[You] can’t destroy the livelihood of the men to protect the environment. There has to be a compromise, but there also have to be some major changes in ... our expectations ... Our expectations have always been high … and we can’t continue that way.
—JEAN BROWN,
CHAIR, COMMUNITY FOREST COMMITTEE
THE ONLY CEMETERY AT THE LAKE is a small one on Indian land. The non’Indian people who have lived and died at the lake in the hundred years or so that have passed since Charlie Green and Bill Swinerton arrived there are buried in cemeteries in Duncan, Ladysmith or Nanaimo.
“Jungle Jim” Lewis is buried in the cemetery just south of Nanaimo at Cedar. The hard-driving, hard-working boss logger with no tolerance for laziness got his nickname “because he used to holler at the men and you could hear him all over the hillside.” When his daughter Jean delivered the eulogy at his funeral, she used his nickname with affection. Jungle Jim had been quite a guy.
Like many loggers who came to the lake during the Depression, Jim Lewis started out on the prairies. The village of Entwhistle, west of Edmonton, wasn’t much of a place, however, and the land Jim was trying to farm wasn’t much either. When he heard from a friend on Vancouver Island that things were opening up in the logging industry, he stole a ride on a freight train, leaving his wife, Rachel, and his two daughters behind until he could afford to bring them out a better way.
As soon as he reached Cowichan Lake, Jim knew he’d made the right decision. One of the first people he met was Carl Swanson, who by this time owned some cabins on the North Arm. Swanson gave Jim a job, some temporary accommodation and the money to bring his family out from Alberta.
Not long after their arrival, the Lewises, in keeping with what had become a rite of passage at the lake, moved into a rented floathouse. They settled into village life. They had two more children. Jim worked steadily, filling in the gaps in his wages caused by regular shutdowns in the woods by racing over to Youbou to get a job in the mill. The men who were fighting for a union so that loggers would have a steadier income had Jim’s whole-hearted support.
Jim and his family’s psychological support came from a small group of people who met to worship together each week in the Lewises’ home, but despite their closeness, Rachel’s emotional health was precarious. As her condition deteriorated, many of the motherly duties of the home fell to Jean, the eldest of her four children, still only a child herself.
When Jean was fifteen years old she met Sam Brown, a twenty-year-old logger from a coal-mining family in Nanaimo. It was love at first sight. They married in April of the following year, and their first child was born in October.
And lots of people, including my parents, didn’t think the marriage was going to last… But here we are forty-six years later … Both our parents were very religious, so it was a commitment for life.
Houses were in short supply in the village just after the Second World War, especially for a young couple with little income. The Browns had a baby and then Jean was pregnant again, and all they could find to live in was a one-room cabin.
That meant the bed was in the corner and you had to pack your water and there was an outside toilet. We were just glad to have a roof over our heads. But it was obvious with two babies that we had to have some more space.
They had all the qualifications for a house on “Diaper Hill,” except that they didn’t have a penny of the $400 down payment. Then a family friend loaned them the money, to be paid back at $25 a month, and the two young people moved with their babies into one of the Hundred Houses. But despite the postwar abundance of jobs, the monthly payment was often a problem because of the shutdowns.
We had to save enough to do when there was shutdowns. So we never had a chance to get ahead. You just accepted it. If you could work till the first of December, you considered yourself lucky. And then you would count on July, August and sometimes into September being shut down because of [the] heat.
It wasn’t always easy for the lake’s few remaining farmers, either. Eighty-year-old Henry March had handed his place over to his second son, Charlie, whom lake people said was “a chip off the old block.” Charlie’s elder brother, Jack, had returned to Cowichan Lake from service in the First World War, but had been killed seven years later while logging for McDonald and Murphy. The Marches never had been able to rely solely on the farm for their income, so Charlie was prepared to do whatever job would bring in a little money.
