by John Demont
Even the want ads illuminate. There you discover it is possible to buy a mussel declumper, a “female bunny rabbit lionhead” and a size ten three-quarter-length mink coat. You see exhortations to “get paid to shop,” or for “cheap phone reconnect,” a “debt consolidation program” and “discount timeshares.” You learn that a two-bedroom duplex rents for $565 a month, and a “1977 mint, never-driven-in-winter Cadillac” sells for $7,500. You’d find that a lobster licence goes for a whopping $250,000, while a scallop licence garners a mere $20,000. You’d see jobs for blueberry rakers, aerospace techs, carpenters, farm labourers and short-order cooks. You’d learn that it has been ten years to the day since Artemas D. Macdonald passed away. And that Joe and Nora Macdonald invite you to an open house to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary from two to four at their home in Cardigan.
TO anyone used to the buzz of a twenty-four-hour news cycle obsessed with gore, sex and celebrity the paper reads like a dispatch from some whimsical place, where time stands stubbornly still. I asked Paul if that was how Montague looked to his father, Jim, when he arrived, filled with expectation, in 1963. The son wasn’t quite sure. It was now lunchtime. Throughout the morning Paul had received six phone calls—receiver cradled between chin and right shoulder as he typed notes into his Mac—and made four. He thrice walked out into the newsroom to talk with Moore or somebody else. He had written a couple of lines of his column. Now, through the bumpy back roads of Montague we bounced, listening to CBC Radio, slaking our thirst with coffee sucked from plastic-lidded Tim Hortons cups.
Nothing had really changed since his father arrived. Except everything had. In his lifetime Paul had seen it happen: the old family businesses disappearing; the traditional industries waning; the necessities of life, like schools and decent health care, moving farther away. Anyone looking for a symbol of the quandary facing Canada’s towns need only set the GPS for Montague. A few years ago Paul had one of the most frightening experiences of his professional life: at a newspaper conference David Foot, the demographer, spoke about the challenges facing rural Canada—and, by extension, the papers that serve them. The area he chose to illustrate the trend was Alberton, home of the Graphic’s sister paper, the West Prince Graphic.
Foot laid a chart of West Prince’s demographic makeup over one for Canada as a whole. They were moving in completely different directions. “There’s a reason you’re having a hard time recruiting nurses,” he said. “There aren’t as many young women.” Foot showed that this once-thriving fishing and farming community was on an inexorable path: soon there would only be old people left. The most it could hope for, if nothing changed, was the second-rung status of a Charlottetown bedroom community. Otherwise, in time the last person will die, move into a nursing home or leave. Forests will reclaim the once-cleared land. Only abandoned farms and homesteads rotting in the damp will remain of their long-gone owner’s dreams.
“The issue is do we matter?” Paul wonders. “Do rural communities matter?” It’s a legitimate question that’s being asked not just in Canada, but also everywhere in the civilized world. In principle everyone seems to like the “concept” of the rural life. Yet growth remains the goal of the moment, expansion the clarion call of the hour. Before the Second World War, just over half of Canadians lived in cities. By 2011, eight out of ten people lived in urban areas—with most of the growth occurring in endless suburbs and exurbs that materialize where farmland once rolled.
As we drive around Paul points out the collateral damage in the push for progress: the boarded-up houses, the now vacant sites where the family-owned store stood for generations. Between 2001 and 2006—when Canada’s overall population rose by 5.4 percent—Montague shrunk by 7.4 percent. He knows big global economic forces are behind the exodus. He still blames governments in Ottawa and the provincial capital of Charlottetown for abandoning rural places like Montague. “The problem is government pays lip service. No real money. No real plan for immigration or repopulation. No real plan to change the economy.”
A panicky businessman watching his market disappear before his very eyes? Rather than fearing Google and the other things supposedly killing journalism, he thinks publications like the Eastern Graphic are about to enter a golden age. “It’s a period of transition that may take twenty years, but we will figure out a way to make money in this changing environment.” In the meantime, revenues are up 4 percent from a year ago. Raises have kept pace with the cost of living. He hasn’t had to lay off staff. Journalistic integrity hasn’t been sacrificed to keep shareholders, or business partners, happy.
