The Madawaska River

It meanders through what has been called one of Canada’s top ten rural areas for country living and it is listed as one of North America’s premier canoe routes. For those seeking solitude, adventure, or simply an experience of nature, it offers a wilderness haven. For centuries it has been the lifeblood for the region’s rich vegetation, aquatic and marshland life, and for the persons along its shores, whether the peoples of Canada’s First Nation or the early settlers who came to carve out a living.

They call it the Madawaska River and it runs through the valley of its namesake. Actually,

there are more hills than valley – the locals call them mountains – and together with mighty oaks, sugar maples, birches, pines, spruce, and balsam fir they frame the beauty of the river. It’s on the southern edge of the great Canadian Shield, a geological formation of very old granite and gneiss covering almost one half of Canada. When the last ice age melted back some 11,000 years ago, it left a jumbled drainage pattern of lakes, rivers, and streams that carried away the glacial melt waters. From its meagre beginnings in Algonquin Park, the Madawaska quickly builds into a series of beautiful lakes and estuaries as it rambles in an east-south-easterly direction towards the majestic Ottawa at Arnprior.

The river has been the constant, almost unchanging element of the region, rising in the springtime, subsiding in the summer months, freezing in winter, and always sending the soft roar of whitewater, like the wind in the pines, riding the gentle morning breezes. It is the embodiment of a wide range of emotions; serenity and peacefulness, depth and shallowness, security and danger. For the people living along the shorelines of the lakes and river it is so much a part of their lives that each holds a treasure of stories that seem to have risen from the waters. Around supper tables and woodstoves, from the front seat of the car, or while dozing on the bedtime pillow, the stories and memories are passed to the next generation. Tales of thunderstorms and snowstorms, fishing and canoe trips, whitewater adventures, boats that went down, drownings, log drives, and of the men and women at the centre of such stories who whittled out a livelihood and created what has become the history of the region.

Some of my earliest memories are of learning to swim in the river while the whole family went for a dip to cool off after a hot summer’s day. Swimming, rowing boats, skating in winter, or wading in swift water have no more of a starting point in my memory than that of learning to walk or talk. They all seem to have occurred as natural developmental processes at a very young age. At the landing at our farm we had wooden fishing boats that my father rented to tourists, and, early on, we learned all about their floating and buoyancy properties. On a summer’s day my brother Bryan and I stood in one that was filled with water and barely submerged. We were thoroughly convinced we had tricked the neighbour, on the other side of the river, into believing we had mastered the ability to walk on water.

Likewise, the sense of such dangers as that of thin ice, or of boating or swimming alone, must have been embedded in the stories and childhood experiences; I recall no specific lectures or warnings. I have a clear recollection, for example, of walking on the spring ice of Kennelly's Lake while checking the trap line with my dad. He chopped a slender pole, about ten feet in length, pointed the one end and used it to test the ice before leaping across a narrow, open section along the shoreline. He explained that it would be safer to walk a few feet out from the shore because the ice would be thicker where the heat of the spring sun was not melting it as quickly. It was clear from his explanation that this was true only of still lake water, not of flowing creeks or rivers. The pole was used to jab at any questionable spots and then he carried it along in a horizontal position so that if he did fall through, the pole would catch on the ice.

Another memory and lesson was the day one of my older brothers tumbled down the steep riverbank up near the gate, at the cottage. It was an early spring day and a number of us, my brothers and sisters, were playing along there. He suddenly lost his footing and tumbled with a splash into the ice-cold river below. He quickly grabbed an overhanging branch, heaved himself out, and scrambled back up the embankment. Without a word, he took off for the house, running.

“You get a freezing like that, you get into a warm house as fast as you can,” he explained.

No further lectures or warnings were necessary about the dangers of playing along the riverbank or of avoiding a spill into the icy river.

And there were plenty of opportunities to fall into the “drink.” Earning some spending money was a challenge

for youngsters on a farm three miles in from the nearest highway. In the spring months, for approximately six weeks, we trapped muskrats along the river. A good pelt would bring 75 cents so we began trapping even before we reached our teen years. It took some time to learn the art. I’d be out before sunrise every morning to check the few I had set. After several early risings and no luck, the novelty would wear off and I’d seek advice. I learned from my older brother to chop a notch in the log so that the trap was virtually even with the level of the log. Also, it was important to cut the notch to a tight fit. The tighter the fit, the more likely one would trick the rat. Occasionally my dad, or one of the older brothers who had really mastered the art of camouflage, would catch a mink, a golden mother lode. That was the Irish Sweepstake for me to dream about. Trapping on the river is where I learned to keep both feet in the boat or else get out of the boat and get both feet on the log; one of either two. If one tries to straddle the two, the boat will move and you’ll end up in the water. That image has served me well over the years as a metaphor in dealing with organizational change. You can’t straddle the old way and the new. You have to get over completely to the new way of doing things. If you try to keep a foot in

both camps, you’ll end up in the drink.

Dangers associated with the frozen river were constant. Farm animals had to be watched and discouraged from the ice. We once lost a bull that was crossing on the ice to visit the neighbour’s cows. - Mother used this as a lesson on “pure thoughts”. Yet, the old folks seemed to know the limits and used the ice to their advantage. Farmers and loggers built ice roads to gain shortened access to their winter jobs. Grandpa Helferty regularly built one to cross over to his winter bush lot and, Arthur, a neighbour upriver, built one to cross when he cut logs on the Crown Land back of the King farm. My older brothers remember seeing him arriving back from his bush work in the evening, stopping the horses at the shoreline at Kings culvert and walking out with a pole to jab into the ice on the side of the road to test its firmness. Don says he recalls, during the evening family rosary, Mother praying for Arthur’s safety.

