Canadians

by Roy MacGregor

  For decades such incidents were held to be nothing more than mildly amusing. But as the twenty-first century got under way everything changed. The Arctic melt was moving so quickly that a number of nations, not just the United States, began looking at the Northwest Passage through the eyes of Frobisher and Franklin: a new, open, and workable transportation route to and from China, now the world’s fastest-expanding economy.

  Only months before Clarkson set out for Alert, little Denmark had raised its flag over Hans Island, a tiny, uninhabited barren rock that lies in Nares Strait between Ellesmere Island and northern Greenland. The flag-raising was taken as a provocative act, though hardly worthy of anything but launching stiff words in Denmark’s direction.

  Canada rather naturally felt a proprietary interest, since Canadians alone make up what very little human presence there is on Ellesmere and points north. The most northern community in all North America is found here at Grise Fiord, Larry Audlaluk’s home—though it might be advisable, under the circumstances, not to mention that Grise Fiord was created out of thin and very cold air back in the early 1950s by the Canadian government shipping in unsuspecting Inuit from farther south. Still, Grise Fiord had survived and now stood as a significant symbol in the vague, slightly throat-catching northern statement that all this empty white space at the top belongs to us.

  Saying and showing are, however, quite different matters. Apart from the Alert base and a small weather station at Eureka, the only military presence in the area was the two-man Royal Canadian Mounted Police station at Grise Fiord and the Canadian Rangers, a charming but rather ragtag Inuit force composed of mostly older males wearing red tams and jackets and carrying worn .303 Lee Enfield rifles passed down from the armed forces, some of the rifles dating as far back as the First World War.

  Clarkson had come north inspired by Vincent Massey, the first native-born of Canada’s many governors general. Nearly a half century earlier, in 1956, Massey had made his own statement concerning who exactly owned exactly what when he flew on military transport over the North Pole and, on the way back to base, had the co-pilot pop the window a moment to drop out a metal canister containing his vice-regal flag.

  Naturally, the canister instantly vanished from sight into the white reflection of permanent day—but at least the sentiment was there.

  Massey’s disappearing canister had given birth to Clarkson’s dream, only she wanted something that could be found again, if necessary. Surely the most passionate about the North of any governor general—a passion largely fed by her husband’s insatiable curiosity about Inuit life— Clarkson had decided to build a rock cairn similar to those built by past Inuit generations, many of which have withstood the elements for centuries.

  Rather than a directional guide or a food cache, however, Clarkson’s cairn would contain evidence of the country’s head of state at this spot in mid-June of 2005. It would stand as a statement for all who might later challenge either Canada’s right to the incredible riches that lie under the Beaufort Sea and Arctic Ocean or its control of the passage between Europe and Asia that might prove the single benefit of global warming.

  With the sun shining and the afternoon wind picking up, volunteers from Base Alert had pitched in to help build the cairn. They carried boulders and small rocks and, under instructions from an army engineer who must have played with such material as a child, they built a solid cairn at the far end of the runway.

  When it reached the height of John Ralston Saul, the tallest man in the group of a dozen or more workers, they paused before setting the large finishing rocks over the top. Then they took a small green ammunition case and opened it up to place within it their statements on Canadian sovereignty over the Far North.

  No one remarked that a Canadian Armed Forces ammo case stamped “EMPTY” on the side was its own ironic statement.

  Governor General Adrienne Clarkson placed her vice-regal flag in first, copying what Vincent Massey had done forty-nine years earlier with his canister. Clarkson and Saul then added their own personal notes, handwritten and folded to keep each message to itself. Everyone who worked on the cairn then signed another piece of paper and it was carefully folded and placed inside the small steel box.

  But there was still room.

  If people truly deplore a vacuum, this was proof. One man placed a business card inside. A woman put a small pin in. A Mountie took his badge, RCMP Nunavut, and dropped it in. Someone found an expired fishing licence to put in—causing another man to shout out: “I sure wish I had my wife’s credit card here!”

