How a TikTok Influencer Built a Community Chopping Wood on the Gulf Islands

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.”