Waiting for answers in Westchester Station

Gary Fisher didn’t bother waiting beside the radio on Tuesday.

“I figured the best thing to do today was just go to work and then go home in the evening and turn on the news,” said Fisher.

So instead of listening for Gordon Wilson’s decision on

Tuesday morning, the 61-yearold was swinging a spacing saw in a woodlot near Westchester Station, Cumberland County. It proved a wise decision. Because the environment minister’s answer to one question only raised a bigger one: will Premier Stephen MacNeil break his promise to the Pictou Landing First Nation and extend Northern Pulp’s ability to use the Boat Harbour effluent treatment facility past the looming

Jan. 31 deadline for its closure?

No one was answering that question on Tuesday but the premier is apparently going to answer questions from reporters on Wednesday.

Maybe then Fisher will know whether to expect another precommercial thinning job after the one he’s currently on.

“If the wood processing stops then so do the silviculture dollars,” said Fisher.

The forest grows whether we manage it or not.

The type of silviculture Fisher was doing in Westchester Station on Tuesday aims to maintain both an industry and a functioning ecosystem.

For $500 a hectare he bounds through the forest, his body acting as the harnessed fulcrum of a tool with a saw blade at one end that’s balanced and swung by a gas-powered engine on the

other.

As he worked the roaring machine he was making quick calculations based on a half-century of experience and evolved values — both financial and ecological — in this mixed stand. Crooked trees fell to the blade. If a balsam fir and red spruce were growing too close to each other to thrive, the fir got cut because in 30 years the spruce might make a valuable saw log.

“Cavity trees that are home for a pileated woodpecker, I leave them,” said Fisher.

“Grey birch doesn't have a market but where I can I leave them because partridges eat their buds in the winter.”

Fisher cut his first load of pulpwood when he was 12 off the family woodlot.

His father delivered it to a waiting barge in Pugwash. He was paid $28.50 a cord. “I made more on the first beaver I trapped when I was 10,” said Fisher.

He built a life working in Cumberland County's forests.

He trained as a forest technician in college, developed management plans for private woodlot owners, swung a chainsaw on pulp crews and ran a harvester for a spell.

Many of his neighbours and friends in Wallace are fishermen.

Their associations are adamantly opposed to Northern Pulp's proposed effluent plan. His industry is largely reliant on the continued operation of the pulp mill.

“We're all friends and we're all going through the same torture,” said Fisher.

Instead of waiting by the radio on Wednesday he'll be back in the woods swinging a saw for what works out to $750 a week minus expenses.

The decisions he'll be making in Westchester Station won't bear fruit for 20 or more years when the first harvester shows up to do a merchantable thinning.

That's presuming one shows up.

The decisions being made in Halifax will bear fruit for industry, the environment and relations with both First Nations and the fishing industry in the immediate and long term.

“I'm going to give our premier some credit,” said Fisher.

“He's never seemed like one to jump around. He grew up in a house with nine kids where if you put a slice of bread on the table you needed to know how to slice it up evenly."