ONE WITH NATURE
Annie Proulx discusses Barkskins, humanity and hope for the future
The American author Annie Proulx, who today calls Seattle, Wash., home, is as well-known in Canada as she is in the United States, perhaps because many of her books have a Canadian setting and sensibility.
The Shipping News was set in northern Newfoundland, and Proulx spent many months living near L’Anse aux Meadows in a small cabin writing the story of Quoyle and his cursed family.
Now she has tackled another Canadian-style story: the tale of the logging of the forests of North America from the upper Gatineau to the wild woods of Michigan. These were places where the Barkskins roamed — the men, and some women, who stripped away the forests as their God-given right, ignoring the wisdom of the First Nations.
It is an unrelenting, troubling tragedy, especially for those whose ancestors have plied this trade and celebrated the loggers who worked north of Bytown and filled the Ottawa River with giant logs. There is seemingly little hope for a future renewal of the woods we all misunderstand, but as Proulx says in this rare email interview with the Citizen’s Peter Robb, she still holds out the possibility of hope in the actions of individuals.
Q Can you tell me a little bit about the genesis of the novel?
A I have been thinking about global forests and their disappearance and keeping observations of deforestation in the back of my mind for many years before it occurred to me to write about it.
I used to drive back and forth across the continent in earlier years and on one trip when I was in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, I came to a crossroad. There was no town, just a laundromat wait- ing for customers. The country seemed all scrub and brush, but next to the road there was a large sign that said something to the effect of “In this place in 1890 grew the greatest white pine forest on Earth.” Not even stumps were visible among the brush and certainly not a single pine — only that sign, which struck me as a great irony.
I wandered around in the area for a few days and found some rough country, too rough to get logs out in the 19th century. Up an old logging road at the top of an extremely steep hill there grew a stand of really large pines. Nearby, in what was once a clearing, I found two or three grave markers, simple slabs of pine. Weather and time had erased any identifying names that might have been scratched or written on them. It seemed to me that there was a story here in the uncut pines, the nameless markers, the remote location. I suppose Barkskins began that day, roughly 30 years ago.
Q Elizabeth Ring is someone who is important to you. Can you tell me a bit about her?
A I went to Deering High School in Portland, Maine. Elizabeth Ring was a history teacher of tal- ent who made a strong impression on me. She had done a great deal of research on Benedict Arnold and from her I learned that the history in textbooks was often shaped to fit political views, and that digging around in letters, diaries, newspapers, town records and other papers could present other views of the past.
The past, I learned, was fluid, and changed as new researchers offered varied interpretations of long-ago events. History, in fact, was not fixed and immutable, was not “Truth” passed down to us by all-knowing savants. She made the point that history was writhingly alive. I took this to heart.
Q The novel is so grand in scope and in impact, but it begins in the woods, the primeval woods. Are you a person of the forest? Do you spend a lot of time there, or have you spent a lot of time there? What draws you into it?
A I am a person inclined to the North, perhaps genetically inclined to feel at home in cold regions with ancient DNA links to northern Scandinavia, likely ancestral Saami people.
I have spent most of my life in rural regions, the first 40 years of my life in New England. I like cold winter weather and cloud-rich skies. From childhood, I have found my most agreeable surroundings to be woods or forest, trying to grasp how it all knits together. Later, I lived for nearly two decades in the Rockies of Wyoming and despite my interest in the place and its people I found the landscape incomplete. I missed trees.
So the habit of off-season forays, a search for solitude and comfort in woodland and on headland took hold. I should have become a student of life sciences, but simply didn’t recognize my interest in and affinity for the natural world until late adulthood. Visiting forests has always been pleasure.
Q I’m a Canadian whose ancestors worked in the Gatineau forests. My wife’s grandfather and father worked in logging camps north of here. You have delved deeply into that culture. What have you concluded?
A Earlier in my life, I drove around and across North America many times, almost always north of the 40th parallel.
I travelled through the Gatineau country, and through New Brunswick’s Emerald Kingdom and the Maritimes and Newfoundland-Labrador. I lived in Montreal for a year, went to graduate school at Sir George Williams (now Concordia). My favourite painters were the Group of Seven, especially Tom Thomson. In my 20s I first saw a reproduction of The Jack Pine, I felt I had been seeing that tree and water all my life; it was utterly and elementally familiar. I always wanted to canoe the Algoma waters, but somehow it never happened and now I am too old. Tant pis!
Q Canada’s capital was built on the lumbering trade. We celebrate it as part of our history. Should we?
A Most people did not realize until the 20th century that forests were not a permanent part of the world. We can’t blame the loggers of the past for desecration. They had no thought or realization that they were damaging the world and the future. So heavily forested was northern North America and other forests and jungles it seemed that the trees would last forever.
