The second person to be arrested in the Walbran Valley was Dana K. (am I right about this arrest sequence?), who was only sixteen years old. Rahab, Zeb and Talitha got up in the morning to be present at the blockade in support where Mira was arrested. Zeb cried openly. Back at her work shift Rahab was shocked to learn that their faces had been on the National, television news Canada wide. It was a while before she got back though. It was also a long while before she learned from Barb that the protesters’ first impression of her, thanks to the fact that she had shaved her head the only time in her life the week prior to coming out there (which was a saving grace out in the woods), it was assumed that she was tough; they speculated she must be a serious dyke.
That was how the family ended up smack in the middle of a rainforest civil disobedience blockade that headlined throughout the province and sometimes the country. It was as inadvertent as their assay into the West Bank had been, and about as immediate. It was not long before their parents attended a blockade as well and received their ‘crash’ education on RCMP parlance in such a confrontation, which included swearing like sailors to get immediate movement. It was a real surprise and something Randy never forgot; he was there that first day as an observer and polite. They were however eminently prepared for such a confrontation. Thanks to having lived in the West Bank, the family was not intimidated. They already had the recording drill down; every encounter they had with the RCMP and loggers was captured on film. Randy was not sure how to address the wholesale destruction of nature and the hostility they encountered. He prayed about it and offered the question to God. He wasn’t jumping into becoming civilly disobedient himself, and asked how they as a family should offer their support?
What they ended up doing was that they ran the ‘Walbran Hotel’. It was a little bit of a borrowed sensibility from ‘Field of Dreams’- ‘if you build it, he will come’. As the ‘Walbran Hotel’ they fed, housed and dried anyone who needed it. Getting dry was the common challenge. It didn’t matter how backwoods you might consider yourself to be, after three days of unrelenting rain, everything is soaked through. Tent flies and tarps do not make a difference in the woods, not unless you have two tarps placed properly, for you ground tarp must reach less area than the tarp you suspend over the tent. You have to be exceedingly well equipped. This however will not get you through a winter. From the outset the family camped on the roadside and not in the woods, which was Randy’s decision. They never set up tents in the forest. It would come into play as a fundamental, pretty much necessary difference when dealing long term. And without question, the Walbran Valley was rainier than what was touted ‘the rainiest place in Canada’, the Cowichan Valley. As a west coast watershed, the Walbran met those clouds off the Pacific first. It had simply never had a rain meter to measure the deluge.
The first challenge of the wilderness in the Walbran’s terms is hypothermia. When the wood on the ground is waterlogged for the majority of the year and hardly has a chance to dry in the summer window, what use is it for drying and keeping warm? The answer is, it isn’t. It actually takes months to dry or cure properly. Many people burned the wood, but without drying beforehand and an accumulated process, that burning would not give off warmth. It was something the family learned a lot about, for it was a continual struggle that became Randy’s prime obsession. Warmth is on the bottom rung of Maslow’s pyramid of human needs, those of vital necessity. It took a great deal of effort to develop a warm fire, something that people could gravitate to when there was little else, and use to get themselves dry and warm again. In effect the ‘Walbran Hotel’ provided a supporting backbone to the protest movement. The Walbran Hotel caused enough strain on the family financially that since they were in an effort to save some of the last remaining greatest and largest forest stands (in terms of the individual trees) in all of Canada, Randy felt in good conscience about applying to welfare for assistance. It was nearly the first time for the family ever being on the dole; the other had been when Rahab was little; it had only been for 3 months. Being less regulated at the time, the paper applications all went into one tray. The family knew a social worker who worked there, John B.'s mother Ursula. She was actually a member of their little church. Randy told her the day he would apply and when it would be in the docket. She simply rifled through and picked up their file and became their personal case-worker, an act that would be impossible today.
Postscript: the youtube link, 'The Road Stops Here' - opens following a road that passes through clearcut after clearcut; that is the road that leads to the Walbran Valley.
There are pictures of the Walbran Valley here.
The Walbran Valley Reunion site, which has pictures of the protest can be found here.
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