E-mail A Friend Tell a friend about the information found on this page by sending them an e-mail.   Your Name: Your E-mail:   Type an e-mail address, then click add: Add a Personal Message: (Optional)

March/April 1997 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Feature: Saguenay Floods Write to Know Our Home and Native Tongue

JULY WEEKENDS ARE SAVOURED like sun-ripened saskatoons. The taste of each one lingers long after our achingly brief summers have swept on by. So imagine the annoyance and dismay many in Quebec felt when Environment Canada issued a forecast on Thursday, July 18, 1996, that rain would begin the following day and last all weekend. As irritating as that news might have seemed at the time, credit Environment Canada for delivering a timely, fateful and critical warning. Within hours the forecast had been upgraded to a special bulletin warning of heavy rains. This was to be a summer storm like no other. It caused the most catastrophic flooding in Canadian history. Rainfall records for the Saguenay go back 120 years and nothing in those accounts comes even close to what happened last July.

Soon after the flood-swollen rivers had subsided, Jean Paré, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Montreal-based news magazine L’actualité, called and suggested that we collaborate on a special report on the floods. He assigned Georges-Hébert Germain, one of Quebec’s most accomplished magazine writers, to the story. We assigned Taras Grescoe, a Montreal-based writer whose work has been published in The New York Times, National Geographic Traveler and Wired. His first feature for us, "Murder, he mapped," appeared in our Sept/Oct ’96 issue.

Grescoe and Germain travelled to the Saguenay, compared notes, settled on who would interview whom and generally worked out an exchange of ideas that allowed them to write different stories that arrived at the same conclusions. Grescoe’s tour d’horizon, written with files from Germain, moves from climatology to human anguish, from geology to engineering, and from history to the development compromises made by local municipalities.

WHILE THE SAGUENAY was under water, concrete spans longer than two football fields were being slipped into place above the stormy seas of Northumberland Strait. The spans are part of the new bridge linking Prince Edward Island to the mainland. One of the illustrations we included in our feature story on the bridge, which was written by Nova Scotia author and poet Harry Thurston, is a radar image of the area taken last winter. Many people were concerned that the bridge would delay the movement of ice out of the strait and thus affect the fishery there. Have a look at that radar image, which shows massive sheets of ice being sliced into strips by the bridge piers. Kudos to the engineers who devised such a clever solution to the ice problem. Still, the bridge looks toothpick-like and dangerously vulnerable compared to the size of the moving ice pack. Think of the Saguenay. Beware of nature’s millennial furies.

As we were editing the bridge feature, Dean Beeby of The Canadian Press wrote a news story about the name chosen for the bridge. Beeby said the blue-ribbon panel created to recommend a name had forwarded to the federal government the top three choices it culled from a list of 2,201 suggestions made by people from across the country. The panel’s list, in order of preference, were: Abegweit Crossing, Confederation Bridge and Northumberland Strait Bridge. The government chose Confederation Bridge. We asked our words columnist Bill Casselman to write about the meaning of Abegweit and comment on the government’s choice. The phone line sizzled when we broached the topic; Casselman was livid. The column he delivered two days later is, ah, unequivocal.

POETS HAVE DONE AS MUCH AS SCIENTISTS to plumb the mystery and meaning of Canada’s geography. Dorothy Livesay, who died at the age of 87 just after Christmas, published her first volume of poetry in 1928 and was still writing in the early 1990s. She had much to say about who we are and how the country has shaped us. In recognition of her work, we dedicated this issue’s "Imaginary landscape" to The Shrouding, a haunting Livesay poem about midwinter. It invokes the mood that envelops many Canadians at this point in our frigid season, a feeling that might be described as an ebbing of faith that July weekends will ever come again.

— Rick Boychuk

top