Winter woods

PHOTO: ANNE HEATHCOATE

The restless moon shifts again and again, and the land shifts with it. Then, a dawning in my head: as the earth begins to warm, one thing about winter that I’ll miss—trust me, the list is short—is the mood of the woods in winter.

Chickadee-dee-dee! The late afternoon sun lights up the naked forest; skeletal lines describe the land forms; stillness, then again: Chickadee-dee-dee! It’s the warning call of the chickadee, a signal that a trespasser is on the radar. Crow echoes; all around, the voices of tree sparrows, juncos and redpolls—arctic birds that have journeyed south to winter with us near the wind-protected woods.

Squirrels from long generations; coal and slate and acorn toned. A nuthatch freezes on the tree bark; holds its guise, camouflaged as a tree branch, patiently waiting for the intruder to pass. I hold still.

A downy woodpecker flees, low, across the forest floor set deep in snow; shadow hues of steel. Bare patches here and there; autumn leaves and lichen and needles of pine; twigs, a broken mix and then outcroppings of raw, timeless granite.

The place I stand today, just outside of Ottawa, is a sanctuary in a season without mud, black flies and ’skitters. While it is a place of its own, here, as in other destinations across the country, thousands of hectares sit as testimony to an earlier time.

It occurs to me that the skinny, extended corridors of pine that cover the landscape—barely enough for a horse and saddle to pass—are a legacy from a Depression- era public relief program and later, in post-WWII times, veterans’ employment programs. Similar approaches in the US saw three billion trees planted and the shaping of 800 parks in that same era.

It’s maybe why I feel that the long rows of now half-century-old trees, parade in formation, a shoulder-to-shoulder platoon; and I move with them, over hill and dale in the tranquility of this March day. Maybe I read it like that because of the stories my father, Paul, and his friend, Jack, tell. They don’t live in the past; it is simply a part of their stories as I help move my father from his home of 50 years into the veterans’ wing of a new retirement facility.

It was from the Ottawa valley in the mid 19th century that three-quarters of the timber shipped from Quebec City to Great Britain—up to 1,200 ships a day— was carried away from first-growth forests.

Timber profits for the entrepreneurs set up our banks. First, the Bank of Montreal in 1817 and, within 60 years, 38 additional banks chartered. Insurance companies such as Sun Life and then trading floors like the Toronto Stock Exchange followed.

Timber ships required ballast for their return voyage. Bunks were installed along the sides of the holds. Ads, mainly in Irish newspapers appeared, offering discount fares for anyone wanting passage to Canada. The fact that the ships were some of the oldest and most dilapidated in the British merchant fleet, and the need to bring their own food and bedding and sharing space with 200 fellow voyagers didn’t discourage the many ready to chance a new start.

Upon landing in Quebec, while a percentage of the immigrants continued on to the US, many chose to follow the rivers upstream—the same rivers that floated timber down—where work could be had in the forests. In the 1840s, when the population of Montreal was 10,000, there were 15,000 Irish loggers employed in the Gatineau region alone. By 1890, 80 per cent of the male workforce in Canada spent the winter labouring in the bush.

The staple that fed the lumber camps was pork, mostly brought in from Cleveland, Ohio. The high cost of shipping spurred the demand to buy local. It also spurred a demand for man–made water highways to connect previously unlinked parts of river systems, and to bypass rapids and falls. Canal building fever took over, creating a legacy we share today: the Rideau and Welland canals; the Trent-Severn waterway.

When the many projects drove the government of Upper Canada into bankruptcy, it influenced a union with the still-solvent Lower Canada, creating one colony in 1840.

And so I walk in the sanctuary of the pines, every one of them reaching mast-like to the sea of light above. Flotillas of tree trunks seemingly sing and sway to the very loudest of midnight pub songs: old comrades in arms. For me, this is a gift of inner freedom, untethered from the demands and noise of the world. I soak up the silence and offer thanks to the trees; a prayer of gratitude for those who planted them; those who witnessed the vein of destruction that lives within our humanness.

Today we reap the joy and peace that the winter woods offer. These trees are a veteran’s triumph. Sometimes the winter woods are called shelter belts. Now I know why.