Canadians (49 page)

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 bush 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.

I am grateful to Peter C. Newman and Andrew H. Malcolm, two wonderful writers who also poked around in the belly-button lint of this nation, for constant support and, for that matter, periodic reminders to get at it and stay at it. I tip my laptop to where they travelled before I dared set out.

Two editors deserve very special mention. Both are tough, brilliant, stubborn, smart, manipulative, persuasive, and … always right. Barbara Berson of Penguin was there from the outline that was lost, as was Edie Van Alstine of Ottawa. If Confederation can be described as a “cat's cradle,” as it has been in this book, that is nothing compared to the knotted coil that thousands of pages of notes can turn into. The book, in fact, was already written—and I thought done—when these editors decided it was only half done, needed to be untangled, re-thought, and recast. For whatever this adventure amounts to, I am forever grateful to these two fine editors and friends.

My gratitude also goes to Penguin's David Davidar, who never wavered on his support and encouragement; to Jonathan Webb, who read and commented on the early version of the book; to Brian Bethune, the
walking Canadian encyclopedia; to Penguin's Tracy Bordian, who kept everything together; to Penguin's art director, Mary Opper, for a wonderful cover; and to Karen Alliston, who did the fine copy editing and translated my scratches and eraser smudges and cross-outs into things that ended up looking like sentences.

I thank Brian Craik and Luci Salt for their help in Cree translations. To Ellen, I simply say thanks, as always.

And I also must pay a debt of gratitude to a long series of editors who, over a thirty-five-year period, saw fit to send me to places and let me go to places that perhaps didn't always seem to make sense—but that in the end provided a sense of this country and the people of this wonderful country that would never have been possible to gain otherwise. Thank you, Peter Newman, Don Obe, Walter Stewart, Gary Lautens, Ray Timson, Kevin Doyle, Robert Lewis, Nelson Skuce, Scott Honeyman, Keith Spicer, Russell Mills, James Travers, Ken Whyte, and Ed Greenspon. The only expenses still outstanding are the ones I will always owe you….

 

 

Roy MacGregor

Ottawa

February 15, 2007

Selected Readings

Adams, Michael. Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging
Values, Toronto
: Penguin, 2003.

Anderssen, Erin, Michael Valpy, et al.
The New Canada,
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2004.

Archbold, Rick.
I Stand for Canada: The Story of the Maple Leaf Flag,
Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002.

Atwood, Margaret.
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature,
Toronto: Anansi, 1972.

Barlow, Maude.
Too Close for Comfort: Canada's Future within Fortress North America,
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005.

Berton, Pierre.
The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the North West Passage and the North

Pole 1818–1909,
Toronto: Anchor Canada edition, 2001.

Bielawski, Ellen.
Rogue Diamonds: Northern Riches on Dene Land,
Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2003.

Boorstin, Daniel J.
The Americans: The National Experience,
New York: Vintage, 1965.

———.
The Americans: The Democratic Experience,
New York: Vintage, 1974.

Bowering, George.
Stone Country: An Unauthorized History of Canada,
Toronto: Viking, 2003.

Bowers, Vivien.
Only in Canada,
Toronto: Maple Tree Press, 2002.

Boyens, Ingeborg.
Another Season's Promise: Hope and Despair in Canada's Farm Country,
Toronto: Viking, 2001.

Bricker, Darrell, and John Wright.
What Canadians Think: “About Almost Everything,”
Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2005.

Brown, Craig, ed.
The Illustrated History of Canada,
Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1987.

Cameron, Elspeth, ed.
The Other Side of Hugh MacLennan: Selected Essays Old and New,
Toronto: Macmillan, 1978.

Cohen, Andrew.
While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World,
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2003.

Colombo, John Robert.
The Penguin Treasury of Popular Canadian Poems and Songs,
Toronto: Penguin, 2002.

Coupland, Douglas.
Souvenir of Canada,
Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2002.

English, John.
Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Vol. One, 1919–1968,
Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

Epp, Roger, and Dave Whitson, eds.
Writing Off the Rural West: Globalization, Governments, and the Transformation of Rural Communities,
Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2001.

Ferguson, Will.
Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw: Travels in Search of Canada,
Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2004.

Francis, Daniel.
A Road for Canada: The Illustrated Story of the Trans-Canada Highway,
Vancouver: Stanton Atkins & Dosil, 2006.

Friesen, Gerald.
The West: Regional Ambitions, National Debates, Global Age,
Toronto: Penguin, 1999.

Frye, Northrop.
The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination,
Toronto: House of Anansi, 1995.

Fumoleau, René.
As Long As This Land Shall Last: A History of Treaty 8 and Treaty 11, 1870–1939,
Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2004.

Gordon, Charles.
The Canada Trip,
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997. Grady, Wayne, ed.
Treasures of the Place: Three Centuries of Nature Writing in Canada,
Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1992.

Gray, Charlotte.
The Museum Called Canada,
Toronto: Random House, 2004.

Gruending, Dennis, ed.
The Middle of Nowhere: Rediscovering Saskatchewan,
Calgary: Fifth House Publishing, 1996.