With his big hopes for his paper and his community Paul MacNeill may seem like a guy with his head in the clouds. A dreamer who, some might say, doesn’t even realize his moment has forever passed. I see him differently: a guy who understands that a newspaper is more than a “profit centre.” Who knows that Arthur Miller, the playwright, was right when he wrote that a good paper “is a nation talking to itself.” Who grasps that when he tools around in his big-city ride with timeless river on one side of him and raw farmland on the other, he is bearing witness. When he sits down in his office, boots up his laptop and begins to type what he has seen and heard, he is not simply fulfilling the family legacy of comforting the weak and afflicting the powerful. By telling people’s stories he is writing lives into being. Otherwise—with the kids gone and the grandkids not even bothering to visit anymore—someday soon only some gravestones in a forgotten cemetery might exist to mark the people of King’s County’s tread on this earth.
It is a lot of responsibility for one man to shoulder. And time is marching on. “I was always destined for the paper,” he says. “But it’s a big wide world out there and I’m not sure I can say the same for my girls.”
That strikes me as a nice spin on a bad situation. I’m afraid that if my kids professed an interest in journalism, I might, in a weak moment, be tempted to put them in a room and lock the door until that thought went away. But happy, they say, is the man with purpose. If Paul can’t survive, maybe all papers everywhere are doomed. What I’m trying to say is that Paul fights, for all of us against the silence. For this reason, wish him luck.
CHAPTER
SIX
IRON MAN
WITH a glad heart Pierre Bedard stretches in the mid-morning heat in the Quebec countryside. Mint, parsley, tarragon and strawberry infuse the air. Hens and roosters cluck, quail and rabbits doze, a donkey brays, a dog—either Edgar, a mix of beagle and golden retriever, or King Arthur, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel—woofs. Pierre’s rectangle of farmland is longer than Rue Saint-Denis, where he once lived in Montreal’s Latin Quarter. Back then, the pinprick of homesickness nestled beneath his breastbone, Pierre didn’t think about how lucky he was to live in one of the continent’s funkiest neighbourhoods. He thought instead about the big mistake he had made by leaving his hometown of Rigaud, Quebec, at eighteen. Mostly he thought about how he had never taken to the big city. And about how much he missed the countryside’s peace, clean air and quiet.
“Here is my ancestral land,” he says with a vast gesture that takes in the tumbledown ski chateau in the hamlet of Sainte-Justine-de-Newton that he shares with his wife, Marie-Josée Lessard, as well as the animals, the woods, the hills and the delicate light. Pierre removes a semi-smoked, hand-rolled cigarette from his mouth, lights it and takes a deep pull. He’s thirty-four, living in the shadow of one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. To the eye, though, he reminds me of someone transported from a bygone age: he’s got oval features, stout dark sideburns and eyebrows and a sportive half beard. Round granny glasses make his eyes look opaque. Though a thick tuft of hair peeks out of the top of his shirt, I have no idea what is hidden under the Afghan headgear, called a “pakoul”—kind of a cross between a welder’s cap and a Shriner’s fez—that his wife made him. He smells faintly of sweat. His hands—long fingers, cuticles caked with grime—have a pre-industrial nineteenth-century starkness. Pierre can’t weigh more t
han 180 pounds, which, spread across six feet or so, makes him look quick more than dangerous. But his wide-shouldered leanness does not rule out power. Nor do those Popeye forearms, singed of any hair and corded with muscle.
Pierre worked until two this morning. (“When I go to the smithy and work, time stops—or at least slows down,” he tells me.) So he’s having a deservedly slow start to the day: sitting on an iron chair beside the herb garden, waiting for the sun to warm his joints, talking about his family’s long history in the area. The son of a cashier in a restaurant and a lumberjack who also did some farming, he was a different kid: “I’ve always been interested in handmade things,” he says in softly accented English. “I believed in that old saying, what is it, ‘Idle hands are the devil’s work tools.’ I was always fixing things around the house. When I was young, I used to carve wood, making little lumberjacks and wood puppets. I had a flea circus and put boats in bottles.”
