An Interview with Bruce Hornidge

Bruce Edward Hornidge was born in 1948 in Belleville, Ontario, an Air Force brat growing up where his father was stationed in Gimli, Manitoba, and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Bruce finished school in 1967, joining his brother Brian at MacMillan Bloedel’s Kennedy Lake logging division at Ucluelet on the West Coast of Vancouver Island. He was married on a very unusual snowy day in March 1973 and, with his wife, Minnie, raised two boys and a girl. He felled trees for twenty-six years. After losing his job in 1997, he became a security guard in Campbell River, Vancouver, and Vanderhoof, British Columbia. Bruce and his wife, now the Rev. Minnie Hornidge, live in Glen Williams, Ontario. There, Bruce gardens and knits. And writes.

Q: What allures writers to the memoir genre?

Initially I started what became the memoir Loggerheads as a legacy project over a process of decades, I was thinking of my family. I wanted to write a story down about their old man.

The Clayoquot incident bothered me, it was a disrupting time in my life. I wasn’t sure what would become of my writing, but I knew I wanted to help people to understand more fully the worker’s perspective of the War in the Woods, not just what they’d heard.

I wanted to talk about the process of working with management, trying to fix the things you could see that you knew were wrong. I wanted to inform people, to push for the environment in a responsible manner respecting that our employment is important.

Q: What was the War in the Woods in Clayoquot Sound about?

Environmental interest groups felt there was too much forest clearing taking place too fast, so they wanted to get the word out through the media and have people obstructing in a meaningful manner to get the word out to the public forum. They believed there was overcutting in the forest, and devastation to the environment world-wide. Clayoquot Sound fit the bill as a place to stage these issues. It was a beautiful tourist area, there was already a protest element there of people who felt passionately about the environment, as well as an established logging industry, and everything was visible, right down to the cleared patch called the Black Hole. They wanted to get government attention on the issue by bringing masses of people to protest in a small, focused area, and Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island seemed a logical protest site for the cause of saving forests worldwide.

On the other side, there was 150 jobs at stake in a small community that shutting an industry down would have a devastating effect. Even today there are people whose retirements should have been much more secure than they turned out to be with the shuttering of the Kennedy Lake division in Clayoquot Sound.

Q: Are there still jobs for loggers?

There are still jobs for loggers, on a very much reduced harvest volume and it is highly regulated by forest management rules. They’re using specialized harvest methods, helicopter hauling of logs, selection cutting of trees are used. This is under close oversight by government. There’s small patches, selection type logging where you leave standing trees – it’s definitely improvement for the forest management. It’s done with special contractors on specific sites as the contracts get approval. Once in a while people scratch their heads when they see slash piles of wood being burnt because they thought all that was far behind us.

Q: What happens when there are no more trees to cut down for loggers?

The simple answer is that if there were no more trees, there would be no more logging. Nobody wants it to get to a state of “no more trees.” Trees, especially growing ones, make the oxygen we live on. There are long cycles for these things, and companies need to respect the length of that cycle of regrowth.

A lot of trees, especially on places like Vancouver Island, are in zones where you can’t get at them unless you use helicopters, lots of money, specialized crews, lots of gas. On Sutton Pass, between Port Alberni and Ucluelet, B.C., there are still lots of areas of what we know as “old growth.”

Maybe another question is what if there were no forest products? You want to live in a plastic house? We can make it out of bamboo, but where does the bamboo come from and how do we get that, and what do we cut down to make room for the bamboo?

Silviculture should be huge. There should always be silviculture, and an effort to make sure there’s always trees.

Sure, there will be new building inventions and better use of available fiber. Replanting forests will maintain the fiber in its cycles.

Q: Today, we see many realtors who cut down trees of beautiful lots just to make them more visible to potential buyers. Why are they not being shamed the way you were?

There’s the old dilemma Joni Mitchell sang about—they pave paradise and put up a parking lot, right? I think it’s the scale of the situation. A developer wants to cut down some trees, it doesn’t go any further than that. It’s in the hands of those who manage public lands as well – nobody’s putting condos up in Cathedral Grove, for example. Usually this is protested on a local scale by small groups and local media. Attitude could be “tis what it is,” land and homes are needed. Usually there is then a court resolution. Ultimately down in the States, they’ve paved paradise to a horrible scale—the entire Eastern Seaboard is massively overdeveloped. It’s a population issue, to a great extent. Then you look at regions of the world where forest destruction is nearly unabated, with far fewer regulations. Getting everyone in the world to respect these issues is complicated.

Q: Tell us about your experience as a logger and why you first became a logger.

I was initially quite mercenary about it—I wanted to find security in living my life in a job, and I wanted to buy a car, which is a personal thing. I hoped to go to university, so I needed much money, my family paying for that wasn’t really an option. I became enamoured with the money and I stayed logging. I loved working outside, working alone, making my own way doing the job. I loved the community—once you get married you settle in and proceed at a job you’ve decided to do as a career. Forestry careers are looking different these days, with degrees available in silviculture for example.

Q: Why was logging such a huge industry at one time?

There was a country to be built. People were pouring into North America. What would homes be made of—plastic? aluminum? There was a hugely expanded industry for the Second World War, for plywood for the Rosie the Riveters to make gliders of in places like Port Alberni, BC. Then after World War 2, as new construction for homes and cities and generally wood products were needed around the world, there was huge growth, aided by new technology like new kinds of chain saws. After the 80s you had special equipment come in—just like every industry where machines were reducing the number of workers. There were helicopters, skylines, balloons, super snorkels, long-lined loaders, hydraulic machines that were much more flexible and movable. For fallers, there were smaller and more high speed machines. All of those things reduced the number of guys and machine operators working out there.

