Loggerheads: A Memoir

Description

“For a decade, the issue of forest and land use in British Columbia raged like a forest fire . . .”

Shamed by demonstrators as a “tree-killer,” Clayoquot Sound tree faller Bruce Hornidge faced soul-searing losses of identity and family livelihood. This gripping, irony-laden memoir of a life spent harvesting in the beauty of the forest deals frankly with the nearly invisible human fallout of the inevitable move away from a resource-based economy and the impact on one man’s psyche.

Hornidge recalls his career as a faller in the West Coast forestry industry from the unique and sometimes irreverent point of view of the many loggers in Ucluelet and Tofino whose forestry careers were cut short on the other side of the demonstrators’ picket lines amid government and company doublespeak.

Three decades after The War in the Woods, we think we know what happened, and we’ve been told why. Here’s what we were never told.

Reviews

“Part treatise, part manual, part eco-memoir, Bruce Hornidge’s Loggerheads is a timely, timeless read for lovers of trees. Richly shared in crisp prose, this book stands as a sentinel, evergreen to the nature and industry our forests provide.” – Bill Arnott, author, the Gone Viking series and A Season on Vancouver Island

Loggerheads is a deep dive into the life of a logger who lived through one of the most contentious confrontations over old growth logging on Vancouver Island. Bruce Hornidge invites the reader to walk a kilometre in the caulk boots he made his living wearing. He exposes the many forces at work in the struggle for public opinion during the War in the Woods, tempering his take with humour and introspection, poking fun at his own foibles—and acknowledging common ground where it existed. A compelling read for people from all perspectives—and a bridge to deeper understanding of the men who risk their lives to provide us with the lumber and other wood products we rely on.” – Derek Hanebury, author, Something Else Altogether, Rough Diamond, Ginger Goodwin: Beyond the Forbidden Plateau, and Nocturnal Tonglen

“Loggerheads is a candid account of the ‘Clayoquot Sound land-use scuffle’ between logging protestors and forestry giant MacMillan Bloedel, and the ‘world media hype’ that accompanied it. It’s a peppery book, competently written by a man who had (caulk) boots on the ground…Loggerheads is insightful, well-documented, and at times poetic, and as its passionate author—now retired and living in Ontario—fittingly says, his ‘personal clarification of events’ has been ‘Written, ironically, not on tables of stone like commandments, but on paper. From wood.’” – Shelley A. Leedahl, SaskBooks Reviews