Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [149]
When Percy and Susanna stepped onto the dock, a small crowd was already waiting to board the steamer Chippewa. There was Catharine’s friend, the Reverend Vincent Clementi, and his wife and niece; Catharine and her daughter Kate; Percy’s brothers George, Robert and Roland Strickland, and Roland’s wife and Robert’s two daughters; plus a handful of other Lakefield residents. There was also a pile of luggage. The gentlemen all had fishing rods and baskets; the ladies had straw hats, parasols and reticules filled with remedies for seasickness and sunburn; Catharine had the basket she always carried for rock, fern and flower specimens; Mrs. Vincent Clementi and Mrs. Roland Strickland had the makings of a picnic.
Catharine and Susanna settled themselves on the wooden seats in the cabin of the little vessel, while the men stood on the deck overhead, by the engine room. Acquaintances often confused the two sisters, with their sharp blue eyes, white hair and lacy widows’ bonnets. But differences were more apparent than similarities when they were together. “I am dark and much older looking,” Susanna insisted, “and she is a pretty old lady with a soft smiling face and nice pink cheeks.” The Chippewa, which had been plying the Lakefield to Stony Lake route since the previous year, was emitting an urgent hiss: it had got up enough steam in its boiler to cast off. Its red-painted funnel gave a resounding whistle as the boat headed upstream through Lake Katchewanooka towards Clear Lake.
With every passing year, more of the forest disappeared and the log booms from Clear Lake down the Otonabee River grew larger.
Susanna’s two nephews, Roland and George, had a particular interest in showing off the delights of Stony Lake. They co-owned the eighty-foot Chippewa with its nineteen-horsepower engine. Roland Strickland, one of the most important timber merchants in the area, used the steamer in the spring to tow his log booms from Stony Lake to Lakefield, and he was eager to drum up passenger traffic for the vessel during the summer months. Aunt Moodie, the well-known author, might be very useful in his campaign to promote the attractions of the waterways above Lakefield. She still received invitations from Montreal magazine editors to contribute to their publications: perhaps she might turn her descriptive talents to the Strickland enterprise?
As the Chippewa churned through the water, Catharine chatted away to anyone who settled near her, but Susanna was silent as she eagerly searched the scenery for familiar landmarks. As she gazed out the cabin window at the east shore of Lake Katchewanooka, she could scarcely make out the property on which she and John had worked so hard in the 1830s. She knew from her visit in 1865 that their old house had collapsed, but only now, as she took in the entire setting, did she appreciate the change in the landscape that ruthless logging had wrought. “The woods about it are all gone, and a new growth of small cedars fringes the shore in front,” she wrote later to her son-in-law, John Vickers. “There is a tolerable looking modern cottage on the spot that the old log house once occupied, and the old barn survives on the same spot on which it was built, more than 30 years ago, but the woods that framed it are all down, and it has a bare, desolate look.”
To Susanna’s eyes, the land looked plucked and shaved with its stubble of stumps. The giant pines, oaks and maples that had topped the skyline were felled, and wispy second-growth birch and cedar were only starting to replace them. Huge quantities of lumber had been taken out of the area. The limestone falls down which water had once roared and foamed from Clear Lake had been blasted out in 1871 to make a lock, so that logs could be floated into Lake Katchewanooka more easily. Banks that