A Good Day's Work (23 page)

Pierre isn't measuring himself against the stuff you see at the local store. He has a higher standard: his Quebec predecessors, the purveyors of his favourite artistic styles, Italian art nouveau and early-American Pennsylvania Dutch. Mostly he wants to earn the esteem of his mentor, Lloyd Johnston, whose people have been blacksmithing in the Kawartha Lakes area of Ontario since 1831. At seventeen Lloyd told his father that he was never going to work where he got his hands dirty. Nonetheless, he studied engineering at university, graduated and then went looking for something to do with his hands “for a while.” Now he and Pierre talk once a week on the phone, and meet at old-time craft festivals. Every month or so Pierre hops in his pickup and makes the six-hour drive to Woodville, Ontario, where Lloyd, one of the province's thirty-or-so professional blacksmiths lives and operates his blacksmithing school.

Guys like this have to stick together. Blacksmithing is a lonely business and Pierre a social guy. This afternoon he is forging a long-handled frying pan for some history buffs looking to re-create the days of the coureurs de bois. Some jobs require more than two hands. Fortunately, today he has help. A man about Pierre's age has shown up. His face is angular; his eyes are dark and Gallic, the bequests of ancestors who made the long Atlantic crossing from France. He is marginally taller than Pierre is, lanky, with a ponytail and a dark beard. He wears a loose-fitting denim shirt, work pants and boots. He carries a plastic forty-ounce bottle of Coke.

Though Dominique Marleau lives in Montreal, he was born in Rigaud, the same as Pierre. One day in 2006 he was wandering around at a traditional arts festival in a town called Vaudreuil, when he discovered Pierre putting on a
blacksmithing demonstration. “I said, ‘Wow, that is neat,' ” explains Dominique. “I'm a train conductor by day so I like things made of iron. But I also like the fire and doing things the old way. I like being able to re-create the way something was made three hundred years ago.”

Blacksmiths used to have full-time assistants who operated the bellows, stirred the fire and carried the coals. Pierre would dearly love to have an apprentice to whom he could pass on the time-honoured techniques. In time, maybe Dominique will live up to his promise to move home and really get serious about learning the craft. For now the best he can do is a once-a-week jaunt to Sainte-Justine-de-Newton to absorb what Pierre can show him.

By the time Dominique arrives Pierre has already prepared the forge—cleaning the fire pot, lighting the newspaper, piling the coal atop the coke, adding some kindling, turning on the air. The customer for the long-handled frying pan isn't paying enough to forge the whole thing from scratch. So Pierre takes an old frying pan and cuts the handle off with a grinder. To connect the pan to the handle, he needs a short, T-shaped chunk of metal. Pierre marks one end of the metal with a piece of chalk and then shoves it into the coals. When the metal is yellow-hot, he lifts it onto the anvil and hits it with the hammer, sending flecks of scale that formed on the hot iron flying into the air seemingly at the speed of sound. “Blacksmiths get burned a lot,” he says. “If something falls, the natural reflex is to catch it. I used to try and pluck those chips. You have to lose the reflex of catching them.”

Pierre rummages around in a pile of metal for a piece of flat bar. The one he chooses is eight feet long and five-sixteenths of
an inch thick. When it's hot enough, he nods to Dominique, who has been patiently watching, his hand absentmindedly on the handle of the cross peen beam sledgehammer by his side. It is nearly 4 p.m. They are ready to forge the iron. Pierre smacks the metal with his ball peen hammer. Dominique smacks it with his sledge. Then they're off, Pierre leading the way, Dominique following a beat later.

Usually the blacksmith's helper is supposed to strike the iron in the middle. When Pierre wants that to change, he indicates where the sledge blows are to fall by touching the spot with his hand hammer. If Pierre gives the anvil quick, light blows, it is a signal for Dominique to strike quicker by putting more of his lanky body behind each blow. When Pierre wants him to pound harder, he hits the metal with more force with his ball peen hammer. If he wants Dominique to strike more softly, he lowers the intensity of his own blows. As they proceed, Pierre sometimes uses verbal cues—“Yep, yep, yep” or “Go, go, go” or “Harder, harder, harder”—to get the desired effect. When Pierre places the head of his hammer on the anvil, Dominique strikes the metal one last time.

They scarf the end of the handle and the edge of the T-shaped piece. They pound them down so that they make a clean weld. Pierre takes a wire brush to the metal to scrape away the scales and then adds borax, a white flux that prevents oxidization, to the two pieces of metal about to be bound. The metal goes back in the coals. The two pieces are placed on the anvil, one over the other, scarf upon scarf, forming an orange cross. They start hammering the metal in the centre of the weld, pushing everything out to the edges. On and on they pound. They pound the metal until the molecules are so full
of energy that they jump from one piece of metal to the other. Only then does Pierre lay his hammer down.

