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By Root 943 0

water belonged to the lake or to the river. The ferocious swells of late-autumn squalls ought to have put the argument to rest, but despite the evidence the populace had such definite opinions on the subject that they formed themselves into two camps, called “lakers” and “streamers.” Sports teams and spelling bees were said to have been assembled in this manner: “lakers” to the left, “streamers” to the right. The “streamers” were most often French: children of the coureurs du bois, or the raft makers, or the rivermen themselves. My father believed that they probably felt more at home with the idea of the river that had so influenced their lives touching this island territory. And from the point of view of geology a good case could be made. The west end of the island is made up of Lake Ontario limestone, the east end of the kind of granite rock that lines the river. It could be argued that the island was a child of both the lake and of the river. And certainly the industry that flourished there made extensive use of both and could not have survived without either.

Shortly before he emigrated to Canada to set up business on Timber Island, my ambitious great-great-grandfather, Joseph Woodman, an engineer by training, was hired by the Crown (along with five or six other men) as part of a commission whose job it would be to investigate and report on the state of the bogs in Ireland. The commissioners were dispatched to the various Irish counties and, as a result, Joseph Woodman was stationed on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry for close to half a year.

According to my father, the fact that the only commerce in this bog-ridden district involved the carrying of butter on a footpath over Knockanaguish Mountain dozens of miles to Cork City had greatly irritated his forebear. He had been appalled to learn that, among other things, there was not a single road in the district capable of supporting a simple donkey cart, and bridges only of the rudest sort, so that the people of the region were often seen carrying baskets of turf, furniture, sacks of potatoes and cabbages, and sometimes even coffins on their backs. Something in him must have rebelled at the very size and scope of a landscape so undeveloped that it supported only scattered potato patches and hard-won fields occupied by few very poor cows. And, of course, the expanse of the bogs in the region, bogs from which men removed turf for their hearths with long, narrow handmade spades that Joseph Woodman would have considered to be almost comical. He wanted the people of Kerry to put down their spades, pick up some good English shovels, and begin the task of draining the bogs so that these murky territories could be replaced with fields of golden grain. But, on the other hand, he wondered if the Irish were capable of completing such a task. Paying little attention to the damp climate and rough geography with which Kerry farmers had always had to contend, he likely ascribed the persistence of the bogs to what he would have seen as the laziness of the men of the district. Yes, my great-great-grandfather was blind to almost everything about the people and the landscape of County Kerry, and yet, for the rest of his days, that landscape had never lost its hold on his imagination. When he returned to England with his report, he did so with the hope that he would be going back to the Iveragh in the company of a vast team of English labourers who would dig the required ditches with proper shovels. He wanted, you understand, to squeeze all moisture out of County Kerry, as if it were a dishrag, but parliamentarians more aware of climate and expense than he apparently was utterly rejected his suggestions. For his efforts, he was dismissed from the commission but granted a small island at the eastern end of Canada’s Lake Ontario. Filled with humiliation, he gathered together a few possessions and his wife and, one month later, set sail for that location.

A few years later, when he gave his Canadian-born son the Irish name of Bran (which he extended to Branwell to make it seem more