“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner

Op-Ed Commentary

As I sit at my desk trying frantically to say something inspirational about Christmas, my eye is caught by an unusual object sitting near my computer. It’s a piece of paper, quite small and covered with dust because it has been sitting for a long time. How long? Hard to say because it was issued 89 years ago and I’ve had it in my possession almost 50 years and it’s just a piece of paper and quite thin paper at that.

But there’s writing on that paper. Printing too. And between the two forms of lexicography, it tells quite a story. The piece of paper was a cheque issued in 1935 and drawn on the Canadian Bank of Commerce in Victoria, but never cashed. Why it wasn’t was a family mystery that took over half a century to solve.

I came across it more than 20 years ago just before my father passed away from cancer. It was in a small mountain of Dad’s papers and at first, I paid no attention to it. But I eventually got around to it and was I in for a surprise when I saw the amount.

The cheque was made out to one Freemont Warner, a tall lanky 16-year-old Slocan Valley farm boy with a strong back, a solid work ethic and full of ambition, which was just what the authorities were looking for.

And who were the authorities? On the back of the cheque, it says, “Forest Discharge” and next to that it said “Protection Cheque.” That’s right, “protection.” Protection of what?

Oh, nothing much. Just protection of what was once our most valuable B.C. resource – namely our seemingly endless forests of Douglas Fir, Western Red Cedar, Engelmann spruce, Ponderosa Pine, Golden Western Larch and many non-conifers as well. Today we lump the species together and call it “Old Growth” and the supply no longer seems endless.

Once the province’s biggest industry, Old Growth logging now is a dying industry with predictions abounding that it will be gone by the end of the next decade with only second growth and planation stands left that are vastly inferior and economically less valuable than the ancient Old Growth stands that preceded them.

Watch the provincial economy tumble when the rapacious logging corporations try to make sweetheart deals with First Nation companies to access the fast-dwindling Old Growth stands left which are largely on native land. But that’s another story.

I once asked Dad what it was like to be a callow 16-year-old youth paid to go out alone in the wilderness looking for spot fires to douse for the B.C. Forest Service, which authorized the cheque.

Dad was quick to reply, “I loved it,” adding after a hard day in the bush nothing beat going to sleep under the stars and breathing the tantalizing perfume of the tiny timberline trees as he fell asleep.

Occasionally he would also get the less pleasant odor of Ursus Arctos Horribilis (Grizzly Bears) in his nostrils. But they were wild wilderness bears and always steered clear of him. And how much did the BC Forest Service pay him for working alone in potentially dangerous conditions like that? Look at the cheque.

Twenty-four cents!

Yes, that was his generous remuneration for five days of sweating it out in the bush with the grizzlies and the Whiskey Jacks. But it was during the Great Depression and millions were unemployed in Canada and around the world.

Mindful of the economic chaos afflicting the land, Dad decided to keep his enormous cheque as a souvenir of his first paid job. And now it sits in a special place on my desk reminding me times are tough now. And they are.

But they can always get tougher.

Photo by Gerry Warner

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist from the West Kootenay. Merry Christmas!

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