LOGGER HEADS By Bruce Hornidge
On the thirtieth anniversary of “The War in the Woods,” a new memoir recalls events from a Clayoquot Sound tree faller’s point of view
Thirty years after the War in the Woods in Clayoquot Sound, career tree faller Bruce Hornidge’s memoir of events, Loggerheads, will be published on October 17, 2023, by Regina’s, Saskatchewan’s Endless Sky Books. Book-launch events are planned for Port Alberni, Ucluelet, and Nanaimo on Vancouver Island from October 25 to 30.
After more than two decades harvesting in the beauty of the forest, Hornidge was “loggershamed” as a “tree-killer” and faced soul-searing losses of identity and livelihood, part of the human fallout of the inevitable move away from a resource-based economy. Loggerheads is written from the unique, sometimes humorous, and even irreverent point of view of one of the many loggers in Ucluelet and Tofino whose forestry careers were cut short on the other side of the demonstrators’ picket lines and government and company doublespeak.
“In a three-week window, decades ago, I produced the bulk of this book in the form of a paper called ‘The Nightmare.’ My goal was a story that is truthful, personal, and encompasses many of the issues in this complex problem,” Hornidge says.“Three decades after The War of the Woods, we know what happened, and we’ve been told why. There’s a lot we were never told.”
Hornidge adds that the logging industry isn’t the only resource-based industry that has been subjected to shaming. “By sharing my story as an ex-Clayoquot Sound forest worker, I hope to help people understand the issues surrounding resource-based industries from a broader perspective than that spun by the media, where those opposed to logging are painted as the brave biblical David versus the Goliath of us ‘evil tree-killers,’” he said.
Hornidge acknowledges the logging industry wasn’t blameless. “A careless approach was adopted by many as the forestry industry picked up speed during what was considered an era of largely unrestricted logging. Some of those true stories can be found in this book’s pages.
“For a decade, the issue of forestland use in British Columbia raged like a forest fire. Starting small, it generated smoke and mirrors and a world media hype that came to hang like a stalled hurricane over a tiny, beautiful corner of the world known as Clayoquot Sound—and the largest act of civil disobedience in Canada to that date. It was a storm that just wouldn’t quit,” Hornidge writes in the opening pages of Loggerheads.“In that brief, tangled era, with my livelihood hanging in the balance, the pressures of life built to such a point that I believed either I’d have a mental breakdown or my emotions would break loose and lash out, with real consequences.”
Raw emotions of distrust and abandonment welled up, and, in his distress, Hornidge even toyed briefly with twisted ideas of how he could give the cause its “fifteen minutes of fame” on the world stage. “Thank goodness cooler heads prevailed.”
Hornidge concludes there is hypocrisy evident in both the anti-resource utilization camp and those in favour of resource-based industry. “Those who live in wood houses shouldn’t throw stones,” he says with a smile.
Loggerheads received a warm review from Bill Arnott, author of the Gone Viking series and A Season on Vancouver Island. “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,” Arnott says.
Loggerheads is available from most bookstores, online and off. It can also be purchased directly from Endless Sky Books at www.endless-sky-books.com or Shadowpaw Press at www.shadowpawpress.com.
About the Author
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.