While the handle reheats, Pierre pokes around in the shop some more. He returns with a punch. He pops a trio of holes in the T-shaped handle end and pushes a homemade rivet—three-sixteenths of an inch long with a mushroom cap head—into each hole. Once the rivets are in place he picks up a half-pound ball peen hammer and pounds the rivets down. When they're flush, he hits each head four times with the hammer to make a diamond shape.

Dominique lets out a “whoo-hoo.” They mumble some words in French that I can't quite catch. But I get the drift. It is the spring of 2010. And yet here stand these two, in this time where everything is written in sand and immortality is a tune by Pearl Jam. Pierre and Dominique had to know that there was nothing really at stake today other than doing something well for its own sake. For them that's enough. So I gaze at this scene—the gloom, smoke and sparks, the elemental tools, the happy men doing work that hasn't changed in essence since the Iron Age—and try to commit it to memory. They make things to last at a time when everything is obliterated by the click of a mouse and the next thing to roll off the assembly line. The least I can do is bear witness. While someone still can.

CHAPTER
SEVEN

READING THE GRASS

O
NE
November morning I got up and got in my rental car in Hanna, the Alberta town closest to Marj Venot's place. I exited the parking lot where the young guys leave their bull-barred, rocker-panelled pickups running while they have a couple of pops in the bar by the motel. I drove past their parents' homes: a generation or two back the original Scots, German-Russians and Americans who settled the area. Beyond a new fire hall, a prosperous seniors residence, ball fields sponsored by the Kinsmen and tennis courts covered in early winter snow I discovered Hanna just stops. Then the horizon opens in a way that makes a city boy from a place where everything is crabbed together take a series of deep breaths.

I lived in Calgary for a couple of years in the late eighties, when the province was in one of those oil-price-related slumps that would pass for prosperity most anywhere else in this country. We hit the highway to Banff and Lake Louise. We went to barbecues in the foothills of the Rockies. Once we drove as far as the Badlands—about forty-five minutes from Hanna—to see a place where dinosaurs had roamed. I'm not sure why, but we never made it to the short-grass country. So I'm quite unprepared for the roll of the flatlands, the scale of the sky, the tapering highway that just goes and goes. I drove up the night before, in fog as thick as I've encountered on Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula. Now it has burned off, leaving a savannah so stunningly empty that it makes me scan the vista for a tree or animal so I could get my bearings.

When we spoke over the phone, Marj told me to watch out for the stop sign or I'd miss the road to her place. She might have been just screwing with the city boy. Heading east along Solon Road, there's only one stop sign. It can be seen from a couple of miles away. I flip my blinker on for the right turn. I realized, the moment I did so, that this was stupid: over the ten-mile stretch to Veno Ranches I see a total of three man-made structures. I don't pass one car. I don't see a single human being. Marj's property sits on the uppermost edge of Alberta's Special Areas, a five-million-acre extension of the Great Plains grasslands that run from the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains. It is land that, in Marj's words, “has not had man messing with it.” Last time someone bothered to count, five thousand people lived in the Special Areas, which works out to one person per thousand acres of land.

The cow-per-acre ratio on her land is much higher. The woman who owns them does not give them names like Minnie, Dollie or Bessie. Marj, who when I arrive is shooing away Duke, her oldest herd dog, doesn't need to. In her mind she says, “There's the one with the short tail” or “Here comes the scared one” or “There goes the rust-coloured one.” A few of the bulls, it is true, have nicknames like “Hustler” and “Grid Iron.” A lot of the cattle can only be told apart by the number on the ear tag: 249, 5440, 47 and so on. Often she refers to them, respectfully, as the “old girls”—although, if need be, she will call them anything necessary to get them to move along.

It helps that cattle don't roam far, even on lands as expansive as these are. Marj and her husband, Murray McArthur, have 19.5 sections of land between the two of them. A section is 640 acres. So their trio of ranches contains 12,480 acres of Alberta ranch land. On it they raise three hundred purebred Angus cows for “seed stock” and another three hundred head of commercial Angus cattle for beef. “More than the average,” Marj says of her ranch, “but there're ones that are bigger.” Particularly these days, when so many ranchers want out and those who stay have to grow to survive. Even so, it's big enough that Murray is off today in the Cessna 150 two-seater airplane they bought to better keep an eye on their land and herd.