The Green family had found it just as difficult to make ends meet. During the Depression, a reluctant Trevor had taken a job as a clerk at Gordon’s Store after admitting that a six-year-long venture in the farm produce business was going nowhere. Working in the outdoors at Greendale was how Trevor had wanted to live after a miserable three-year sojourn at a Victoria high school. Trevor’s mother, Louisa, had been supplementing the family’s farming income since 1917 by running a summer camp at Greendale; guests lived in tents or in one of the cottages the Greens had built around the property. In 1929, when Trevor returned from the city, his mother had bought a Model A Ford Phaeton with side curtains for bad weather and a luggage rack on the back to haul feed from Duncan, and the family had gone into the business of raising and delivering farm produce.
Trevor made a twice-daily round of the village, delivering milk, eggs, the occasional order of cream and butter and, in season, apples, pears and crabapples. So dedicated was he that when the river flooded the village, as it did periodically, he completed his deliveries on foot, wearing a bathing suit.
There were other duties that gave him great pleasure: bringing in wood for the house and the summer cottages, and clearing more hay land to provide feed for the cattle. There had been stumps to clear at Greendale ever since the E&N had taken timber off in the nineteenth century. Since the family couldn’t afford dynamite or a bulldozer, Trevor dug out the roots and burned each stump until it was gone. As a much older man, he remembered how content he had been clearing land and burning out stumps. “Even now I regret the fact that there are almost no stumps worth burning … I seemed to find my soul when I was engaged in burning out stumps.”
When the Greens realized in 1935 that the farm could not support them, Trevor took the job at Gordon’s Store. It turned out to be not so bad after all. With $75 a month in his pocket, he could pay his parents for board and save for a new car. He stayed at the store for almost thirty years, during which he met and married Yvonne Loutet, a schoolteacher with a talent for amateur theatricals.
At the party given to celebrate their marriage, Yvonne and Trevor were given a Westminster chimes clock by Trevor’s fellow employees at Gordon’s Store. Working with customers had not been easy for the shy man, but he had overcome his discomfort. Sometimes he thought he had overcome it too well; he was beginning to feel like a fixture. Someday, he thought, someone would come into the store to show a stranger around and would say,
That door goes into the meat department, and if you go upstairs, that’s the accounting department, there’s where you pay your hydro bills upstairs, and there’s the dry goods department over on that side, and that’s Trevor Green over there, and down over here is where you can get hardware.
A rift with his employer in 1963 cinched his decision to change his life. He stamped out in a “white-hot rage” and, realizing that he couldn’t use his store-owned vehicle any more, began to walk home to Greendale and the wife and two children dependent on his soon-to-be-nonexistent salary. As he walked, the rage turned into euphoria.
It was most extraordinary that with every step I took I felt I was stepping higher and higher and higher, floating, floating home on a cloud of … I don’t know what—triumph. All the worry and the perplexity, and how to make ends meet and when was I going to get paid, all that faded away and I felt free and at last I was finding myself.
A chance to work at the Mesachie Lake Forestry Research Station turned into a dream job. Although many of the tasks were mundane, he was in the outdoors where he wanted to be. He had always loved plants; the little flowers he tried to grow were “real to him.” He learned the botanical names for all the trees. He characterized his work as “delightfill, instructive and interesting,” describing his duties with the forth-rightness and precision he used in all his conversations. When he retired in 1977 he continued to go back every Sunday as a watchman and did so into his eighties.
People who find their salvation close to home are in the minority in the twentieth century. More usual are those who move to somewhere else in search of better lives. This was especially true of people from Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, where life was unusually hard during the 1930s. Many of them came to Cowichan Lake.
Being from the prairies and making it at the lake required some adaptation. For some, like Raymond Legault, who arrived in 1943 as part of a large group of men from Saskatchewan recruited to fill the labour shortage during the war, the lack of experience in the forest was fatal. He drowned at Camp Six after falling in the lake while he was trying to spin a log wearing slick-soled city shoes.
George Majer was a little luckier, but he found the cold hard to get used to. Even though he had grown up in Manitoba, with its legendary harsh winters, he couldn’t get over how numb and cold he felt standing out in the heavy, freezing rain at a Camp Three side. His first job was on a bridge crew, where they asked him to square off the ends of two logs that were each five feet in diameter. George had logged with his family back in Manitoba, but he’d never seen anything as big as those logs.