  They were about to seal the box when Julie Verner, a fair-haired, bespectacled soldier, stepped forward and asked them to wait a moment. The forty-five-year-old warrant officer had something to add.

  She surprised herself by asking the others to wait, but there was something about the cairn that had her thinking. She’d hiked out to see another, older one, farther along the bay, and it had struck her that such constructions last forever in the Arctic.

  It never occurred to Julie Verner that she might stand for something. But she did. She came from Sault Ste. Marie, pretty much the midpoint of the Trans-Canada Highway that runs from one side of the country to the other. She was the child of a francophone father and an anglophone mother and had married a man whose heritage was neither. She was also the mother of four young children, the elder two now able to talk freely to their Poirier grandmother in Rouyn-Noranda who spoke no English at all.

  “I remember thinking,” she told me months later, “here we are on the top of the world and you could never put a flag up that would last very long. But this cairn could last forever—maybe even longer than Base Alert will be there. I thought about someone opening up this cairn hundreds of years from now and there not being a Canadian flag there saying this is our place.”

  And so, very carefully, with her eyes beginning to sting, Julie Verner reached up and tore the small Canadian flag off the shoulder of her uniform. She rolled it over once in her hand and then dropped the tiny flag in and turned away, tears now freely flowing.

  Taken one way, it looked like disrespect to the uniform. Taken the right way, it was merely a soldier serving her country.

  Canada, a country that so often makes no sense at all.

  Canada, a country that, every so often, makes total sense.

  Roots and Rocks

  THESE ARE MY ROOTS.

  I can feel them with my bare feet; I can grab them with my hands; I can find them with my eyes shut; I can even swing from them along the rock cliffs that ride high over the pine-needled trail that runs out to the far point where they brought me to stay when I was all of three days old.

  “Roots and Rocks,” we called it back then—so very long ago that the photographs are black and white and the magnificent two-storey log cabin that stood high on the point is long since gone. But if you know where to look, you can still find the trail in from the highway. And hints of what once was.

  We played Roots and Rocks from the time we could walk. The rules were as simple as life itself seemed back then: you can step only on roots or rocks; miss a step and you’re dead. Now some of the players really are dead. Now no one lives here any more but ghosts.

  We ran races back then. Roots and Rocks up to the Big House, Roots and Rocks down to the kitchen cabin, Roots and Rocks all the way out along the cliffs to the highway, Roots and Rocks to the icehouse, to the spring, to the outhouse. There was a time when the four of us—three brothers and a sister—and a half dozen or more cousins could fly along these roots and rocks as if they held both a magnetic field to catch our bare feet and a spring to throw us to the next safe landing … and the next … and the next.

  To a passing canoeist, we must have seemed a wilderness camp for children having to learn to walk all over again; to us, we were always one step away from death and, it seems looking back, never quite so alive again.

  Apart from the disappearance of the log house and the three small cabins, the outhouse and the icehous
e, this rocky point along the north shore of Lake of Two Rivers in Algonquin Park hasn’t changed at all. Perhaps some trees are taller and some have fallen in the half century that separates those laughing children and today, but the roots and rocks are so much the same that it feels, to fifty-eight-year-old bare feet, as if some genetic code of their presence, distance, height, and feel still pulses through the soles.

  It certainly does through the soul.

  This is the landscape Tom Thomson came to paint and was never able to finish. His fiancée, Miss Winnifred Trainor, whose sister Marie married our Uncle Roy, used to sit in a lawn chair on this rocky point and stare out over the water that runs from the Algonquin highlands down through the Madawaska Valley and all the way to the Ottawa River. The teacoloured water ran then, and runs today, just as it did back in 1837 when the great mapmaker David Thompson—then sixty-seven years old, impoverished and all but blind—paddled by this rocky point and noted in his journal: “Current going with us, thank God.”