We know better now, and we know that replanting and tending our forests is a vital followup part of logging. Forests are finite. A few people only began to see this in the mid-19th century, but even today some people think forests can replicate themselves. The idea that leaving a few seed trees in cut-over land will bring a new forest has been shown to be more of a hopeful dream than reality. People who work planting trees know how much work and care goes into getting the new growth established, especially without the nurturing undergrowth plants whose roots and shade and special qualities are integral and crucial parts of a forest, without the small streams and bogs. It’s easy to take a forest apart — very difficult to put one back complete in all its detail. Tree farms are easier, and they have their place in this world to keep a supply of harvestable timber.
The brawny, colourful loggers of the past, their arts and skills, their songs and great deeds are part of Canadian and New England and Michigan and coastal history and mythology. But once we knew what wholesale cutting could mean to our descendants we had a moral obligation to consider the problem and work to reverse the irrevocable damage.
Q The early settlers/colonizers of New France and of New England began stripping the country they invaded. In the novel they are almost locust-like. Do you believe that was their essential nature?
A I do believe European Christian people believed the Earth was theirs to do with absolutely as they wished. If someone objected, the defence was pointing out that the right to take the natural world in hand was in the Bible. Humans had dominion. It was a religious right (and the duty of civilized people) to take trees, fruits, fish, gravel, water, land, beasts, precious rocks and ore wherever and whenever the chance arose.
The forests of the New World, of Indonesia, of New Zealand, of Brazil were a fabulous and endless resource that provided a livelihood for thousands and wealth for many. And if indigenous people were in the way — well, they were not civilized and so did not matter to the men with the axes. It is apparently human nature to take and take until the resource is gone. We are not a forward-looking species. The immediacy of the present still rules our behaviour. In the fable of the grasshopper and the ants, we are the grasshoppers. Even now, with climate change looming, how slowly we mobilize, how loudly we deny the problem.
Q One character believes that a forest can be managed and renewed. Others do not. Where do you stand?
A There are two different kinds of forests here. Dieter believes in the utility of the tree farm and a managed “forest” that keeps timber coming. Conrad and Charley recognize and believe in the importance of the entire biosphere to the Earth’s health, and their forests must have the thousands of subsidiary plants and understory bushes, must have their insects and fauna. A real forest is an incredibly complex living entity, its hundreds of differing layers pulsating with life, all important to the whole. We do not yet understand how all the parts work together, and there is great scientific study still to be done, hundreds of fascinating veins of research for tomorrow’s foresters — an exciting frontier for certain kinds of people.
Q Near the end of the novel, one of the characters muses about the inevitability of the environmental catastrophe we face. Were we really doomed when the first hominid stood upright and picked up a stone axe?
A I can’t answer that question any better than you can. I don’t know. Humans are so damn destructive — and so damn creative and inventive. That may be the real yin/yang core of the complicated biped who makes an axe and knows what to do with it beyond frying bacon on the flat side. We also have a terrific overpopulation problem and no one is going to stop copulating for the sake of a few trees.
Q The novel is, I believe, an indictment of, for lack of a better descriptor, western civilization, but is it also a call to wake up and change our ways?
A Of course the views put forward in the novel are not new. There are many people who want to save and nurture forests, people like the Ontario botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger, who understand how badly the old Earth needs its blanket of oxygenating shade-casting trees. People like the nature artists, as David Nash, whose extraordinary sculptures honour forests in moving ways. And, of course, there are also many who (are) utterly unable and uninterested in changing their ways. For people-watchers this is a rich time to live as we leave the Holocene behind and elbow our way into the Anthropocene epoch.
Q Is there hope?
A I do have hope. A few months ago, following a reading, a man came up and gave me a photograph of his milkweed garden — rows of stately milkweed. Many people know that Monarch butterflies need milkweeds, once a common wildflower, to sustain them. Over the decades, Monarch populations have dropped and dropped as we have sprayed the roadsides and woodland edges with Roundup and other weed-killing chemicals. But then, in the last few years there has been a slight uptick in Monarch numbers. It is thought that the many gardeners who have read of the milkweed-Monarch crisis and planted milkweed in their gardens, may be responsible.
The Xerces Society urges our interest in saving insects. Others plant bumblebee habitat gardens. And from the milkweed and the bumblebee gardens I tell myself that it may not be that far to honouring the vitality of forests and helping restore them. But countering the saving of Monarch butterflies is the rampant poaching of elephants whose numbers have declined disastrously in the past decade. A first population census by Elephants Without Borders shows that in seven years, from 2007 to 2014, the animals declined in number by 30 per cent. Tigers and many other iconic animals are disappearing as we watch in disbelief. How can it happen so quickly?
It is apparently human nature to take and take until the resource is gone. We are not a forward-looking species. … Even now, with climate change looming, how slowly we mobilize, how loudly we deny the problem.