Thursday, July 29, 2010

Log Booms on the Fraser

Log booms on the Fraser this morning lay close in to the tree-lined shore. The river was blue and utterly calm. The long line of booms along the irregular shape of the sandy river bank formed what looked like a series of ponds, peaceful and untouched.

Log booms. Canada's wealth of wood has been so much a part of our history, used to be so much a part of our economy in BC.

In the fifties and sixties, two or three of the huge logs then being harvested in the Skeena Valley were often enough to fill a logging truck. Through my northern childhood, the busy trucks plied the dusty gravel roads, carrying logs to mills running three shifts a day.

Throughout my childhood, the log booms in Kitimat Bay, in the Skeena, in Prince Rupert seemed so normal. I thought they had always been there, would always be there.

Flying in to the Terrace-Kitimat airport after some years away, I was shocked to see how the mountainsides that ringed the valley had been logged off -- clear as a shaven chin.

In 2007, in the interior of BC, I witnessed what the pine beetle had done. Mile after mile, hill after hill, the raw red and gray scars of disease encroached on every stand of healthy forest.

Today, as I regarded the idyllic-looking log booms from the vantage point of the Sky Train window, they reminded me of BC's forests, the background of my life, once so very much taken for granted.

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