  The current went against Winnie Trainor though. She was left with a honeymoon reservation at an area lodge she could never use; left, many believe, with a child she’d have to give up; left with a dozen or more Tom Thomson originals she’d keep wrapped in newspaper and stuffed in a six-quart basket in her small second-floor apartment in Huntsville. One of those tiny sketches broke through the million-dollar mark at a recent auction in Toronto. What would she think about that? Winnie Trainor had to rent out the better part of her house just to make ends meet. She couldn’t even afford to put in hot water for herself.

  This is my Canada. Come sit for a moment on the warm rocks.

  The wind is in the pines. The waves are licking under a rock cut at the end of the point. David Thompson paddles by on his final great journey, the last assignment the great mapmaker would ever take on.

  Winnie Trainor spins her eyeglasses in her right hand as she talks, growing ever louder and more animated. While we children cover our mouths and giggle, the glasses suddenly fly out of her hand and stick high in the spruce tree standing over the handmade wooden chair she fills with her large, dark, imposing body.

  Our grandfather, the old park ranger, works a hand pump down by the water, his sweat turning his faded green Lands & Forests shirt black under the arms and in a sloppy V down his back.

  Our mother has the coal oil-fired washing machine running, the exhaust burping out a straight pipe like a motorcycle as she runs sheets as white as snow through the ringer sister Ann once caught her arm in up to the elbow.

  Our grandmother, wearing a simple print dress, as always, is putting up wire fencing in a useless effort to stop the deer from eating her geraniums.

  Our father, Saturday afternoon off from the mill on the next lake down the Madawaska River system, is far out on the waters of Lake of Two Rivers, trolling with steel line for lake trout.

  All of us—Jim, Ann, Tom, and I—periodically scan the water for him and his little wooden boat, eager to be the first to shout “HE’S UP!”— meaning he’s on his feet and reeling in what will be tonight’s supper in a world where dinner is eaten at noon.

  Older brother Jim and I returned to the point this past summer. I try to get there once a year; he’s returned only a few times since the mid-1960s when, after the old ranger died, the family sold the place to an American and, a decade later, the new owner panicked over an impending ruling to limit park leases and had the log house dismantled, the logs numbered and carted away and reassembled like some wilderness IKEA in a very different setting far away from Algonquin Park.

  Jim says there are too many ghosts and it bothers him to be there. I, on the other hand, enjoy the company of the ghosts.

  When our sister Ann was dying of cancer the year she turned fifty, I asked her once, when it was beyond obvious what was going to happen, what meant most to her in a life that had included moving from the park area to a small town then to a city for university and a long career as a renowned fact-checker at Maclean’s. (She would have caught those sorry gaffes you noted earlier.)

  She never even paused: “Lake of Two Rivers, of course.”

  Four years later, when our mother was beginning to happily wander and was hospitalized not long before a stroke put an end to it, I happened to ask her if I could get her a drink of water. Her response astonished me. She told me where to go to get it, but nowhere in the little hospital in Huntsville. Instead, with her eyes half closed, she gave me perfectly detailed directions on where to walk along the rock cliffs and where to climb down and how to get across the beach and over the small creek to the little natural spring that bubbled with water so clear and cold it made your teeth ache if you drank it too quickly.

  Lake of Two Rivers. Roots and Rocks. The place I think of first when I think of Canada.

  My Pier 21—where I landed at the age of three days and have stayed ever since.

  And where, one day, I may return to give my brother the willies should he happen to canoe over all by himself for a last look around.

  I ONCE THOUGHT that rocky point on Lake of Two Rivers was big, then I believed Algonquin Park endless. To get to some parts of it the Lands & Forests would have to send in a floatplane to pick up the old ranger and carry him off to fight a fire or deal with poachers. Then the town we moved to from the little village seemed awfully big, but not so large as the city to the south where we would sometimes go and be overwhelmed by such simple matters as escalators and traffic lights. The province was so huge that I was grown before I ever set foot beyond it, only to discover that the country of which the province was but a portion was so big not even David Thompson’s maps could hold it all.