They’re good memories, you can tell. Pierre likes things that last. He treasures tradition. It feels good for him to make his home where his people have lived for generations. Just as he considers himself blessed to practise an art mentioned in the Book of Genesis; that was said to be practised by Vulcan, the blacksmith of the gods; that forged the scimitars of Saladin and the anchors of the Nina, Pinta and the Santa Maria. An art that, after all those millennia, remains as basic as ever: air, fire, water and metal—the power of the physical merged with the chemical. A man with a hammer trying, through pure will and muscle, to change the nature of a piece of iron.
As much as anything, it is the intent that matters to Pierre: what he does—forge things out of metal—is practical but, in this day and age of mass production, absolutely irrelevant. All that is really at stake is the tissue-thin difference between “a thing done well and a thing done ill,” even as the rest of the world cares less and less about craftsmanship, dedication, patience and meticulous attention. “There is a right way of doing things,” Pierre likes to say. The ecstasy he seeks isn’t the thrill of heart-thumping excitement. It is the deep pleasure along the eternal road to mastery.
Pierre—who lives where he wants and generally does what he chooses according to his own schedule and rhythms—is a contented man, a blissful man. He doesn’t hurry. His natural expression is a half smile. He laughs easily. Pierre stands, yawns, then walks toward a solid, beaten wooden building topped with an old weather vane. Some other laid-back soul would probably just stay outside and soak in the astounding day. Yet le forgeron lives for the flame of the forge, the clang of the hammer. Today Quebec’s Brotherhood of Blacksmiths has dwindled to just fifty members. About half are hobbyists: guys with an anvil in the garage who dabble at forging. The rest are professional artisan blacksmiths like Pierre, who make and repair metal products—decorative, practical and sometimes both—with a few simple tools. That he is the only one who slavishly adheres to the “old ways” is as much hard-headed pragmatism as misty-eyed romanticism. “I am trying to keep the old techniques alive because they work,” he says. “A house will burn down and the only thing salvageable will be ironwork. I’m doing the same thing the same way it’s been done since the Iron Age—because it lasts.”
Inside his workshop the air bulges with heat. Some kind of particulate stings the eyes. Coal overpowers the sinuses. What light there is comes from outside, or from the forge, which he started firing up a few hours ago. At first the eyes dart around, searching for something heavy, slow and nasty—a Minotaur maybe, over there in the corner. Once they grow accustomed to the smoke and gloom, it’s possible to make out a room that’s about the size of a small barn, which is what it once was. A horseshoe, symbolically, overhangs the entrance. If there is a floor, I can’t see it. Two anvils—the smaller one atop an old tree stump—are visible. I glimpse a primordial workbench, a wooden barrel full of water—the slack tub, for cooling the hot metal—and a cast-iron block, called a “swage block,” with holes and grooves for shaping metal.
To a visitor used to typing away on a laptop in a neat little room, the shop looks chaotic and tousled. A closer look shows that everything has its place: the pile of debris is scrap metal, which will always come in handy. The stacks of tools are different kinds of tongs, files and chisels and dozens upon dozens of punches. In a thigh-high rack I count twenty-six hammers, different sizes, shapes and materials, no two of them alike.
Pierre has four forges. A smith, I discover, can never really have too many. Before metal can be shaped, it has to be heated until it is as malleable as clay. Heat like that requires a safe fire-resistant structure to house the fire. Pierre’s forge is wide based and waist high. The bowl-shaped fire pot has a hole in the bottom, through which air is piped to increase the flame’s heat. A draft hood to draw off the smoke from the flame looms over the hearth.
Pierre shows me the drill: how he puts kindling and newspaper inside the fire pot. How he lights the kindling and uses a long, hooked tool called a “rake” to pile coal into the fire pot. The coal—shipped from Montreal in hundred-pound bags that cost thirty-five dollars each and last between a day and a week depending upon the work being done—is the bituminous variety. It has to be baked for a few minutes until the impurities are burned off. The dull-looking leftover residue, which is called “coke,” burns more easily and hotter than coal. Pierre, who moves with an outfielder’s unhurried grace, rakes away the coke that has burned to ash.
