A Golden Meeting
Labels: George Brown College, Golden Spruce, guitar, John Vaillant, Six String Nation
In 2004, Dr. David Suzuki first told me about the legendary Golden Spruce of Haida Gwaii and alerted me to John Vaillant's article about it in the New Yorker magazine. Suzuki also introduced me to key people in the community on Haida Gwaii and the long adventure began of obtaining the only piece ever taken from the murdered tree that is now the top, the face and voice of Voyageur.
By the time we travelled to Haida Gwaii for that historic expedition, Vaillant's article had expanded into an extraordinary book, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed, and picked up a Governor General's Award for non-fiction. John and I had spoken by phone and corresponded by email in advance of the trip and following. And we kept missing each other at festivals and author's events in the years since then.
This afternoon, thanks to George Brown College - who had booked John into an event at the college which had to be cancelled due to a labour dispute - we were guests of the college at a special lunch held at the Gallery Grill at the historic Hart House at U of T. I'd always fantasized about being invited to one of Lewis Lapham's famous lunches for Harper's magazine and this felt a bit like that - a lively, literate conversation over a delicious meal. But it also proved to be a remarkably emotional meeting once I cracked the case and put Voyageur into John's hands. While I was looking forward to finally meeting John face to face, I hadn't anticipated how profound a moment it would be for me to see that moment of the Golden Spruce guitar in the hands of the author who had put so much of his life into the story of the death of that tree and to hear it resonate as he played a slow blues.
Deepest thanks to John Vaillant and to our wonderful hosts from George Brown College: Michael Cooke, Camilla Wheeler, Donnalu Macdonald and Gary Kapelus - who also provided the photo.