When Elgin Garnett got out of the army at the end of the war, the only thing he knew for sure was that he didn’t want to go back to the prairies. Accordingly, he took his discharge in Vancouver, came over to the island and went to the Duncan employment office. His request for “a job with a house” got him work at Camp Six and a floathouse to go with it.
His wife, Emily, who had “never been near water,” was a little taken aback to find herself on a tugboat travelling from Youbou to Camp Six across a large body of water with the new furniture they had just bought. There was her beautiful new white enamel stove with full-sized top, reservoir and warming oven sitting precariously on the stern with eight inches of freeboard between it and the choppy lake. Having safely reached the camp, the Garnetts were unpacking when their next-door neighbours invited them for dinner. “That’s the first time I remember our evening meal called a dinner. We always had dinner at noon on the prairies,” Emily recalled later.
Supper on the prairies was a meal Alice Pedersen had usually had to cook for a lot of people. She was the only child of homesteaders near Iola, Alberta, and with her mother had tried to make a go of the farm after her father had been blinded. Although she graduated from Grade Eight with honours, there was no money for high school, so she got a job on a series of farms, doing men’s work for most of the day and then coming in to cook supper for the rest of the crew, who then went to bed leaving her to wash all the dishes by herself.
By the time she fell in love with Ivor Pedersen, Alice knew that there was nothing she couldn’t do, and she spent the rest of her life proving it. They married when she was sixteen, just before the war, and moved to Vancouver Island shortly after with two daughters and not much else. A former Japanese bunkhouse at Charter Siding was the best they could do for a house when Ivor got a job as a lumber grader at the Mayo mill. The house had a broken-down wood stove that Alice coaxed into cooking just about anything she wanted to make. Nothing fazed her.
When pregnant with her third child she cooked for a nine-man pole gang; then the Pedersens bought a house in Chemainus, and she cooked for nine boarders. That was followed by a waitress job in Duncan so that she and Ivor could afford to buy themselves their own café. In preparation for that event, they moved to Lake Cowichan, and while Ivor worked at Mesachie Lake, Alice got a job at the Riverside Hotel. Ivor became the bartender and Alice was the cook, famous for her deep-fried chicken.
We used to halve the chicken and then we’d throw ‘em in the deep fry, never coated them with anything. We just threw them in the deep fry, and everybody just really loved that chicken.
By 1955 they owned the Snack Bar in Youbou, working together and saving for the house they were finally able to build on a hill overlooking the lake. The lumber they used had been salvaged from the old fish hatchery buildings. But the family pride and joy was the taxi business Ivor and Alice Pedersen started in i960.
The only car they had to begin with was a beat-up old Dodge with a welded front end. They had to borrow every penny to buy it. Then they replaced it with a Plymouth. By 1965 they had acquired an eleven-passenger Isuzu bus rigged up like a big bus with the “proper door handles and everything.” They were taking over from Vancouver Island Coach Lines, which didn’t believe in small buses and hadn’t been making enough money from the lake ever since roads had reached the camps, men had moved into town, and cookhouses and bunkhouses had started to close.
People told Alice driving bus and taxi was no job for a woman, especially with all the rough characters to be found around the lake. But Alice was tough and businesslike and she had a uniform—a green peaked cap, green pants and a green jacket with the company name, “44 Taxi,” on the badge. When little Alice walked into the Riverside to pick up a customer, laid her hand on his shoulder and said, “It’s time to go,” the fellow did what he was told. In recognition of her toughness and that uniform, people around the lake called her “the Green Hornet.”
Alice and Ivor were able to cash in on a trend—the end of logging camps as isolated communities. Roads built for truck logging had provided people in the region with the means to travel long distances faster, and the Pedersens would take anybody anywhere on the lower half of Vancouver island as long as there was a road.
And more than the camps were closing. Ralph Godfrey had a year and a half to go before retirement when the Hillcrest operation ran out of timber.
A lot of the boys went to Port Renfrew camp. I coulda went down there, but I’d had enough. I was all in one piece. I hadn’t had no injuries to amount to anything. It has happened to guys just about ready to retire—bumped off or something.
