The Last of the Lumbermen (20 page)

Wendel doesn't flinch. “This same
government has close ties to the international trade unions, who've
become more pro-cut in the last ten years than the multinationals. They'd flatten every forest in the province to keep their membership employed.”

A couple of the progressive union guys in
the Coalition nod their heads at this, and the academic sits
down. Wendel looks around the room. He spots
me, but doesn't react. He's got amazing presence for
a twenty-year-old, this kid. And just as I'm think-
ing that he didn't get his presence from me, he rolls on.

“So here's the bottom line. In
theory, the government has cut the official harvest of
trees. It'll sound great to people watching television down
in Vancouver, but we know what they've really
done. The newly designated salvage areas will be removed
from the ‘sustained yield' formula, thus making the sustained
yield volume cuts irrelevant but keeping the facade of sustainability
in place, and keeping the few Forest Service
bureaucrats who haven't been laid off in the government
cutbacks smiling. The multinationals will cheerfully accept the cuts, move
their equipment into the salvage area, and go
crazy like they did in the Bowron. They'll get mo
re trees, and more profits, than they
would have under the old formula. A few years will
pass, more cuts in the harvest will need to be
made to keep the facade in place, and another diseased,
over-mature salvage area — read ‘old g
rowth forest' — will be discovered, designated, and then decimated.”

He's finished. He's about nailed it, and
everyone in the room knows it. He asks if anyone has comments or questions, and stands there, calm and collected, to field them.

TWENTY-ONE

T
HE COALITION HAS THE
same problem everyone has
these days: it's a lot easier to see what
or who's being screwed than to do anything about
it. These are people who understand that everyone
and everything in Mantua is being humped by the mul
tinationals, and that this isn't going to stop until someone
— or something — stops them. Some of the
Coalition members, like Wendel, even have a fair idea what changes need to be made.

It isn't that they don't
have the courage of their convictions. There are
situations in which courage isn't enough. You need imagination, and
a willingness to question some much more basic beliefs,
the ones we all get drummed into our heads
from elementary school on: that in a democracy
the government belongs to the people and, ergo, life is supposed to be fair.

I'll tell you what I
mean. Just after I came back to Mantua, I assembled some
industrial land for a guy named Sid Brickman. He'd pulled
together the finances to do something that should have been done
around here thirty years ago — he built
a fingerjoint stud mill.

Finger-jointing is where you take
two pieces of scrap wood and glue them together
to make a piece of spaghetti otherwise known, non-metrically, as a two-by-four. The result, both in theory and practice, is construction wood superior
in strength to an ordinary two-by-four.
Even better, the profits are good because
you're using wood that's already been milled and
rejected, and because the process is relatively labour-intensive
it produces jobs and helps out the local economy
. In short, it is what every government in the W
estern hemisphere has been whining about the need for since the gravy started thinning out after the oil crisis in
1973.

Sid got his mill up and running,
three shifts and one hundred fifty workers, and
it was doing fine until some bureaucrat in the
Forestry Department assigned his wood supply contract to InterCon. Sid's
mill was soon getting wood he couldn't fingerjoint
into decent toothpicks, and when he squawked about it, the wood got worse.

Eventually, Sid recognized that InterCon was deliberately trying
to put him out of business, and he sued for
damages. But the moment the papers were served InterCon cut
off his wood supply altogether. And that's wher
e it sat for close to three years, until
Sid won his court case. Guess what? The award
didn't come close to covering his costs, and the mill,
meanwhile, was gathering dust. Right now it's still running
at a quarter capacity, because a multinational corporation has ways of ignoring court rulings.

Now,
many of the Coalition members would prefer just to
hold news conferences like the one they're planning this
afternoon, and then go home to their out-of-the-industry jobs feeling
morally superior. Reason? Bickering and bitching about corporate
malfeasance or government incompetence is safer and easier than sticking
your ass into a multibillion-dollar meat grinder. But today
, Wendel and a few of the others aren't
willing to give up so easily. One of the
independent loggers stands up and starts explaining how this is the
right time to begin setting up a logging co-operative that
will do things differently, even if it
has to do it on a demonstration basis. This is
the route Wendel wants to take, too. Another
group wants to go a different, nastier
route — they want to block the highways, sabotage the railways, or do whatever else is needed to keep the sawlogs from
leaving town. The rest — a minority, for once
— just want to be outraged for a few hours, go
to the bar, and then go home and watch
television like they usually do. The way things are
going, the three factions are probably going to
deadlock, meaning that very little is going to get
decided. From the frustration in Wendel's face, he
sees it too.

I haven't planned to do anything mo
re than watch, but after another fruitless go-around
I find myself standing in front of everyone tapping my
finger on the table like some schoolmarm. There's about
a hundred things I could say that everyone in
the room already knows, so I offer the
one thing I have that they don't know about. One or
two of them — Wendel being the only one
I care about — might find it useful.

“I don't know whether you're aware
of this,” I say, “but I own one hundred
acres of fairly decent industrial land down on the
flats. If you need a location for your scaling yar
d, you can have the use of it.”

The room goes stony silent
for what must be nearly ten se- conds. That's
how long it takes around here for surprise
to percolate down to cynicism. The first response
comes from one of the smartassed academics.

“Oh sure,” he says. “What's the catch?”

“No catch,” I answe
r. “How about a rental contract for one dollar a
year? Plus the co-op pays the taxes on the land
if and when it starts making a profit.”

