Bound For Father Point - a Geography Lesson, Published 5 July 1934
I
got the thrill of my life when I went aboard the Empress at Father
Point on her last voyage in. All my reportorial life I have wanted to
make that trip, and last week I was able to gratify this long-deferred
ambition. I can say sincerely that I often thought about it, imagined
what it would be like, and planned how I should make the trip. And the
fact that the realization in every way was a thousand times better than
the anticipation makes me feel the luckiest of men. I am not striving
for effect nor fine writing, when I say the Father Point trip is one of
the highlights in my not inactive career. I use the verb "is" because
although the calendar says the trip is past, I am still living most of
it over in enticing retrospect.
I do not
think I shall be able to kindle in you, anything like the enthusiasm
this trip has given and is giving to me, for I am not smart enough on
the typewriter for that, but I will pick you up at Bonaventure Station,
aboard the Maritime Express. The big 6017 lifted some empty fish cars
and a good quota of passengers out of the fire-trappy station on this
June day, and pretty soon, we were a whole 1.5 miles away at St. Henri.
Certainly the most interesting entrance and exit to Montreal is via
Victoria Bridge, not the least interesting part of it being that the
track doubles back and runs along almost parallel to the waterfront,
thus giving a great view of the city over your left shoulder.
* * *
The
train passed St. Hubert, where the quarter million dollar mooring mast
that has anchored only one dirigible since it was built stands, a
silent reminder of R-100 which came to Montreal, and the R-101, which
was to come and didn't. You could hold a dance in one of the rooms in
that mast, and even at the top of it, you could run a bicycle around
the top gallery, 200 feet up. The airport itself is semi-deserted, a
far different aerial picture than the vigorous days when Hon. Peter
Veniot was firing postmasters and building up an airmail service; the
good times when Hon. J. L. Ralston was replying to Agnes Macphail and
keeping our Siskins in shape.
Crossing
the Richelieu river near the foot of Mount Beloeil, the rain started to
fall, and I never emerged from that rain the rest of the trip. As the
miles were clicked off east of St. Hyacinth, where we crossed on to the
old Intercolonial tracks, I began to think how many thousands of
anxious office seekers must have passed by those same fields and farm
houses, up from the Maritimes with high hopes and small claims, seeking
political pap from the potentates at Ottawa. How gleefully triumphant
they must have ridden the parlor car back or how glumly frustrated they
must have crouched in the second class, on their way back. Borden,
Fielding, Tupper, they all rode the Intercolonial, as they came up to
Ottawa the first time on the road to political preferment. And a lot of
the now-forgotten boys rode it on the way back, too, to political
oblivion.
As they cursed its service and
inefficiency, its tardiness and its grime, its political bungling and
its ancient equipment what did these 19th century giants and pygmies
and in-betweens think? Certainly, in that long ride, policies which
helped Canada must have been planned; ward politics that stunk the
nostrils must have been schemed.
* * *
But
I leave these old Intercolonial mental ghosts to you, and pass on to
that rather uninteresting land that exists between Drummondville and
Levis. The train passes through a semi-cleared country that evidently
offers little agricultural promise, for I can in no other way account
for the fact that much of it is unfilled, in a district that knew the
plow back in the 1600's. When I came through here in 1918, there was a
great deal of unfenced property along the right-of-way, the sure-fire
mark of poor land.
One unpaintcd station
with the word "Laurier" stencilled on it caused a man in the diner to
mark: Is that the best Quebec could do for Laurier? It is. Despite the
fact he is the greatest political figure that Quebec ever produced, the
most his native province has done for him in the way of town-naming is
a little straggling hamlet away down in Lotbiniere county Actually
there is a place in Manitoba, on the Winnipeg-Dauphin line, called
Laurier, not so very far from Hon. T. G. Murphy's Neepawa. But the
truth is that Quebec, which reveres the St. Lin boy, cannot seem to
have done him geographical justice.
When
you get down near St. Apolllnaire, you can see the Laurentians away
across the river to the north, and a few minutes later, as you dash
into Charny, you glimpse the Quebec Bridge. Charny is where you turn
north if you are going into Quebec city. The old National
Transcontinental runs across the famous Quebec Bridge northwards from
here, and southwards toward Monk and Edmundston, N.B The line, which is
not far away from the old Intercolonial, and none too distant either
from the Quebec Central, is just another one of our political railway
disasters, for actually, though it was supposed to be a short cut from
Quebec to Moncton, is only 24.1 miles shorter. Can you imagine such a
crime as that! Here they built a new railway 473.4 miles long, from
Quebec to Moncton, over a fabulously costly bridge it took more than a
decade, two failures and many lives to build, to save less than 30
miles. For from Levis, opposite Quebec, it is only 407.5 miles to
Moncton, the long way round. No, Senator Cox wouldn't wait, and his
impatience is causing us a couple of millions a week. At that I believe
in public ownership, but pork barrel railway building is the leech that
is sucking Canada into near-bankruptcy. Levis next stop.
