Where does driftwood come from?

Hundreds of thousands of trees stripped from the verdant hillsides, and pulled down into the salty water of steep-sided inlets, then rafted together to form massive writhing matts of extracted resource, of power, of money in vegetable form. These giant booms are harnessed with long steel cables to tiny tugs and pulled along the Strait of Georgia to Vancouver Port where they’re stacked up onto big ships for their trip to Chinese sawmills.

But there are some few errant logs from this earthy exodus, escapees from the movement of nutrients across the globe which wash up on our stony shores, where they become the bleached bones against which we rest, while burning bonfires and toasting sugar bombs to stuff, sticky sweet, into small children’s mouths.