Joe Garner, Never Chop Your Rope

Look: Joe Garner was a terrible writer, and he may have been worse when it came to stretching the truth, but the fact of the matter is that hardly anybody else wrote down the stories that would’ve intersected with the stories he wrote down. I’m seething the whole time I’m reading his books, but damn it, and damn him as well, Joe Garner’s Never Chop Your Rope: A Story of British Columbia Logging and the People Who Logged is basically irreplaceable.

Not my pic: thanks, Ebay seller!

Broken into 23 chapters, each one named after someone from the logging industry that Garner worked with or knew in the old days (or Garner himself, twice), Never Chop Your Rope makes no attempt to draw connections between stories and characters. There’s a dictionary of loggers’ lingo (“Schoolmarm: A log or tree which forks into two tops. Loggers describe it as a log that won’t roll over.” Hello!), and a tipped-in insert at the back representing an artist’s conception of logging operations, but you won’t find an index or even any cross-references. Some chapters, too, appear entirely inside quotation marks, indicating that the person wrote a piece for Garner to use, and many others include lengthy quotations from interviews, but this is Garner’s book, the way he meant for it to be.

Namely, he meant it for it to seem old-timey enough to look legitimate. Bluntly, this meant it would find its way onto the bookshelves of as many older long-time BC residents as possible who were still around at the time he was writing, especially those living on Vancouver Island. A few people bought his books for themselves, but the vast majority of copies, I can attest from my own extended family, were bought as gifts.

And so I seethe not just because of the stories Garner tells, even though many of them madden me almost to the point of rage. I seethe because his approach had the effect in the 1980s of clear-cutting the rich ecosystem of stories about Vancouver Island rural history, especially logging, that could’ve really been something if only (to mix my metaphors) he hadn’t salted the earth by carpet-bombing bookstores and older folks’ shelves with … with THIS.

But let’s talk about the stories, and let’s start with one of the author’s younger brothers, Ollie Garner. Like all the others, his chapter proceeds chronologically across almost his entire life in logging, in this case from age 6 (“kept out of school … to be a whistle punk,” p197) to his retirement years.

Ollie’s chapter opens with a photo of him with a big tree: “the 12-foot [diameter] log was the largest ever taken off [Galiano Island].” After retiring to Galiano, where he owned a large property that he’d logged HARD earlier, Ollie subdivided much of his property, radically changing the nature and structure of life on Galiano (for humans and for its non-human residents). For anyone who’s spent time on Galiano, or any of the southern Gulf Islands of BC, that tree, like that subdivided property, represents a radically different version of these islands, so if you’re wondering who might be to blame for that….

While still working, Ollie at least once got a forest ranger drunk enough that he wouldn’t or couldn’t check the timber that the law required him to check, when Ollie knew full well that his men had illegally cut trees outside the boundary: “They were the best of friends from that day on” (p207). It’s a pattern throughout the book, but the Garner brothers are most frequently and most deeply implicated in this kind of activity.

Most egregiously, Ollie and Joe reminisce at one point about the destruction of prime salmon spawning habitat at Smith Inlet:

“Down at the lake there was a gravel beach, right where those big spring salmon come in to spawn. Bing Crosby and Bob Hope used to come in there to fish,” Ollie recalls. “They’d throw a big party for the loggers every time. Sometimes there’d be no work done for a couple of days” (p203)

To get out his timber from Smith Inlet, Ollie decided he’d have to build a road through a bog (and of course we now recognize bogs as one of the region’s most endangered, unique ecosystems). Ollie threw down into the bog a mat of logs, full-grown trees, but that wasn’t enough to support his D8 dozer, so he punched those logs down and threw down a second mat, then a third. When he ran low on logs, Ollie dynamited a rock bluff, and threw all that down onto the bog, but the result was still too rough. Over the next two weeks, Ollie then hauled FIVE HUNDRED LOADS of gravel, off this beach beloved by Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, not to mention “those big spring salmon,” to dump into the bog he wanted to cross by bulldozer.

And after all that, the price of logs plummeted this same year. In the end, Ollie walked away from this logging show—and the vandalized bog, and the gravel stolen from the salmon—without cutting barely a tree.

Like I said, I seethe almost continuously while reading this book.

But (imagine my teeth gritting audibly at this point) it really is irreplaceable.

Do I wish that Thelma Godkin, the first woman to work full-time logging in the BC woods (as a whistle punk) had written her own stories before she passed away at 93? Hell yes, even if her interviews housed at the BC Archives are phenomenal, but I’m glad that Garner wrote them down, quoting her directly at length while doing so.

And it’s useful, in Ken Hallberg’s chapter, to hear about Big Jim Ferguson losing his arm to a job-related infection. It’s useful to have Hallberg go on to reflect also on Lew Edwards, who’d also lost an arm, and on two unnamed loggers who each had peg legs (one of whom regularly drove nails into the end of the peg, for grip when working in the mud and the rain and the scarce-comprehensible shambles that’s an active logging area). This was seriously dangerous work, and the companies and their managers were never held fully accountable for their mutilation of the men who worked for them (pp.118-19).

And in Bill Moore’s chapter, you’ll find breadcrumbs that’ll lead you toward the Downtown Winter Harbour Music Festival of 1967, 1969, and 1971 (pp153-54), which featured some of the best West Coast jazz musicians, from as far as California, playing in the bush for loggers (but mostly for the executives of various BC industrial interests, until the hippies found it in 1971).

So yeah, it’s irreplaceable. There’s nothing more accessible than Joe Garner’s books that’ll get you a clearer look at the vibrancy, humanity, rapacity, and absolute goddamned criminal exploitiveness of early BC logging. Even when I’m hating them, which is often, I’m convinced we need to keep reading these books.

Unless you know a better option?