Levis from the Train - Geography Lesson, Published 10 July 1934
But if you stood out on the back of the train,
as the line falls toward the river you'd get a big kick out of the down
grade from Charny to Levis. The road drops and drops and then some, the
train rolling easily around the curves as more and more landscape gets
above you, and less and less of it stays below you. The geographies all
say that Levis has only about 10,000 people, but in approaching it, you
feel you are coming into a city of 100,000 at least. The old city makes
the most of its strung-out waterfront.
The one-man street cars
cross and re-cross the highways, bob in and out among the trees, and
keep pace with the slowly rolling train. You slide down past paved
highways and blind end streets. One-man street cars bob in and
out of the trees alongside you, as the tracks run sometimes down
the middle of the pavement sometimes along the side of it. You look
into the backs of houses and see maman getting supper. You notice ruins
of old buildings nearby where her grandmere or somebody else's
grandmere got supper. The shore line is just teeming with interest, as
you drop througth St. Romuald, Hadlow. Point Levis and Levis.
Then
if you turn your eyes toward the river, you discover with a little
thrill that you're looking at tidewater, always worth a tingle if
you're a landlubber, and worth good many tingles, they tell me, if
you've lived along the ocean and then have exiled inland. Old Man
Atlantic may not be right beneath Cape Diamond, you reason, but you get
a hint that he's just down the river a little way now. You see queer
little craft that only salt water produces. You look at ribbed,
daylight-diffused hulks worthy of the Ancient Mariner's most delirious
fancy. You fascinatedly follow the green painted hull of the tramp
Gitano, going up stream to get a cargo for Aberdeen, and the dingy
Wanstead returning light, her wheel visible out of the water, as she
plods back to North Sydney bunkers for more coal.
As you get a
glimpse through queer little gardens reclaimed from high tide areas,
you see the sight that thrills the world. No one can gaze on Quebec and
not be exalted. Something happens inside your heart - inside your head,
when you look at Quebec for the first time - or the 1000th! You can't
look across that less than half-mile of water and be indifferent. The
names Sillery Cove, Plains of Abraham, Beauport Flats leap right up at
you out of the history books. You see the centuries spanned when you
view the old Cathedral, its predecessor the worshipping place of
Montcalm, today the church of the Taschereaus. You can't quite see the
old guns of Cape Diamond that you know are there, which fired at
the French with British ammunition, and some of which have fired at the
British with French ammunition. I was realistic enough to look at the
long empty shed at Wolfe's Cove where I would be when the Empress of
Britain docked 26 hours hence.
The guy who picked the site
for the Chateau Frontenac, and the chaps who did the architecture have
between them, done as worthy of Canadian commendation as Sir
Christopher Wren was when he designed St. Paul's. I could talk about
Quebec all day, and you would soon be snoring soundly over your
Citizen, so I shall skip Montmorency and Ste. Anne de Beaupre and Sous
le Cap and the hundred other spiritual, aesthetic and historic
delights, and bring you back to Levis, which you never left anyway.
Few
people know that Levis has its Upper Town and Lower Town like Quebec
has. In Lower Town there are a few hotels the post office, the railway
station ferry dock, and one street right under the cliff which is
dominated by a religious institution. If you want to get to Upper Town
you take a tram that starts down the river, but ends up finally on the
main thoroughfare above you. You can also meander east a few
hundred paces, climb a hundred steps, and mount to a lookout that
commands a marvelous view of Quebec. There is an iteresting, narrow,
winding road to the west of Levis station, and alongside this road are
queer, broad-boarded circular steps that twist away up and around out
of sight in their ascent ito Upper Town. If you do get to UpperTown in
the 25 minutes the leisurely Maritime Expess waits in Levis, you will
see the 18th century structures and chain stores incongruously
clashing. And you'll bound past a place on the tram that re-echoed to
the shots of Kirk fired in taking Quebec. But the conductor has just
given the engineer the highball, and the 6017 gathers speed for the run
to Riviere du Loup.