Ralph had been rigging until then, but he had to take whatever job he could get to finish out his career and be eligible for his IWA pension. He ended up running a jackhammer on the grade, a job not commensurate with his skills, but he was philosophical. “It was level anyhow.”
There were portable metal spar trees by then and helicopters masquerading as grapple yarders; hard hats required by Workers’ Compensation with “bug screens” that made a logger feel as if he were looking through a screen door; and rubber pants that kept him dry on the outside and sweaty on the inside. Old-timers swore that when loggers used hand saws, the men were fine physical specimens; now that loggers were using power saws, they had back pains and all sorts of problems.
But with each problem that came up there was the possibility of finding a solution. The union was there to negotiate, mediate, demand, threaten job action and call a strike. The old-timers viewed it all with a jaundiced eye.
At first, after the 1948 split, the men who stayed loyal to the IWA were moderates. Percival Clements called the following six or seven years the “nickel and dime era” when the union was fighting for better conditions and not for higher wages. Archie Greenwell called it the period when the “stooges or stoolies or whatever you want to call them” were active in the union. “There was a period of about six years when they just got nothing at all.”
Then the union started to go after higher wages and more statutory holidays. That was when there were strikes almost every second year, and people started getting tired of having to plan financially for regular strikes on top of the regular shutdowns. There was a feeling that nobody started to negotiate seriously until after June 15, when the contracts expired. The most memorable strikes were the 1962 Hillcrest strike, when the company wanted to stop supplying transportation and the mill men were pitted against the loggers, and the 1972 strike, which focussed on the fallers’ demand for travelling time and extra money on contract to compensate for the occasions when their output was reduced by rotten trees and steep terrain.
The loggers who reached retirement age in the 1970s shook their heads over the union and what they thought it had become. They said that loggers were overpaid; that new technology had made it too easy to make a lot of money; that men got lazy when they got seniority; and that union meetings weren’t any use unless more members showed up.
That was about the time the mills started to close. And that was the time when it started to occur to bureaucrats, logging companies and loggers that decades of working the forest as if there were a limitless supply of trees had created a crisis for the future.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. People had been ringing the alarm bells as far back as 1910, when an impassioned poet decried the introduction to the forest of
that shrieking giant, steam,
And lumbering loggers hasteful trade
Shall rouse thee from a peaceful dream
Thy sanctum ruthlessly invade …
In the 1930s, visitors writing about scenes of desolation were dismissed as outsiders who didn’t understand that it didn’t matter if only the best timber was taken and the rest was knocked down and burned as slash—there was lots more where that came from. Whenever that remark was challenged, there was always someone who pointed out that logging operations tried to leave the odd seed tree. And someone like Matt Hemmingsen—who in his old age admitted that sustained yield forestry should have been introduced fifty years before—would defend the early loggers by pointing out that logging in those days was a very hand-to-mouth affair. No one could afford to think of regenerating the forest.
And the forest did reseed itself. John Hemmingsen made a point in recent years of going back to the areas his father had worked at the lake and Port Renfrew, and he was impressed with the new forest. The decimated slopes of the 1930s were once again covered with a new crop of timber ready to be cut. But when trucks and diesel engines put formerly inaccessible timber within reach in the late 1940s, the trees that had provided the seed for that miracle of natural regeneration were cut down.
The first efforts at replanting had the reek of tokenism. Sending high-school students out to plant competitively gave the signal that this was children’s work. But the Sloan Royal Commission in 1945 decreed that it was an adult problem and made proposals that resulted in the system of Forest Management Licences (FMLS), which were designed to ensure that there would be trees around for succeeding generations.
Nonetheless, after thirty years of FMLS, timber stocks had dropped alarmingly, victims of improper replanting, political manipulation and scandalous behaviour on the part of Social Credit cabinet ministers. Some changes had occurred, however, in the attitude towards the use of the resource. Pulp mills now used the wood deemed useless before, and some companies chose to plant and thin more responsibly than the law required them to do. But the increased efficiency of the industry always outstripped the ability and the willingness to replace the trees.
