 |
magazine / ja09
 |
July/August 2009 issue |
|
|
|
EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK
Locks and lakers
I grew up a block and a half from the St. Lawrence River, but I have never
so much as dipped a toe in it. In Montréal’s workingclass
bedroom borough of Verdun, where I spent my young years playing hockey
in back lanes and corner rinks, the river was an ever-present but remote
and dangerous force, reachable only by crossing rue Wellington, boulevard
Lasalle, Parc Wilcox and the boardwalk, then slipping down a steep, gravelly
incline to the shoreline of the cold, grey, rushing current.
Kids didn’t dare swim here, for fear of being swept away by the
powerful flow, only to wash up dead downstream, snagged on a pylon under
Pont Champlain or in a pile of rushes and debris across the channel on Île
des Soeurs, the subject of a dramatic and intense police search and rescue
effort. At least, that’s the scene our parents painted to scare the
Huck Finn out of us.
No, for me, the St. Lawrence was terra pericolosa, a dangerous
place that puts travellers in jeopardy. But for a legion of savvy navigators,
the river has long been fluvius cognitio. Paddlers and oarsmen,
raftsmen and fishermen, naval crews and merchant mariners confidently plied,
and still ply, the mighty St. Lawrence, at least until they get to the
virtually impassable standing waves of the Lachine Rapids, a short cruise
around the bend upriver from Verdun.
It didn’t take long for sailors to find a way around the rapids.
First attempts at a canal, as early as 1689, were modest — and economic
failures. These culminated in 1825 with the 14.5-kilometre Lachine Canal,
which fortified Montréal’s role as a booming port but was
soon rendered obsolete by ever-growing vessels. Enter the St. Lawrence
Seaway.
In the mid-1950s, directly across the river from my Verdun home and ranging
from Pont Jacques-Cartier to beyond Pont Honoré-Mercier, an audacious
engineering infrastructure took shape. Man-made islands, canals, channels
and locks, combined with stretches of navigable river, formed a new marine
superhighway, custom-made for that behemoth carrier of coal, grain and
iron ore, the laker. A half century later, the economic, environmental
and social impact of that waterway can’t be underestimated, as writer
D’Arcy Jenish and photographer Martin Beaulieu discovered when they
climbed aboard the CSL Spruceglen and sailed from the St. Lambert
Lock to the dock at Iroquois, Ont., a half-hour drive from where I live
now. Whenever I’m in that vicinity, I love to stop and watch the
passing ships from the shore of this great conduit of the Great Lakes Basin.
One of these days, I might even dip a toe in.
Intrepid and prolific, Ed Struzik is the kind of writer who lives what
he writes about. He has travelled through numerous national parks, paddled
rivers and hiked to peaks across the country, particularly in the North.
But not for mere recreation. He always returns from such places with a
relevant story to tell. Most of these have appeared in the Edmonton
Journal, where he’s been a senior writer for the past three
decades. But many have been published in this magazine as well, beginning
with one on the impact of Arctic oil spills in 1981 and peaking, perhaps,
with a 5,000-word opus on Nahanni National Park Reserve in 2002. His latest
effort, in this issue, is an anecdotal, incisive and respectful 100th-anniversary
tribute to our national parks wardens, many of whom Struzik knows on a
first-name basis.
Two years ago, Struzik took a sabbatical from the Journal to
criss-cross the Canadian Arctic and write his third book, The Big Thaw:
Travels in the Melting North. On June 10, he was presented with the
2009 Michener-Deacon Fellowship by Her Excellency the Right Honourable
Michaëlle Jean, Governor General of Canada and Patron of The
Royal Canadian Geographical Society, for his next proposed book project,
on Arctic sovereignty. Struzik certainly didn’t achieve this pinnacle
of journalism overnight. He works really hard at it, and all his readers,
myself included, benefit.
— Eric Harris
top
|
|
|
