There was something up at the Wicks mill; the Mattagami flowed by black and deep and the only reference to it was the lonesome, black, rotting burner. The sawdust coop. Every mill had one, either a cone or tall cylinder stack, screened at the top to keep the fire sparks in. For me it had been there before memory, when all was black and watery. It tested my mind like biblical stories fed to children, like a colloquial bank-shot dragged from a leathery reign in the soggy soup of time. How do you know? Where’s the physical proof of what existed before you were born? Just a hand-me-down scene in a proverbial moose costume in Northeastern Ontario.
By the time I can remember Wicks mill had all but ceased to be. What really sparked my synapses were the three big sawmills spouting smoke from their burners: Mountjoy, Feldman’s and McChesney’s. Wicks’ mill lay hidden beyond the gravel road beside the river, behind the propane tanks at the rail siding. The cement forms, the pipes and trees and a deformation of time had played upon the ghosts of lumber workers past. Yet from the other side of the river, where the highway runs from town, it shows up like the far side of the moon. It was really there! This certainly encouraged a deep dreamy understanding of things. When everything else seemed timeless, Wicks’ mill burner broke down the ramparts and poked a few chips around memory salade. This could be very disturbing for some people. How come only now did this time hole of history become a new reality, a destroyer of one’s feeble string of comprehension, revealing the truth beyond the myth.
Timmins had four mills but I knew only three. This was before the Mattagami flood that washed the past into obscurity. In April, 1960, everything was packed into an ark – well almost everything: left behind was a world set to perish like a plum pit in a dump, fish carcasses, water logs, soap wrappers, the lot. All that could be carried out needed to be loaded before the cold rains of spring fell in the time of the big spring melt. For days and nights the waters backed up behind the river ice, engulfing the town’s lower half in an chilly fashion, left inundated with pike patrol squads and armies of panicked pickerel. Black water beasts wandered over the little clay belt where orange carrots were usually planted. Where was Bertha's farm now? Her blistered hands, worked to the bone with broom handles, cigarette tar and Bon Ami window juice? Where were the sawlogs that floated down the black silk waterway, feeding the mills of working men who shat in the smelliest of outhouses, wearing their hard hats proudly with smokes hanging from their bottom lips? Where did the Mountjoy bridge disappear to? And this was the scene just before Stompin’ Tom.
With no one to write our songs we were left with our collective memories which degenerated with time, especially after the computer revolution of the 1980s. Email in those days was by telegraph or teletype. No cell phones, blackberrys, or digital laser flashes. Information overload was not a problem in the 1950s – in northern towns it was easy to spend a lifetime memorizing license plates on local vehicles.
“That’s Gus Gagnon’s truck: L458046.”
In order to store information that was deemed “VALUABLE”, a system evolved – time tested and true – like a top rate decimal disposal reclamation system that would sift up the good stuff and dispose of the useless. The mind is a sieve by practical design; we blame it, foolishly, for poor memory. Precious butter nuggets were catalogued, packed into a place of effortless retrieval and slung into the river of folklore to be kept cool, experienced and enjoyed by collective cultures who grooved to it, articulated it, moved it from this place to that one, defended it, fought over it, hung it and flung it until it was either put into a museum as a beaten relic or written about in a folk song for instant glorification, or perhaps a story or a tale, a lampoon-cartoon, to be recognized by all who were aware of its unique existence.
In those days folklore was our route to the future. This would later be supplanted by the infestation of foreign viruses masked as pop icons showing up on radio sets, TV and movie screens across the land. Stars were shining brighter than the stars ip in the sky. With the advent of belching waste killing the carefully cultured plants of the forest, the sky grew duller while the blazing lights of collective human consciousness canceled out the dark canopy of white night light. So we required new Stars to guide us: pop Stars dressed in popular outfits, forcing entire nations to share in the dilemma of the sameness that it created the whole world over. Well crafted, addictive dramas and songs, speaking little nothings but allowing an immediate emotional release-point experienced at the exact same moment by multitudes of conquered human souls. These constellations drew us closer to Hollywood, Nashville, London and New York than to the house just next door.
“Hey Fred, didja see The Godfather last night?”
“Ya, I did. ‘Make him an offer he can’t refuse!’ Ya, it was great.”
"I liked the part with the horse head the best."
