SLASH BURNS PROVIDE FUEL FOR ENTERTAINING MEMOIR
Nick Raeside loves fires. As a child in New Zealand, as he reports in his new memoir from Harbour Publishing, he had an early firefighting experience. Seven years old, working barefoot in smouldering gorse and wielding a wetted burlap bag, he helped put out wildfire cinders close to a family cabin. He was hooked and remains fascinated by fire to this day.
Slashburner tells the story of Raeside’s decades spent in the B.C. woods in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. Mainly, during those eventful decades, he worked as a slashburner, setting and managing fires to clear away the scrap wood left behind by clearcut operations and preparing the logged area for tree planters.
Slashburning is a controversial practice, with critics like Ben Parfitt — writing in The Narwhal earlier this year — arguing that burning slash unnecessarily adds CO2 to the province’s emissions and wastes wood that could be turned into value-added products.
Like many who worked the woods in those decades, Raeside is a great storyteller, and Slashburner is essentially a loosely linked set of anecdotes from his career setting fires. These are essentially good-humoured accounts of equipment failures, weather disasters, near fatal encounters with falling trees and imperfect logging roads, and of the ongoing tradition (at least on Raeside’s crews) of hair-raising pranks and practical jokes.
Raeside delivers these stories in a relaxed, conversational style that makes this reviewer wish he was sitting in an Interior pub and swapping tall tales with the author.