When Nicole Coenen was running her own production company in London, Ontario, she did everything, she says, “to avoid Toronto.” Five years later, she lives in the Gulf Islands of B.C. and avoids any city at all. It’s a familiar refrain among former urbanites who make the move to a rural setting. For those feeling the tug, Coenen offers lots of practical advice in her breezy new book, Axe in Hand: A Woodchopper’s Guide to Blades, Wood, and Fire, published last month by Quarto. It’s probably the first book in history that mingles a history of the axe—much longer and more complicated than you might think—with the evangelizing passion of a 31-year-old TikTok influencer.
“I went from working in film and marketing to being a farmhand and labourer and discovering that I was happier shovelling goat poop at 4 a.m. in the morning,” Coenen says during a call from, presumably, a thick, petrichor-scented Pacific Northwestern forest. She also concedes that it takes a certain type of person. If you shrink from not just goat poop but also bugs and mud and the raw cycles of life and death—stay put. Coenen left behind plenty of friends and family who are, as the neurotic comedian once said, “at two with nature.”
“Some people have an aversion to, well—I don’t know what it really is,” Coenen, who had a habit of getting lost in the woods outside of London as a child, says with a laugh. “Getting your hands dirty? I get almost a dopamine rush from getting my hands dirty. Outdoor activity is a natural antidepressant. Humans, we’re built for so much of this kind of hands-on work, and it just feels good doing it. There’s satisfaction in something like woodchopping, where you see the results of your effort, you see the process, it’s good for you on a physical level, and it’s mentally satisfying too. And so simple. People pay 50 bucks a month for a gym membership where you could just go help a neighbour chop wood or do farm work.”
Coenen ditched the city in the early days of the pandemic, landing at a farm in the Kootenays before setting out for the Gulf Islands. There, she fell in with the GreenAngels Wood Choppers, a volunteer group that bucks, splits, and generally cleans up after fallen trees. Profits from the sale of firewood are then donated to various community initiatives. The rewilding of Nicole Coenen was already underway when she arrived on the West Coast, but Axe in Hand owes a lot to the Wood Choppers, and that’s where things get a little more interesting. How did they react, at first, to a young queer woman joining their ranks? Was it weird? Did she encounter any prejudice?
“Here? No,” she says. “It’s amazing, actually. If anything, it’s been the exact opposite. When I joined the group, it was predominantly a bunch of older men, and they took me under their wing. They taught me about trees, about how to fix a chainsaw, about the physics of chopping, and in no way did they ever make me feel that, because I was a woman, I couldn’t do this. They were like a group of really proud grandpas. With the Wood Choppers , it doesn’t matter who you are.”
Coenen managed to go a full year with the GreenAngels before they figured out who, exactly, she was. “One of the guys at coffee after about an hour of us all sitting there, he turns to me and says, ‘So my daughter showed me a video of you in the TikTok,’” she recalls, with a laugh. “I was like, ‘Oh no, it’s out.’” The punchline is that Coenen (with her two million followers on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok) now finds herself with another video production company of sorts, albeit staffed by older men volunteers who know how to fix and hang an axe. “Every now and then when I go out,” she says, “one of them will say, ‘So in your last video, your swing is getting a lot better, but I would say that you’ve got to bend more at the knee.’ They’ve been very, very supportive.”
It’s not lost on either of us that I’m speaking with Coenen on the day of the most fraught general election in Canada’s history, when too many of us have taken refuge in tribes and echo chambers, especially online. Axe in Hand is loaded with critical advice about types of wood and how exactly to get that fire started, all very important stuff, and Coenen writes lucidly about her personal history and inner life. But just beyond the margins of the page is an experience that’s true for most of us who defect from city life: the humbling realization that we might have arrived with a few unexamined prejudices of our own.
“I lived in Lemon Creek on the Slocan River for a bit, a town of about 300 people,” Coenen says. “Going from half a million in London to 300 people—it’s a bit of a culture shock. You really just have to accept everyone. In a big city you can find your people and isolate yourself in a silo. In a small town, it doesn’t matter what your neighbour’s views are, if they need help getting their truck out of the driveway after a snowstorm, you help. Everyone helps. There’s more of an acceptance. It feels like an extended family. In a small town, you learn who the human is first. It’s a different value system. I just joined the fire station, and I volunteer with the Wood Choppers , and both groups are very diverse in their opinions. There’s quite a few older men in the Wood Choppers , cis white men, but we’re all in it for the community. Same with the fire station. You’re in it together, and you know that, and you don’t let the divisiveness really divide.
“At the end of the day, that’s your neighbour, and you’re going to see them at the next potluck.”
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