Two neighbors joined by the hip of the same TV show instead of community events. There's a lot to be said about the people that we live with, who share the same electrical grid, or use the same garbage dump, who sit in the same coffee shop, rooting for the same local hockey team, engaged in the same local tragedies. Blessings, fires, floods and frostbites tend to feed on external feelings beyond the walls of our limitations. The stories that have been shared, the songs that have been sung buried beneath a cascading barrage of synthetic hues. We slowly fell into the narrows of the hourglass, falling with the sands of the void of space. And wondered:
“What the hell just happened?”
When the flood water subsided and the river returned to its banks, it left a ruin of muck-mixed devastation in its wake. The Mountjoy mill never did operate again leaving Feldman and McChesney alone on the river. The surviving mills were retrofitted with insurance money, with brand new electrical equipment – gone was the sound of the world of steam that saw mills of The Porcupine through the coldest of nights. By the time Timmins celebrated its golden jubilee (1962) everything seemed to be back in its place, except perhaps a little tidier. Fine coats of wet matted sawdust coated the town, driving the recent past even further back in time. The competing burners of the two sawmills worked around the clock as forklifts piled stacks of fresh cut lumber three high and box cars were filled along the ONR sidings. Work horses chewed the summer pasture grass while the searing saws ripped through the flesh of softwood logs right off the jack-ladder and made into rough cut boards.
It was just upstream past the missing plank docks of the pike-poled log herders that we had our summer cottage. After the flood they were basically ruined, never again used for summer birds, Laura Secord suckers or Peter Pan. For the very first time I felt a bit older, a little more knowledgeable and saddened by the loss of our summer paradise in the land of my childhood. I think we were all affected but we had no song to sing, we had no guide to lead us away from our blury blues.
“I drink ‘em when I have ‘em,” said the sanitation guy at the dump, hands in pockets, work boots wedded to the golden floss tossed over the edge. He smiled so wide that even his mustache grimaced kindly at the thought of tossing back a cold one: “Drink ‘em down as soon as they’re opened. You can’t just let them evaporate, eh.”
The kids in town grew up on Doran’s Cream Soda but I think
it was the smell of their beer wafted into the malted nose of Stompin’
Tom. Doran's made its Northern Ale at its plant beside the railway bridge
that crossed the Algonquin highway by the station of the Ontario Northland
Railway. How else can you explain why he spent 14 months in town playing
a gig in a local bar: The Skyway Room of the Maple Leaf Tavern? Think about
it: it had to be the beer! It was good northern brew made of mining town
slag that tasted as heavy as the minerals they mined. He wore a beatened
cowboy hat, carried his flat-top guitar and with an extra shirt as extra
padding as he walked into town, soaking it all in. The first thing he would
have seen was the Hollinger Mine, then the Bon Air Motel and the railway
bridge, the Doran’s plant and the Empire Hotel. He found his way over to
Third Avenue, milled into the hustle of a busy downtown core. It had a
Kresgie’s and a Woolworth’s, Sam Bukovetsky’s and The Palace Theater; the
Golden Cue, the Golden Arrow, Gerry Plouffe’s Men’s Wear and Koza’s for
the ladies. He passed old timers leaned against the walls watching the
terminal world of Timmins doing nothing. Women carrying brown paper shopping
bags of goods from the stores; high schoolers going into Eddy Office Supply
to buy provisions for school and walking out with a new pop record, like
"The Twist". Furniture was sold at the Music Box owned and operated by
local musical hero and band leader, Mister Henry Kelneck.
Come and listen to the music of the Northern land
The hootin, rootin' tootin' Henry Kelneck Band
From the boogie to the oompas in the oompa-pa halls
Polka Playin' Henry was the king of them all1
Somehow he found his way into the Maple Leaf Tavern – just one of 40 similar bars that served a town of 29,000 in the year of '64. There was the Welcome House, the JV, The Northern Tavern, The Moneta, Goldfields, The International, The Riverside, The Mountjoy, The Algonquin, and so on and so on. Beer soaked and dark, salt shakers on the little round tables, stubby brown bottles containing 12 fluid ounces of lager.
“How much for a bottle of beer,” he asked, placing his guitar case down, hoping to rest his tired frame on a stool while lubricating his dust caked throat?
“Forty cents,” answered the bar man, Gaetan Lepine.
Tom Connors was five cents short and that was the birth of the motherlode that put the Maple Leaf Tavern on the country's largest map beneath the stompin' board of time.
"Get up and play us couple of songs and we see you the beer," laughed Gaet Lapine.
Notes
1. Polka Playin' Henry by Tom C Connors, Crown Vetch Music, 1994