Crawling Up From Levis - A Geography Lesson, Published 13 July 1934
While I was watching the slow ascent of the
train, I had plenty of time to look over at the Isle of Orleans, that
insular anachronism alongside the thoroughly sophisticated city of
Quebec. The Isle of Orleans is the sort of place that ox-carts get off
the roads to let air-flow motors go by, where the 18th century clashes
with the 20th in the most unexpected ways at the least likely moments.
Within eye-shot of No. 2 highway, and the gay Chateau Frontenac, these
Gallic peasants have lived partially cut off from the world. Today
Premier Taschereau unfortunately is putting a bridge over to their
island at heavy and perhaps unwarranted cost, but time marches, whether
the voters want it to or not.
* * *
You can see too, the
white spot far beyond the island which is the mighty Montmorency Falls,
and the towers of that famous shrine, Ste. Anne de Beaupre, are also
just around the bend behind the tree. But I was most interested at the
moment in Lauzon drydock, where the Pennyworth had just been towed.
After being on the rocks near St. Jean d'Orleans for about seven
months, she was salvaged and taken to the drydock. The going aground of
this ship caused a great many snickers among the Hudson Bay route
Westerners. It seems that when the S.S. Bright Fan went down in Hudson
Strait in 1932, and disgorged a lot of Cockney and Arabian sailors
huddling into rowboats, the pro-St. Lawrence-anti-Hudson-Bay-route folk
all guffawed loudly, and the chorus intoned, "I told you so," pretty
frequently. But when the Pennyworth went aground in the St. Lawrence,
last November, the On-to-the Bay crowd had a big laugh. By the way, I
am not fooling about those Arab sailors. The Bright Fan's potential
sheiks and erstwhile tars were a queer lot when I saw them, but what
the sons of the sand must have looked like, amid ice floes of chill
Hudson Bay, I can only imagine. A picture of their faces, as huddled in
open boats on that frigid sea, and gazing ruefully at bergs would, I
bet, have made any rotogravure section in the world.
* * *
I
have, I know, only given you the sketchiest picture of the dozen miles
on this and the other side of Levis, but anybody who did it justice
would write so much about it nobody would read it, and I am afraid I
have overtaxed your patience now with what has already been typed. But
dark has gathered, and while the train whizzes past the old sub-divided
seigneuries, with their arpent wide farms, I am going to take you
inside the smoker, to meet the folks.
About the last place I saw
in daylight was Montmagny, the shire town of the county by that name,
so prominently represented by Armand LaVergne. Incidentally, in all his
years in the House of Commons. J. S. Woodsworth, C.C.F. leader, has
never quite managed to say Montmagny correctly. He pronounces it with
his eyes instead of his ears. I saw the agricultural college at Ste.
Anne de la Pocatiere, in Kamouraska riding, and represented on
Parliament Hill by a professor, Georges Bouchard. When I drew attention
in the smoker to the college there, veterans who have been riding that
line for the past ten years, about twice a month in summer, admitted in
some be wilderment they never knew the town had an agricultural college
before. English-speaking Canadians are never done learning about
Quebec.
* * *
In the smoker of the Shediac were a
number of people going down to meet the Empress of Britain. You might
think that meeting this ship is a routine affair, but it is not.
Meeting the "Britain" is almost a business to be gone about
reverentially. For instance, a United States customs man and a U.S.
immigration man make the long run down there, just to get people lined
up for entry into American territory, perhaps 1,000 miles from where
the ship docks. But not only are U.S. and Canadian customs men to be
found, but the train abounds in ticket agents, baggage handlers,
railway clerks, and government officials who merely stroll down to the
dock casually when an ordinary ship puts in at Quebec, but go down to
Father Point for the Empress with a certain self-conscious pride. They
try to let on that their chore is a routine job, but just the same,
they feel just a little bit elated.
Among the chaps in the smoker
was Harvey Pulford, Jr., now of Quebec city, and he told an interesting
joke on himself. Once, during a wartime hockey exhibition game, when
all the old Silver Seven were squeezed into uniforms and hoisted out on
the ice, young Pulford went to a hockey match. He did not have his
glasses on, and seeing a big fellow out in center ice, he asked the man
next to him:
"Say. who's that guy?"
"That," said the man indignant at his neighbor's terrible ignorance, "is Harvry Pulford the great Harvey Pulford."
Turning beet red. young Harvey thanked his informer meekly, and never said another word.
"That" remarked young Harvey, "was the only time I ever saw my father play - and I didn't know him when I saw him."
Old-timers
will be interested to know I picked up some dope in the smoker about
Doc Crippen, which I shall retail in the next Lesson.. |