Q: How would you describe logging to someone unfamiliar with the term?

First there’s assessing the forest, engineering, mapping, roadwork. Then there’s the falling, which is a faller with a chain saw, cutting into the tree in the safest way possible, to get it to fall in the best position possible, in order to save the fibre rather than smashing it. The limbs have to be removed—safely, again. As to getting the wood out of the forest, you can get into lots of different descriptions, from timberjacks to hydraulic loading machines that go walking into the forest like Star Wars vehicles, with wide tracks able to go into flatlands and some mountainsides, and they physically throw the logs to the road, or you have a very long loading reach for the loader to cast the grapples way out there and move it to the road.

Certainly the wages skyrocketed up for the falling groups, especially in the 1980s. My argument was doing a professional job, not just exploding them down the hill to get them off the stump and on the ground faster. As I mentioned in Loggerheads, that wasn’t always how it was done. The companies and contractors had their own reasons for wanting to “get ‘er done” for maximum profit.

Primarily the harvesting processes of trees which are moved from the forests to the mills, to the consumer. This requires mapping, road construction, harvesting, movement of logs and replanting. Huge machinery and many workers, though fewer now.

Q: What are some of the issues you discuss in your book, Loggerheads?

The proper and sustainable use of the forest fiber, bucking and producing logs, consideration of Protection of fish creeks or minimize the effects of harvesting, and safety for all the crews. All industries have their own conflicts that are a part of life and working.

No matter what you do, right off the top, if a man does any kind of work he’s going to make mistakes—that’s what they teach you straight off in first aid training. You try and avoid those mistakes from past experiences and investigations, and you still have to apply that. You play the percentages—yes I can outrun that, yes I can clear the escape trail. Close calls? We can all talk about that. You might talk to the guys for a learning exercise, but you don’t want to get your wife or family scared, or to burden them. They might notice something’s odd with you after work – maybe you’re grumpier or edgy. Some would consume alcohol, or book off work. Me, I smoked a little too much for a couple of hours after a rough day.

Q: Were there any pros to logging that those on the opposite would have approved of?

Had they looked into it, the environmental lobby would have seen that there were those concerned with silviculture and protection of the forest and the fish. We had children and grandchildren too, and we lived right there, so we had reason to get it right. The bigger problem was probably that company policy and strategy and management and training needed to change as well, for the betterment of the environment, but the underlying profit motive was a hindrance to that. They were, in effect, dinosaurs that had their day.

It became forlorn hope as all we heard was “save the trees” and “eradicate the loggers of Clayoquot Sound.”

I hope people can see from this memoir that we endured the wrath and we were eradicated, as least our jobs were.

Clayoquot Sound, I think we could have logged it in a manner that would be agreed upon—at the start of the War in the Woods, I thought that’s where we were headed, an agreement towards more flexibility, doing a better job, learning from past mistakes. A place to test better methods, and I thought we would have been retained as workers. The challenge was that the companies found ways to reduce manpower and increase productivity, and didn’t take the important things into consideration. As loggers, you have to do what you can do to meet company expectations. We wanted to protect jobs and workplace safety, but also to protect the forest’s future for everyone.

Q: What would you like readers to learn from your memoir?

I want readers to understand fallers and loggers are real people—we were then, we are now. Not tree killers, but people with professionalism and feelings and families, whose jobs were vacuumed out from underneath us. There were some conflicts within the industry, which there always will be between bosses and crew no matter what your line of work is, for everybody that goes working. A lot of this pushback shocked me at the time, as I was in a dangerous job and I was responsible for myself. I wondered why someone would pushing me for volume and to “get ‘er done.”

And while I’m at it, I’d like to eradicate something of my own—I’d like to eradicate the myths—the notion that we were heartless tree killers. We wanted to respect First Nations traditional trees, respect the fiber and respect the fish creek, and respect nature.

A lot of the media coverage or the advertising the environmental lobby put out at the time was just wrong, or not the full story. The concept of clear cutting, made out to be so shocking, was for safety reasons. Underbrush and flying debris kill fallers; that doesn’t get publicized. My brother married a woman whose first husband was a faller who was killed in a falling accident.

I wanted to eradicate the shorting of safety rules over expediency, the push to get ‘er done for productivity and profit regardless. We developed falling techniques and technology to protect fish creeks.

This is ongoing, with wonderful efforts to rebuild fish habitat, towards silviculture.

If people are really worried about devastation, look in Russia, South America at vast swathes of unchecked logging and rainforest destruction.

Q: If logging was a career that could last forever, would you still be a logger?

God willing, I’d have loved that. It was dangerous work, and the longer you were in it, the worse your odds were against being injured. MY plan was to fall trees until I was 55 years old, then do some other powersaw job until retirement at 65. I would have probably then gone to log cutting in a sorting area, if I’d had my druthers. Sooner or later, though, your reflexes and strength and speed aren’t what they were. However, my logging story ended too abruptly at age 50. That was not my choice, and I felt very disoriented, and I go into detail about that in Loggerheads. I actually enjoyed logging, working productively in the outdoors, contributing to society and community. A couple of close calls, but overall, it was good work, and I did it as well as I could.

Q: What inspired you to share your story as a logger?

Over the past three decades, I’ve been trying to fix the things I could see, somehow address what I thought was wrong, unfair, or inequitable with the industry as it was then, as best as I could explain it, and to tell the more specific story about my experience in falling trees in one of the most beautiful places in the world. And I wanted to give a true picture of the experience of the loggers’ side of the Clayoquot Sound “War in the Woods.”

Q: Where can readers find you and your memoir online?