For a young boy, the river held mysteries. Why would it freeze solidly enough for the horses and sleigh at this point but be open water just a few hundred yards upstream? How was it possible to flow some one hundred feet deep at one place and yet, in another, one would scrape your canoe in a shallow rapids? My father recalled at one time, how once in a sermon, while talking of the magnificence of creation, Fr Louis had wondered aloud, how it is that the river can be a rushing, raging rapids in one place yet, in another it slows to

just a small creek-like trickle. Yet, it continues to balance out all of its parts and to feed itself hour after hour, day after day, year after year. “I’ve often thought of that and wondered myself, how it is,” he marvelled.

And stories abound about how it can change so quickly. Almost without notice, a summer storm can catch you out on the lake. Or, a channel that is frozen solidly on one date is open a few days later. Bryan recalls coming up from the city one weekend and using his old Johnson snow machine to go down the river on the ice to the Bay. The next weekend he his sailing down the same trail and suddenly there’s open water just ahead! He had to think and change his direction quickly.

And speaking of direction, one needed to know the direction of the flow of the river. Grandma Helferty held the notion that you must set up your bedroom so that your feet were pointing downriver. “That way you sleep better,” she told me. “If you sleep up-river you’ll have all kinds of crazy dreams.” This is the same Grandma, who, when on the way to church one Sunday and a black cat walked across the road in front of the car, had Hughie and the whole family turn around and go home. She was absolutely convinced that there was terrible bad luck just ahead. More terrible, she believed, obviously, than the pangs of hellfire for missing Mass on Sunday.

Those who were raised along its banks knew it flowed towards the Atlantic, and that upstream was obviously towards the west. Down was that way, towards Ottawa. Not all who came from elsewhere saw it so clearly. My nephews brought their friend up from Toronto with his new boat and motor and warned him he could go down the river but not upstream where there were dangerous rocks “just about that far under the surface.” Sure enough! It was only a matter of time until the lad was wading around on the flat rock picking up the parts of his lower unit.

If those city slickers didn’t comprehend the directions of the river, you could not teach them that the road ran along the river and, therefore, the cottage was up the road and the sheep pasture was down. Although, the first challenge was to help them understand that it was a river, not a lake. On more than one occasion I recall my dad laughingly telling his city-folk nephews, “It’s not a lake, you gammy hawk, it’s a river!”

Over the years I’ve had the good fortune to experience the river and several of its major lakes in various seasons and at all hours of the day, from early misty mornings to late dark nights when one uses the faint outline of the shoreline horizon as a guide. It's a huge challenge to try to adequately express the fullness of those experiences in prose or poetry. Yet, Archibald Lampman (1861-1899), one of Canada’s earlier principal poets wrote a beautiful poem, “Morning On the Lievre”. Whereas the Madawaska enters the Ottawa River about 60 miles west of the capital city, the Lievre is also a tributary of the Ottawa and enters from the province of Quebec about 60 miles east of Ottawa, at Buckingham. Both rivers have similar, picturesque, Canadian Shield landscapes, and Lampman’s poem could just as well be called “Morning on the Madawaska”.

Far above us where a jay	Where the forest and the stream,
Screams his matins to the day,	In the shadow meet and plight,
Capped with gold and amethyst,	Like a dream.
Like a vapour from the forge
Of a giant somewhere hid,	From amid a stretch of reeds,
Out of hearing of the clang	Where the lazy river sucks
Of his hammer, skirts of mist	All the water as it bleeds
Slowly up the woody gorge	From a little curling creek,
Lift and hang.	And the muskrats peer and sneak
	In around the sunken wrecks
Softly as a cloud we go,	Of a tree that swept the skies
Sky above and sky below,	Long ago,
Down the river; and the dip	On a sudden seven ducks
Of the paddles scarcely breaks,	With a splashy rustle rise,
With the little silvery drip	Stretching out their seven necks,
Of the water as it shakes	One before and two behind,
From the blades, the crystal deep	And the others all arow,
Of the silence of the morn,	As steady as the wind
Of the forest yet asleep;	With a swiveling whistle go,
And the river reaches borne	Through the purple shadow led,
Ina mirror, purple gray,	Till we only hear their whir
Sheer away	In behind a rocky spur,
To the misty line of light,	Just ahead.

In 1961, the National Film Board of Canada, with producer David Bairstow, developed a 13-minute film to accompany Morning on the Lievre. On several occasions, in my early days of teaching, I used the film in Grade 7 & 8 to help the students gain some appreciation for early Canadian literature and the splendour of the Ottawa Valley and the Canadian Shield.

Log drives contributed to many of the river’s stories. My dad, uncles, and several cousins all worked the drive as young men. Like fur trapping, it was one of the few sources of income for the young men to gain some earnings to get through the summer months. It was common, on a spring Sunday afternoon, for the people of the nearby villages to walk down and watch the men working the drive. Occasionally, if the weather was suitable, they took food and joined them for a potluck supper. Although many songs and stories have

romanticized the initial timber trade and log drives, there is also a body of writing to demonstrate that the early lumber companies valued profit and efficiency over social values and aesthetics. The beauty of the river was devalued in those earlier days but more recent transportation methods, environmental legislation, and social expectations have greatly helped to restore the natural views.

Life has been drawn to the lakes and river corridor for centuries. Where settlement occurred, development has been slow, plus, today, there are still long stretches of shoreline where the natural views have remained pretty much intact. It presents a rural, peaceful, scenery-catching experience that is not to be missed. No entry or membership fees are necessary. Tourists, newcomers, and residents alike, continue to be astonished and to have their imaginations stirred by its beauty.