And about the same time as the FML system was judged to be defective, environmentalists started to make themselves heard. The Nitinat Triangle, the Walbran and the Carmanah become part of everyone’s vocabulary. And ironically, thanks to the network of logging roads, those places were within everyone’s reach by then, environmentalists and loggers alike. A drive to Clo-ose or Port Renfrew is just another fare for Alice Pedersen, still driving her taxi. And she’d like to see the day when a drive to Port Alberni is just as easy.
So would Archie Greenwell. In 1992, when he was eighty, he led a group of lake people on a walk from the head of the lake to Port Alberni using the old CNR grade as much as they could and logging roads for the rest of the journey. Their walk was to publicize the need for a road that was started in 1892 and hasn’t quite made it through yet. Alice Pedersen drove the bus in the next cavalcade, which went to Port Alberni in 1993, the year she turned seventy.
The road at the foot of the lake, the road that has been causing so many people so much trouble for so long, is a swooping, curving ribbon of well-engineered asphalt now. But it carries disturbing cargo. On the average day, during the average twenty-minute drive from the Island Highway to the lake, a traveller will pass seven or eight logging trucks carrying impressive-sized logs, going the other way—away from the lake. In a faint echo of the days when seven long E&.N trains loaded with logs left the lake every day, the raw logs are again going somewhere else.
Jean Lewis Brown is trying to make some sense of this. She loves the lake and has been working for years as a village councillor to come up with some good ideas to save the best things about living there. The idea of the Community Forest came originally from the IWA, but Jean is its most passionate advocate. The trim, stylish mother of four successful grown-up children chairs the Cowichan Community Resource Board, whose membership includes the three major forest companies still involved at the lake, the IWA, four native bands—Chemainus, Cowichan, Paccheenaht and Halalt—and representatives of the community. Their goal is for the lake to have everything: logging jobs, sustainable forestry, a healthy environment, and opportunities for recreation and tourism.
A thousand years ago there was only the lake and the native people who used its resources. A hundred years ago the scattering of recluses and A-frame loggers who chose to live along its shores in relative isolation made little impact on the abundance of trees and clear water. When the arrival of the railroads made it possible, industry grew, and the building of sawmills kept more of the benefits of the forest wealth at the lake. More people came to stay. But as the forest receded and the mills closed, the community’s children had to go elsewhere to find work. Now the tourists are returning and retirees have discovered a haven of low living costs and natural beauty. In the wake of trailer parks and new housing developments, environmentalists keep up their tireless refrain—remember the forest.
The mountains that cradle Cowichan Lake are mostly covered with a thick coat of coniferous green. Here and there, bare patches reveal the source of the big logs that ride the trucks heading out along the highway. Another road, asphalt with some stretches of gravel, rings the lake, bringing the once isolated valleys and creek mouths within the range of anyone with a car. On a Sunday afternoon, the sound of boat motors is loud enough to impinge on the vastness of the lake and its surrounding mountains.
At the Jeanne S. Simpson Field Studies Resource Centre, the exotic species of rhododendrons have been moved to the University of Victoria in accordance with Mrs. Simpson’s wishes. The old log house still nestles into the slope in the clearing on the shore of the lake. Beyond the clearing, in the stand of old-growth trees that covers most of Lot 29, the forest floor is parklike, kept clear of undergrowth by a parasol of branches overhead. Nearer Marble Bay, however, the sunshine is able to sneak through, patterning the foliage that grows thick enough to obscure the path. Foxglove grows wild here, but the bamboo, grapevines and aged fruit trees that push their way through the undergrowth are the civilized relics of the Simpsons’ garden.
There is a strong perfume in the air. It comes from a rhododendron blossom growing on a long branch of a plant too large to have been moved. When the woman who sowed the seed that grew into this ancient plant was nearing the end of her life, she said she would return in spirit on some far-off day if she were able. Her spirit is very apparent here. And so are the spirits of all those other lake people who came to Cowichan Lake looking for solitude, sustenance or an easy fortune.