Another silence. I catch Wendel's eye
and try some telepathy on him. I want him to stay
out of this for a moment. He seems to understand, and sinks, watchfully
, back in his chair.

The academic is the first one to start flapping
his mouth. “Well,” he intones, “this is all well
and good. But isn't the Forest Service conducting feasibility studies
on community scaling yards? Maybe we ought to wait for them to give the go ahead.”

I'm tempted to blow the chicken-hearted turd-polisher off, but a glance at Wendel convinces me to
circle around him instead. “Maybe we should wait
for the Forest Service,” I answer. “But maybe we
shouldn't. I don't know if you've heard about that
photo the Chief Forester has hanging in his office
— the one with the line of about thirty haul
trucks coming out of the Bowron?”

A rumble
crosses the room, and a couple of Coalition me
mbers laugh out loud. “I see some of you
get my point about what those feasibility studies are going
to say. Everybody's known for decades that the
industry has the Forest Service in its pocket. That isn't
going to change unless we can convince a few mo
re people that having the Forest Service in cahoots
with the multi- nationals isn't part of the natural or
der, and that there's some other routes we can go.”

I haven't
intended to make a speech, and I'm a little amazed that
I'm parroting things I've made fun of Wendel
for saying to a bunch of strangers. But the clear app
roval in Wendel's face tells me to go on.

“I mean, look at
the long view. If we know what the wo
rds and the pictures really mean, don't we
have to make some choices? One of the choices you
people have to make is between your anger and your
cynicism. The fact that the people who are su
pposed to be taking care of our resou
rces for everyone aren't doing their jobs ought to
make us all angry as hell. But what does knowing that get us, unless we do something about it?”

“So
what are you saying?” the academic pipes up, this
time with a whiny ping in his voice. “What are you asking us to do?”

“Get up off your behinds and commit
to the community scaling yards, for starters. I can't give
you technical advice. For that you'll have to find somebody
who knows the business end of a chainsaw from his ass. I don't.”

After
repeating that the offer is a totally serious one,
I sit down and sip coffee while the upr
oar dies down to a calculating buzz. I'll be surprised if
they take me up on it, but if they do I'll damned well stand behind it. My speech does flush the chickens
out of the underbrush, and the conversation moves on
to the practicalities. That's good. It'll help Wendel and his supporters.

Meanwhile, it's time for me
to head out. I'm on a roll, so I
may as well find James Bathgate's parents this afternoon. P
romises are promises, and I'll need to
get the kid's insurance release signed so he can
be at the practice tomorrow. I repeat once
more to the Coalition that my offer is
serious, that I'm not about to skip town or run
for political office, and that they can appoint whoever they like
to carry out the negotiations when and if they're
ready to go forward on the deal. I hope
I'll be talking to Wendel about it before
the day is out. As I leave the coffee
bar, he winks at me and mouths a “thank you.”

It's a beginning. Even
if it ends up costing me a bundle, I'm okay with it.

THERE'S
AN UP-TO-DATE PHONEBOOK
at a payphone in the
lobby, and it lists four Bathgates besides myself. I fish
some quarters out of my pocket and start dialing. I
draw blanks on the first two, one of them X-rated. The
third call gets a woman with a bright, r
easonable-sounding voice.

“I'm sorry to bother you,” I say,
“but I'm trying to locate one or both of James Bathgate's parents.”

There's
a slight hesitation on the other end of the line.
“Yes? I'm his mother. I hope he hasn't gotten himself into trouble.”

“Oh, nothing like that,” I
say, trying to sound reassuring. I explain that I'm
from the Mohawks hockey team, and that we'd like her son to be our stickboy, etc. etc.

“Oh, yes,” she says, sounding relieved. “James did mention something about it, but I thought he was telling tall tales again.”

I
go on to talk about the necessity of an insurance
release, mentioning that since he's at all the
games anyway he's probably safer behind the bench than in the stands. No, I don't tell her that her son's biggest safety hazard is the
V8 he's got attached to his mouth — or that
I've been the chief threat to his health. She
digests the technicalities without difficulty, and asks whether he's expected
to travel with the team for away games.

That hadn't crossed my mind, so I have
to think quickly. I suggest to her
that it can be optional, then correct myself immediately
, saying that though the Friday away games will probably
keep him up too late he might want to
travel with us for some of the Sunday games. I make
it clear that I'll abide by whatever she decides is best.

“We've
got a practice late tomorrow afternoon we'd like him
to be at,” I continue. “Is it possible for me
to drop out and get you to sign the release before that?”

“That'll be fine,” she says. “But I don't know who to expect.”

“I'm Andy Bathgate,” I say.

There's an audible intake of br
eath. “When should I expect you?” she asks.

“Let's say somewhere around four this afternoon.”

Another hesitation. “Then we'll see you at four.”

She's
probably going to ask for my autograph. Times like
this I wish I was somebody named Joe Fish. On
the other hand, that wouldn't help either. Someone would assume
I was Country Joe, and want to know where The Fish have gone.

THE ADDRESS LISTED IN
the
phonebook is in an obscure subdivision far north of
town across the Nechalko River, but I have
enough time to drop around to Wally's to
see whether Jack was kidding about having the goalie mask. If
it is there I may as well pick it
up and spring it on Junior while he's still in the hospital.