Writing Jack Pine came about from my vacationing in the Boundary Waters in Minnesota just below Canada. I was lucky enough to find a group of people who accepted me through my wife into their logging camp style vacations and I came to know the people of the North woods. I also came to know the issues associated with that way of life. Logging and the land and the environmentalists are all intertwined into a complicated mosaic.
Jack Pine at the core is a story about a strand of three hundred year old pines the loggers missed when the country was logged out in the late nineteenth century. These trees are priceless but they are up in the Boundary Waters a million acres protected when Teddy Roosevelt created the Boundary Waters Canoe Area by turning it all into protected land. From there the stage is set between the people who make a living off the land and the people who want it for the people.
And you can see both sides. In my book a Deputy Sheriff is torn between the three groups who are fighting for their rights. The Indians. The loggers. And the environmentalists. Everyone has a legitimate claim to the land but there is just not enough room and time is running out. I even rode around with a sheriff who patrolled this lonely land and got his take on what life is like for someone trying to enforce the laws over this vast frontier.
Throw in some dead loggers who are logging in the Boundary Waters illegally and the fuse is lit. I tried to give a picture of this land that is very similar to the West in that its beauty and sweep take your breath away and the people who have lived there. The rest is up to the reader.
www.williamhazelgrove.com
Jack Pine
Jack Pine at the core is a story about a strand of three hundred year old pines the loggers missed when the country was logged out in the late nineteenth century. These trees are priceless but they are up in the Boundary Waters a million acres protected when Teddy Roosevelt created the Boundary Waters Canoe Area by turning it all into protected land. From there the stage is set between the people who make a living off the land and the people who want it for the people.
And you can see both sides. In my book a Deputy Sheriff is torn between the three groups who are fighting for their rights. The Indians. The loggers. And the environmentalists. Everyone has a legitimate claim to the land but there is just not enough room and time is running out. I even rode around with a sheriff who patrolled this lonely land and got his take on what life is like for someone trying to enforce the laws over this vast frontier.
Throw in some dead loggers who are logging in the Boundary Waters illegally and the fuse is lit. I tried to give a picture of this land that is very similar to the West in that its beauty and sweep take your breath away and the people who have lived there. The rest is up to the reader.
www.williamhazelgrove.com
Jack Pine
