UPPER-GATINEAU: LAND OF FLYING CANOES AND DANCING TREES...

Flying canoes of the Upper-Gatineau area, in Canada,

are probably distant relatives to the more famous flying carpets of Arabia,

known to anyone familiar with Middle Eastern lore.

A rare picture of trees caught dancing in the early morning,

when they thought they were alone, all by themselves, with no witness,

among the snow, the ice, and the cold of a typical Canadian winter.

Hydrographic map of the Ottawa River (la grande rivière des Outaouais), an early water-road connecting the Montréal archipelago with the Great Lakes region (long before there were land-roads and freeways in Canada or the United States), including the main sub-river, that is the Gatineau River (the one going straight south in the direction of the present city of the same name, where it meet with the Ottawa River, right in front of the city Ottawa). It is important to remember that travel upriver from Montréal through the Upper Saint-Laurent was dangerous (and often simply impossible) because of the existence of the powerful Iroquois confederacy nearby, in what is now Upper New York State. From the Great Lakes, by canoe, it was relatively easy, for early French explorers, soldiers, voyageurs, priests, colons and traders, to reach the Ohio River, the upper Mississippi River, the Missouri river, or the small waterways leading to the Canadian Prairies. Those Great Lakes were thus a kind of intersection (like a sort of ancient watery roundabout) for access to the waterways existing all over the central part of the continent. Control over that intersection enabled New France to survive and thrive for a century and a half, despite very bad odds, quite insufficient numbers, and poor support from a motherland that was (and still is) more of a land-power than a sea-power.

 

 

You're herby invited to discover a very special valley...

 

The Upper Gatineau

 

The Gatineau valley is located just north of the Canadian capital, Ottawa, but in the province of Québec. It started high in the boreal forest of the western part of the province. The river goes down a vast land covered with forests, hills and lakes, created by the movements of glaciers in a very long ago past. Nobody remembers the first individuals, families and clans that used the river and its tributaries. The indigenous nation that now inhabits those parts, the Algonquins, came from the west, according to all available evidence and spread in a westerly fashion through the last millennias, to the Upper Great Lakes and adjacent areas to the west. All those nations (Algonquins, Mississaugas, Nippissings, Outaouais, Ojibways) all share the same name (Anishinabeg) and speaks a closely related tongue, besides using the ubiquitous birchbark canoe.

 

Then came the French, the explorers first, led by Samuel de Champlain, en route to Huronia, followed by traders, soldiers, settlers, Jesuits, etc. They used the rivers, especially the Ottawa and the Gatineau, to travel back and forth, here and there, to and from the Great Lakes, Hudson Bay, the Prairies, the Mississipi, the Illinois Country, la Louisiane, the Missouri lands, etc., and didn't left much of a permanent presence.

 

The very first white settlers to live near the mouth of the Gatineau, surprisingly enough, were not Canadian, but the New Englanders brought by Philemon Wright, the founder of the first permanent settlement, Hull, now a district of a much larger city, Gatineau. They were later joined by French-Canadians and Irish people, and also by the original inhabitants of that part of Canada, an Algonquin band that sought refuge near Montréal and went back to its ancestral lands in the first part of the XIXth century, under the leadership of Antoine Pakinawatik.

 

At the very same time, European settlers, French-Canadians mainly, but also Irish in a smaller way, were in the process of  creating new agricultural lands all along the lower reaches of the Gatineau valley, clearing the forests, removing stumps (with the help of horses teams), creating fields where timberland used to reign supreme, starting from the south, near Hull, going north slowly, one parish at the time, with the most northerly village being Baskatong, now replaced by an artificial reservoir but then at the very apex of a colonization axis that took almost a month to travel from south to north in horse-drawn carts. At that time, the population of the valley was essentially made up of three cultures: the Algonquin, the French and the Irish.

 

Those villages that sprang to life were divided in three regions: the Lower Gatineau Valley (la Basse-Gatineau), from Hull to Low, the Medium Gatineau Valley (la Moyenne-Gatineau), from Low to Gracefield, and the Upper Gatineau Valley (la Haute-Gatineau), from Gracefield to Baskatong, with the main settlement and local capital (Maniwaki, dubbed la Reine de la Gatineau) situated about midway between those last two villages. The whole agricultural settlement axis stopped at Baskatong (that was before the building of the Mercier dam, the creation of the reservoir, and the evacuation of the French-Canadians inhabitants of Baskatong to the nxt-to-last village -Grand-Remous-, and of the Algonquins inhabitants to the lands of the Kitigan-Zibi and Rapid-Lake bands of that nation), the upper reaches of the Gatineau river being left to private logging companies.

 

Flying canoes

 

For a long time, the villagers being quite poor, and life, quite harsh, it was necessary to make ends meet. So, each winter, after all work had cease on the fields, snow-covered and forlorn, the men will leave their farms to go working in shanties located deep in the boreal forests, cutting trees for those logging companies, eating huge quantities of food, and longing for their families left back home. It is said that longing was deep enough and painful enough to push some habitants to make a pact with the Devil Himself... The oat was simple: the Devil will transport the woodsmen in a canoe to their families and their village, at the condition that they're not late to go back to the shanties by the same mean, to the risk of giving their immortal souls to their new pal, the Guardian of Hell.

 

That took place a long time ago, in the semi-legendary era of the Chasse-Galerie, a difficult-to-translate expression that designate a quite important part of the local folklore. It was at around the same time that the Jos Montferrand and other larger than life bûcherons and woodsmen became folk-heroes. At that time, the canoes were said to be able to fly through the sky, from forest shanties to the agricultural villages, not by themselves, of course, but with the help of the Devil, of course. Is it something that was made up by our ancestors? It's possible, but who knows? Come to think of it, if we're able to walk on the Moon, we may be able to fly high in canoes, amid the birds, and among the whiteness of the clouds, especially if the Devil is involved... Why not?

 

Dancing trees

 

As fot the dancing trees, I must truthfully admit that contrary to the Chasse-Galerie, they are not specific to the Upper-Gatineau valley. All forests are made up of dancing trees, to be honest about it. Worse, each and every tree is able to dance, and dancing is what it does, if at its own speed, a speed too slow for us to notice the whole thing.

 

All members of the animal kingdoms are mobile and able to move. It's the same thing for members of the vegetal kingdom, it's simply that they live in a quite-slower-than-us universe. A tree, for instance, will move and transform itself all through its existence. More specifically, it will transition and transform itself all through its existence, both temporally and spatially. Through time-space, it will start as a small kernel of a being, and grow slowly, every year, to reach eventually, usually, a much large and impressive size. Its roots will plunge deeply into the ground, its branches will reach always higher, while its trunk will enlarge a bit at a time, concentric circle by concentric circle.

 

All that, of course, takes place slowly, much too slowly for us to be able to see it. Thus, it is true that trees dances, it is just that our metabolism is too fast, our attention span is too short, and our thoughts are too fleeting. We think in seconds and minutes, while trees operate differently, in terms of months, years, decades, and centuries.

 

A Mystical Land

 

I'm just an old man, by now, preparing to die in a few years. But still, I just can't help enjoying the idea of having been born and having grown up in of such a mystical place, a valley where canoes flies, trees dances, Algonquins lives, and life goes on, from one marvel to another, in the land of ice-melting springtime, searing hot summers, rainy and sad autumn, and minus 40 degrees winters.

 

...a land that will always remain the legendary kingdom of the Gatineau...