THE BIG FIR FIELD

"The Big Fir is slowly dying... My guess is the tree has another fifty years of dying ahead of it, or somewhat more than I have. So long as any part of it is green I want it to stand..."
Photograph to right © Mary Randlett

"Once the Big Fir was shaded by other trees as large and larger, packed all about it in the heavy forest. The Indians had a smoke house within a hundred feet of it then and beached their canoes within reach of its shadow. I have found myself fishing and swimming and planting seeds in the same shadow, and I have sheltered new-born lambs and nursed them to life in its lee. The first trail up the river passed near it and the first skid road and the first wagon road. It is only a mass of wood, pitch-seamed, diseased, and rotten, with no more than a spark of giant life remaining in a narrow strip of sapwood. There are probably a million other great trees like it on Vancouver Island, overmature, moribund, without significance except perhaps in the seed they throw. Only a sentimentalist could give importance to such a thing. Yet I shall look up at the Big Fir a thousand times or more before I die, and never without emotion," (Roderick Haig-Brown. The Measure of the Year. pp. 124-127).

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