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Jack Knox: Lumberjacks and lumbersexuals on Vancouver Island

People in Canada’s big cities are throwing axes for sport. Really — they have competitive leagues and everything.
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The recreational axe-throwing fad began a couple of years ago as a Toronto hipster thing, writes Jack Knox, but it has since drifted into the mainstream — all the way to Halifax, where Darren Hudson runs the Timber Lounge, and Vancouver. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan

Jack Knox mugshot genericPeople in Canada’s big cities are throwing axes for sport. Really — they have competitive leagues and everything. The recreational axe-throwing fad began a couple of years ago as a Toronto hipster thing but has since drifted into the mainstream, floating all the way to the Lower Mainland where it showed up on the TV news last week.

Never thought we would see the day when Vancouver had the axe-throwing contests and Vancouver Island had the drive-by shootings, but then I didn’t think the Republicans would run a man-sized demented marmot for president, either.

There is, in fact, plenty of axe-throwing on the Island. It’s just that it’s found in places like Port McNeill, or Port Alberni, or Ucluelet, where they still stage logger sports shows. The big competition will be in Campbell River on the August long weekend, when world and Canadian championships will be up for grabs: underhand chop block, choker race, single-hand bucking …

If you don’t understand any of that, it means you live on the Victoria side of the imaginary line that bisects the Island — lumberjacks on one side, lumbersexuals on the other. Plaid-clad guys with $70,000 trucks versus plaid-clad guys with $70 haircuts.

Not sure where the line is, exactly, but it’s north of the Malahat, for sure. It used to be somewhere between Sooke and Victoria, but shifted well before 2002, the last year they held All Sooke Day.

If you never saw All Sooke Day, you lost out. It went all the way back to 1934 — when Sooke really was a logging town, populated by broad-shouldered men who made John Wayne look like Wayne’s World. In its heyday, up to 13,000 people would crowd the Sooke River Flats to watch events such as the peavey roll, the springboard chop and log birling.

Birling, for the uninitiated, involves running in place while balancing on a log floating in water. More to the point, it involves doing so while trying to make your opponent tumble off the same spinning log.

Back in 2000, the All Sooke Day people persuaded retired faller Dick Herrling, a 40-year logging sports competitor and the father of four world champions, to teach me the birling basics. (Birling seemed safer than one of those events where I might accidentally chop off something that would have to be sewn back on.)

Alas, while Herrling’s nine-year-old grandson calmly danced on the bobbing log, I went down as though shot by a sniper. This went on repeatedly — I took more dives than a tomato can boxer — until one particularly spectacular dismount that left me with giant bruises on both legs, which I whined about for days until my wife told me to shut up.

But I digress.

Sometimes it took people from elsewhere to appreciate the skills on display. A highlight of the 1994 Commonwealth Games came when the athletes were bused to the Sooke flats for a logging sports demo. They were enthralled.

Sitting in the stands, one of the African athletes warily eyed the 80-foot pole standing in the ring: “What’s that for?”

“They race to the top, ring the bell, then slide back down,” I told him. He looked at me as though I were messing with him: “No, really, what’s it for?”

He remained unconvinced until, slack-jawed, he watched a man in caulk boots clamber to the top as though being chased by a bear.

In truth, even by 1994 Sooke’s logger sports were more an echo of the town’s past than a reflection of its present. The community had morphed from logging town to commuter country by then, with just eight per cent of the Sooke-Port Renfrew area’s income derived from forestry.

That figure had fallen to four per cent by 2006, according to a B.C. Stats study. Compare that with 14 per cent in Duncan, 21 in Port Alberni, 23 in Campbell River, 32 in Port Hardy.

To reflect its economy today, All Sooke Day events would include the No. 61 bus dash, followed by the Colwood Crawl (which is close to a marathon in distance but takes twice as long).

All Victoria Day events would include parking ticket avoidance, cubicle decoration, the prostrate panhandler sidewalk steeplechase, and passive-aggressive inter-office memo writing.

Axe-throwing would be a demonstration sport.