*#% Tree Huggers!

Here is a story about the Goldstream Valley and what some might consider the ‘old days’: Back then Roger Voigt was one of the best heavy equipment operators in the valley. He put in my driveway at Ester Dome. There was sharp curve around a few spruce trees I wanted to keep.

“Peter, you have to cut down those trees right there. The curve you ask me to make is way too tight.”

I looked at him… “I’d like to keep those trees.”

Naturally he then made it possible with a grim smile on his face:

“Damn you fu##ing tree huggers.”

Roger was brilliant.

–

Years later while I had the honor to be part of the Goldstream Lions Club, Ken Kunkel gave quite a few acres of densely grown forest to the Goldstream Lions. The land he gave to the Goldstream Lions Club would later on become the Ken Kunkel Center.

A machine was supposed to mash all trees of the acres Ken gave to the Lions into little pieces to create a flat area for a playground. It was the kind of machine that simply lowers a rotating blade on trees and creates wood flakes. As a Goldstream Lion, I went out into the forested area to be obliterated and looked at all the trees the night before it all was supposed to happen. In the end I flagged five scraggly birch trees to be spared and stood there the next day in the morning to make sure they would not get hurt.

Once all the brush and black spruce had been mashed and destroyed, those tiny birch trees looked rather silly in a landscape of total destruction. Little lost finger in a mass of destruction….

I doubted myself back then. No other Goldstream Lion had come that morning. None needed to come. The job had been ordered and would be taken care of. I was there because I felt that razing everything was not the way to start new.

–

The next day we laid down Typar plastic to hold up the layers of gravel which would come next. Again, it was Roger who spent time, fuel, and wear on his equipment to do so for free.

Without him and his help the Ken Kunkel Center would not exist today.

–

I was careful back then to cut the Typar around the birch trees and shovel gravel back from the trunks. Roger looked down from his loader at me back then and said:

“With all the gravel on those roots those trees will die anyway.”

I stood my ground.

He shook his head.

That was the day his term ‘fu##ing tree hugger’ became a joke between the two of us.

He nodded and smiled at me back then.

I smiled back.

What a great man he was.

–

In any case, this is the story of the large birch trees you now see at the Ken Kunkel Center. Against all odds, they once grew as tiny seeds in a black spruce forest, struggling for light. When I drive by there nowadays, I will always see them as a proud reminder of what could become of anything and anybody if just given a chance.