The Mill on the Floss

Today we took a field trip to a mill in Port (Clements). Yup, that's right, a field trip to a mill. It was actually pretty interesting, though also kind of depressing. The forestry industry is really hurting up here. After the disastrously unsustainable management of the forests, the protests in Lyell Island and the 'bust' part of the boom and bust cycle up here, the forestry industry has been slowly coming under the control of Taan Forest, the Haida forest products management branch. It's a pretty complicated and tense history and current climate and I don't profess to understand what's going on particularly well but the end result of all this is that there really isn't a reliable source of raw timber for the couple of mills that are trying to make a go of it on the islands. The mill that we went to is operating super part time and mostly sending raw logs oversees, instead of doing some more value-added processing. I've never been inside a mill before and I still don't really understand how all that machinery works but it was definitely interesting.

Finish boards are way harder to sell post-US housing market collapse.

So this is the raw timber that ends up getting shipped to China and Korea.

Trim saw's not seeing a whole lot of action these days.

The mill is only operating three to six months of year due to availability of cut logs.

After our field trip, four of us headed back into Port to meet with A, another student from our program who lives in Port, to work on a project we're doing on Skidegate. The work is sort of endless (though the report is due Friday...so I guess it can't be that endless) but A made us an amazing dinner (elk and spinach pasta, salmon with capers and giant salad) and we got to hang out with her partner who's a faller, aka a man who does the actual cutting down of the trees. For a resource management program we sure don't know much at about how forestry actually works so it was fantastic to pick his brain for an hour about what harvesting lumber involves. Super interesting and full of a ton of jargon and words we didn't understand. But it was really interesting to hear about the realities of clear cutting vs. selective logging (the former resulting in much faster and healthier re-growth, less destruction of water sources from wind-downed trees and considerably less lost lumber) and the mechanization of the forestry industry.

This whole program, all 2.25 weeks of it, has really opened my eyes to how much I've limited myself in my life so far. People up here are full of creativity and flexibility and...bravery almost. I feel like my life so far has been very lazy. When I have a problem I call someone and they fix it for me. If my bike is broken, I take it to the shop and pay someone to deal with it. There's a guy here who had a broken bike so he started a volunteer program at the highs school to teach people how to fix their own bikes. He reads stuff on the internet and in books and just tries stuff out. If people see a need for something in their community they just...do it. My experiences with rural life, aka the time I spend reading research papers in my spare time, has always been to think about the lack of access that being rural and remote involves. But now that I'm actually living it I can't believe how much more access I feel like I have. If I want to hike, I go for a hike. If I want something to do I go to the Wednesday night hulahooping class or the Tuesday night bike program or the Friday night coffee house and open mike at the Legion. If I'm bored in the evening I go to someone's house and we play music and sing. The world seems full of possibilities here and for the first time in a long, long time I feel like I have skills, valuable skills, that could make a difference to this community. I feel useful.

I just can't believe how different life can be from what I thought it had to be.

This is my favourite totem at the Ka'ay Centre. I can see him from my seat in class.