The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [13]
Along these leafy shores of the St. Lawrence, towns and hamlets had sprung up, founded by United Empire Loyalists, settlers made up of former soldiers in the battalion of the “Royal Yorkers.” Then came the German, the Dutch, the Scottish settlers. Then a tourist by the name of Charles Dickens, travelling by steamboat and stagecoach who described the river that “boiled and bubbled” near Dickinson's Landing and the astonishing sight of the log drive. “A most gigantic raft, some thirty or forty wooden houses on it, and at least as many log-masts, so that it looked like a nautical street …”
Before this came the hunters of the sea, the Basque, Breton, and English whalers. And, in 1534, Jacques Cartier, the hunter who captured the biggest prize, an entire continent, by quickly recognizing that, by bark canoe, one could follow the river and pierce the land to its heart.
The great trade barons grumbled, unable to depart their Atlantic ports and conquer the Great Lakes with their large ships, groaning with goods to sell. Two irksome details stood in the way: the second largest falls in the world – Niagara – and the Long Sault Rapids.
The sound of the Long Sault was deafening. It ate words out of the air and anything caught up in its force. For three miles, a heavy mist hung over the river and even those at a distance were soaked with spray. The white water rampaged through a narrow gorge, a gradual thirty-foot descent.
In the mid-1800s, canals were cut to bypass the rapids but were too shallow for the great freighters. It was the way of things; Avery could not name a significant instance where this was not true, that early canals proved to be the first cut of a future dam, no matter how many generations lay between them. Building the seaway, with a dam to span the Canadian and American banks of the river, had been discussed many times, over many decades, until, in 1954, the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project was born. Hydro-electricity would be created for both countries; a lake, a hundred miles long, would pool between them.
To achieve these ends, the wild Long Sault would be drained to its riverbed. For a year, while the channels were widened, archaeologists would roam the ships' graveyard where, for centuries, the force of the water had welded cannonballs, masts, and iron plate into the rock of “the cellar” on impact. Nothing short of an explosion would pry them loose.
For some time, Avery sat on the shore of the river, in sight of the heavy machines, and thought about the wildness of that water, the elation of that force. It was familiar to him now, this feeling at the beginning, which he conscientiously registered as containing an element of self-pity; the first signs of a slow, coagulating grief.
In the flooding of the shoreline, Aultsville, Farran's Point, Milles Roches, Maple Grove, Wales, Moulinette, Dickinson's Landing, Santa Cruz, and Woodlands would become “lost.” This was a term for which Avery had once felt contempt but now appreciated, for the sting of its unintentional truth; thousands would become homeless as though through some act of negligence. The former inhabitants would be conglomerated and relocated, distributed between two newly built towns – Town #1 and Town #2, eventually to be named Long Sault and Ingleside. Because the town of Iroquois was to be rebuilt a mile farther from shore and retain its name, officially it was not considered “lost,” though it would lose everything but its name. To be flooded, too, were Croil's, Barnhart, and Sheek islands. Construction would soon begin on the northern edge of the town of Morrisburg to make up for the half of itself that would disappear. The First Nations, descendants of Siberian hunters who'd crossed the land bridge from Asia twenty thousand years before and who'd made these shores their home since the