He pokes around in the fire pot for “clinkers,” hunks of non-combustible impurities from the coal that dilute the quality of the flame. Once the pile in the fire pot burns grey, hard and porous he turns on the blower to feed the forge with more oxygen. Smiths used to depend upon a bellows operated by an apprentice. Pierre’s blower is electric. He flicks a switch, hears the whoosh, then steps back and waits for the deep bed of coke to heat.
Today he is working on a cadenas de cabane à sucre or, in English, sugar shack lock—a lock for one of those small shacks dotting the Quebec woods where sap collected from sugar maple trees is boiled into maple sugar. Right now it’s nothing more than a piece of wrought iron a couple of inches across. From those rude beginnings will emerge a nifty little conical device into which a heart-shaped key is inserted that sets or releases the shackle. Eventually the lock, which will take about sixteen hours to make, will retail on the Internet for three hundred dollars. He knows that’s not great money. Pierre could make more dough cranking out in-demand antique reproductions for Home Depot and home furnishing outlets looking for a little old-style authenticity. He calls that “monkey work.” And life is just too short.
Using a set of long, tapered tongs, he plunges the iron into the by now white-hot coals, then rakes some more coal overtop. It takes anywhere from 1,200 to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit to heat a piece of iron to the point where it can be easily shaped.
Pierre doesn’t own a thermometer. The shop’s perpetual gloom allows him to read the metal. He knows that when a piece of metal is red-orange, he can bend it. When it turns yellow, he can punch a hole in it. When it is white, he can “upset the metal”—hammer the metal back into itself to increase the mass and make it shorter—which is what he wants to do now. Blacksmiths can do other things with a piece of metal, an anvil and hammer: they can “draw out” or lengthen the metal; they can punch decorative patterns into the metal.
When it glows white enough, Pierre uses tongs to extract the metal from the fire. Then he drops it onto the smooth surface of his anvil. At 129 pounds it’s small by anvil standards—his other, a double-horned French anvil, weighs about two hundred pounds—but big enough for the job at hand. Pierre owns a homemade power hammer, which is easy on the joints but can’t do the kind of precision, angled work he aims for. He almost always opts for muscle power.
By perusing the website for Kayne & Son, a North Carolina blacksmithing family who supply Pierre with many of his tools, I discover that lots of hammers are fit for forge work: bossing mallets, chasing and dinging hammers and French, German, Nordic and Czech hammers. T
here are hammers for planishing, polishing, raising and rounding. There are cross peens (with a wedge-shaped surface on one edge of the head) and ball peens (one end round and the other cylindrical). The biggest one I discover is a French sledge (17.6 pounds) and the smallest one may well be a doming hammer (.35 pounds), apparently used by armourers. Each of Pierre’s hammers has a different handle to make it instantly identifiable. He lifts one that he forged himself out of the rack: two-foot wooden handle, steel cross peen head with a total weight of 3.5 pounds. Then he steps toward the anvil. It is time to pound some iron.
IN junior high school when I grew up, boys took a class called “industrial arts,” where, theoretically, we learned how to make things with tools. My self-esteem suffered mightily in that class. I lacked the patience to measure twice and cut once. Nothing—not tie racks, footstools or jewellery boxes—was plumb, flush or smooth. Everything jiggled. When the shop teacher—an ex-navy diver with a chest like a bellows—started talking about fret saws and rip cuts, he might just as well have been speaking Phoenician.
That didn’t stop me from seeing the value and virtue of such an activity. Perhaps it has something to do with a family tree that was dotted with electricians, carpenters, auto mechanics, bakers and Linotype operators. All I know is that since I started thinking about such things, I’ve felt nothing but wonder for the people who make the stuff of life. They build things, keep them running, then fix them when they break. They do something important and absolutely necessary—they may even do it with a little flair—with just a few tools and their own two hands. My admiration for people who work with their hands began as simply as that. But I also liked their no-nonsense ways. The sense of accomplishment of making or fixing something—instead of trying to anticipate the airy whims of some magazine editor—appealed to me. So did the notion of being rooted in the real world and making lives better in some concrete way.