Remembrances

Lytton, British Columbia, like many villages, is rich with lore and spirited characters. In 1858, a Nlaka’pamux chief named Cexpen’nthlEm negotiated a treaty with invading American gold miners. Not long after, the ranchers Joe and Catherine Watkinson had the first of their eleven children, whose many descendants still call the place home. After the Second World War, Lyttonites called Doris Loring “Gramma Love” because she greeted everyone with “Hello, love.” A decade later, the Manders boys built a tree house, popular with local kids, to stash nudie mags and sweets. And then there was Dunstan “Rattlesnake Dan” Raphael, who in the 1960s “yahooed all the way down” a sandy hill on horseback while participating in “suicide races.”

Peter Edwards moved to town as a child when his father, a physician, took a job at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. The future Toronto Star beat reporter left after high school. The playwright Kevin Loring, on the other hand, hails from Lytton “in the most elemental sense.” He grew up “in the shadow of Jackass Mountain” and has Nlaka’pamux ancestry. In Lytton, the two depict a colourful community — one whose many confrontations with fires over the years, as Edwards put it, has turned the town into “a place where anything that endures is bound to be loved but nothing is really precious.”

The book begins just after the last ice age and ends in 2022, one year after the area’s most devastating wildfire in recent memory, when the retired school principal Denise O’Connor won the mayoral election with eighty-seven votes. Many anecdotes gathered here are nostalgic in tone; others speak to abuses at the nearby St. George’s Residential School and to the racism experienced by Chinese immigrants. (In the early 1900s, for example, the railway patrolman Giuseppe Taverna really wanted a chicken coop next to his house, so he spent twenty-six years lobbying Ottawa to allow him to buy neighbouring land, which held a Chinese joss house.)

In the summer of 2021, officials declared the village a heritage site and the soil beneath it toxic. Twenty-four months later, some residents returned to try to square what they saw with what they could remember. “This charred layer that was the Lytton of my entire life is just another layer in the geography,” Loring writes, “and the Lytton I remember a slowly fading hologram in my mind.” Yet he, like Edwards, is convinced this place will rise from the ashes.

With The Last Logging Show, Aaron Williams chronicles a community lost to changing times rather than to flames. In 1961, his paternal grandfather, John, founded Wedeene River Contracting on the B.C. mainland. It went bankrupt in the late ’80s after Japan, the chief importer of its timber, entered a recession. Several years later, Aaron’s maternal grandmother, Joy Dover, became a partner in a small salvage operation outside Sandspit, on Haida Gwaii, where she paid her ten-year-old grandson five dollars an hour to sweep sawdust. Growing up as he did, Williams often heard forestry workers describe the freedom of the bush: “There was an energy to their recollections that drew me in.” The allure eventually faded; after he graduated from high school in 2008, Williams moved to the East Coast to study journalism.

In the following decade, Williams returned to Haida Gwaii to profile a dozen employees and contractors of Husby Forest Products, which procures timber in Port Clements, forty kilometres south of Masset; his father, Kelly, worked there as a foreman until retiring in June 2024. Williams covers the industry’s evolution, largely from the mid-twentieth century, when a business might hire a worker solely to look after its tires, to the present, when hoe chuckers and other machines have axed jobs and when those still hanging on feel caught between the old ways and the new.

Logging on the archipelago started relatively late, in the early 1900s. Fifty years later, the province had been “more or less logged into oblivion.” The Council of the Haida Nation was formed in 1974 to curb the unsustainable practices: “Many Haida were loggers, but it was becoming difficult to reconcile making a living with what was happening to where they lived,” Williams writes. “For a decade these tensions simmered.” Protesters put up blockades in 1985, 2005, and 2017, when one demonstrator told Kelly that “they’d had enough.” Both factions were afraid of losing a way of life: the Haida, their right to the land, and the loggers, their right to extract its resources.

With a keen eye, Williams juxtaposes nature and industry. He relates how silence once filled a forest when equipment was shut down — the crew’s “ears not yet adjusted to the sound of birds calling and a creek burbling.” He explains how a veteran logger can produce “a perfect melon slice of wood” almost by feel. Williams describes returning a chainsaw to its owner as if he “handed a crying infant back to its mother.” He sketches the environment in a similar way, beautiful and evocative in equal measure. Flying above the Dixon Entrance, the strait between B.C. and Alaska, he notes how “the snow-capped, timber-rich Coast Mountains meet the ocean and yawn away to the north.” Before a nasty boat crossing of Masset Sound, he hears wind “squeeze through the edges of the windows and give a foreboding whistle.”

The men who populate the pages of The Last Logging Show are almost stereotypical in their masculinity: smoking and shrugging in response to hazardous labour, terse and confident when answering difficult questions. In one sombre recollection, a tree limb struck a new father in the head and killed him after two of Williams’s uncles had tried to hurry him along. “It fucks with you so bad,” one of them said of the guilt. But the attitude at the time “was work first, people second, feelings . . . who gives a shit.” Or, as Williams’s dad would put it, “Drink a few whiskeys and go to work the next day.”

Ultimately, any family or community would be lucky to have its history neatly collected in a readable volume such as The Last Logging Show or Lytton. The trees near Port Clements will regrow, just as the homes in Lytton will get rebuilt. Neither place will be the same, of course, but that future’s for another book.