  I am grateful to journalism’s entrée for getting me around so much of this enormous bumblebee of a country. And yet I suspect I’ve seen but a fraction of the fraction David Thompson saw in a lifetime of exploring. It’s probably easier to cup the morning mist that rolls along the gunwales of a canoe than it is to fully grasp the width and breadth and astonishing variety of this land and its people.

  I am acutely aware of how sheltered life once was here on this point. Our parents once took us to the small city of Orillia to have our eyes tested and locked us in the little motel room while they went to arrange appointments. We’d never used a flush toilet before and put so much toilet paper in that it blocked and flooded, and when the manager came pounding on the door we refused to let him in because, of course, he was a stranger. We saw so few truly different people back then that, when a black family came and set up a tent at the Lake of Two Rivers campground, word went out over the tiny crank telephones that connected the rangers and that evening we joined a virtual convoy of cars slowly making their way past the campsite. We pressed our faces to the window and stared hard at people we’d heard of but never seen—the poor family probably wondering whatever became of the promised peace of the Canadian wilderness.

  Today, this great park is often filled with more visitors from outside the country than from inside. There are busloads of Japanese tourists taking pictures of the fall foliage. There are Germans on the hiking trails. There are African-Americans and African-Canadians not only in the campgrounds but in the very family that started out from this rocky point in Algonquin Park. Middle Eastern families are buying ice cream at the little Canoe Lake portage store. A Dutch tourist walking about the Smoke Lake landing tells me that the thing he’ll remember most about his holiday in Canada is driving on a road and not seeing any other traffic—something he’d never before experienced.

  No wonder nine out of ten of us told that Globe and Mail survey that the thing that spoke to them most about this thing called Canada was the vastness of the landscape. This, even with the growing fact of urban life suggesting otherwise.

  Here, size matters.

  On the plateau behind the rocky point there’s nothing left of the log cabin today but remnants of the magnificent stone fireplace the old ranger built with his own hands. The beautiful quartz rocks he gathered from the surrounding shoreline and bus
h are missing, the curious having made off with them as well as with most of the lovely granite stones with the fine mica flakings. The fireplace is gone.

  And yet readers will understand when I say it burns still.

  On that gorgeous fall day that VIA Rail no. 638 carried Pierre Trudeau’s body home to Montreal I stood at the window watching the bush and water slide by and thought about how, as a young boy, the future prime minister had been sent off to this same Algonquin Park to polish up his English. He came to attend Taylor Statten Camps on Canoe Lake, the same lake Tom Thomson painted and died on, the same lake on which Winnie Trainor kept her little cottage and where, each year, she would climb the hill behind it and clean up the grave where her Tom was first laid to rest and where some believe he still lies.

  It was here, on this lake, that Trudeau gained his lifelong love for the canoe, the paddle, and the backpack filled with all the worldly goods one might require.

  Years after those early canoe trips, Trudeau penned an essay he called “Exhaustion and Fulfillment: The Ascetic in the Canoe,” in which he wrote, “I know a man whose school could never teach him patriotism, but who acquired that virtue when he felt in his bones the vastness of his land, and the greatness of those who founded it.”

  I like to think that unnamed man was Pierre Trudeau.

  I like to believe that, potentially, it could be each one of us, man, woman, child—and generations of children yet to come.

  Roots and Rocks … Roots and Rocks …

  Acknowledgments

  THIS BOOK came out of a happy accident. We were meeting with publishers over another project, and I happened to mention that it had been sixty years since Bruce Hutchison had written The Unknown Country, and, by and large, the title still holds. I have to thank Natasha Daneman and Bruce Westwood of Westwood Creative Artists for seizing on the moment and prodding me for months after to start gathering material and working on an outline—which, of course, was lost the second my fingers touched the keyboard.