ON THE ROAD TO TROUT
I
The run on the days following the packed moments of Montreal was one of
luxurious indolence. The Royal train was heading for the almost fabled
trout of Nipigon, where, among the beauties of lake and stream, the
Prince was to take a long week-end fishing and preparing for more
crowds and more strenuosity in the Canadian West.
Through those two days the train seemed to meander in a leisurely
fashion through varied and attractive country, only stopping now and
then as though it had to work off a ceremonial occasionally as an
excuse for existing at all.
The route ran through pleasant, farmed land between Montreal and North
Bay and Sudbury, and then switched downward through the bleak nickel
and copper country to the beautiful coast of Lake Huron on its way to
Sault Ste. Marie. From this town, which the whole Continent knows as
"Soo," it plunged north through the magnificent scenery of the Algoma
area to Oba, and, turning west again (and in the night), it ran on to
Nipigon Lake.
It was a genial and attractive run. We sat, as it were, lapped in the
serenity of the C.P.R., and studied the view. Wherever there were
houses there were people, to wave something at the Prince's car. At
one homestead a man and his wife stood alone near the split-rail fence,
the woman curtsying, the man, who had obviously been a soldier,
flag-wagging some message we could not catch, with a big red ensign; an
infinitely touching sight, that couple getting their greeting to the
Prince in spite of difficulties. On the stations the local school
children were always drawn up in ranks, most of them holding flags,
many having a broad red-white-and-blue ribbon across their front rank
to show their patriotism.
At North Bay, a purposeful little town that lets the traveller either
into the scenic and sporting delights of Lake Nipissing, or into the
mining districts of the Timiskaming country, there was a bright little
reception. North Bay is a characteristic Canadian town. It was born
in a night, so to speak, and its growth outstrips editions of guide
books. Outside the neat station there is a big grass oblong, and about
this green the frame houses and the shops extend. Behind it is the
town so keen on growing up about the big railway repair shops, that it
has no time yet to give to road-making.
The ceremonial was in the green oblong, and all North Bay left their
houses and shops to attend. The visit had more the air of a family
party than aught else, for, after a mere pretence of keeping ranks, the
people broke in upon the function, and Prince and Staff and people
became inextricably mixed. When His Royal Highness took car to drive
around the town, the crowd cut off the cars in the procession, and for
half an hour North Bay was full of orderlies and committee-men
automobiling about speculative streets in search of a missing Prince,
plus one Mayor.
Sudbury, the same type of town, growing at a distracting pace because
of its railway connection and its smelting plants, had the same sort of
ceremony. From here we passed through a land of almost sinister
bleakness. There were tracts livid and stark, entirely without
vegetation, and with the livid white and naked surface cut into wild
channels and gullies by rains that must have been as pitiless as the
land. It was as though we had steamed out of a human land into the
drear valleys of the moon, and one expected to catch glimpses of
creatures as terrifying as any Mr. Wells has imagined. So cadaverous a
realm could breed little else.
It was the country of nickel and copper. We saw occasionally the
buildings and workings (scarce less grim than the land) through the
agency of which came the grey slime that had rendered the country so
bleak. They are particularly rich mines, and rank high among the
nickel workings in the world. They were also, let it be said, of
immense value to the Allies during the war.
Pushing south, the line soon redeems itself in the beauty of the lakes.
It bends to skirt the shore of Lake Huron, a great blue sea, and yet
but a link in the chain of great lakes that lead from Superior through
it to Erie and Ontario lakes, and on to the St. Lawrence.
We arrived on a beautiful evening at Algoma, a spot as delightful as a
Cornish village, on the beach of that inlet of Lake Huron called
Georgian Bay. We walked in the astonishing quiet of the evening
through the tiny place, and along the deep, sandy road that has not yet
been won from the primitive forests, to where but a tiny fillet of
beach stood between the spruce woods and the vast silence of the water.
From that serene and quiet spot we looked through the still evening to
the far and beautiful Islands.
In the wonderful clear air, and with all the soft colours of the sunset
glowing in the still water, the beauty of the place was almost too
poignant. We might have been the discoverers of an uninhabited bay in
the Islands of the Blessed. I have never known any place so remote, so
still and so beautiful. But it was far from being uninhabited. There
were rustic picnic tables under the spruce trees, and there was a
diving-board standing over the clear water. The inhabitants of Algoma
knew the worth of this place, and we felt them to be among the luckiest
people on the earth.
The islands we saw far away in the soft beauty of the sunset, and
between which the enigmatic light of a lake steamer was moving, are
said to be Hiawatha's Islands. In any case, it was here that the
pageant of Hiawatha was held some years back, and across the still lake
in that pageant, Hiawatha in his canoe went out to be lost in the
glories of the sunset.
II
On the morning of Tuesday, September 4th, the train skirted Georgian
Bay, passing many small villages given over to lumber and fishing, and
all having, with their tiny jetties, motor launches and sailing boats,
something of the perfection of scenes viewed in a clear mirror. By
mid-morning the train reached Sault Ste. Marie.
"Soo" is a vivid place. It is a young city on the rise. A handful of
years ago it was a French mission, beginning to turn its eyes languidly
towards lumber. It is on the neck that joins the waters of Superior
and Huron, but the only through traffic was that of the voyageurs, who
made the portage round the stiff St. Mary's Rapids, that, with a drop
of eighteen feet in their length, forbade any vessel but that of the
canoe of the adventurer to pass their troubled waters.
Then America and Canada began to build canals and locks to link the
great lakes, in spite of the Rapids, and "Soo" woke. It has been awake
and living since that moment. It has been playing lock against lock
with the Michigan men across the river, each planning cunningly to
establish a system that will carry the long lake vessels not only in
locks befitting their size, but in locks that can be handled more
swiftly than those of the rival.
At the moment the prize is with Canada. It has a lock nine hundred
feet long, and can do the business of lowering a great vessel from
Superior to Huron with one action, where America uses four locks. The
Americans have a larger lock than the Canadian, but the Canadians are
quicker.
And this means something. The traffic on these lakes is greater than
the traffic on many seas. Down this vast water highway come the narrow
pencils of lake-boats carrying grain and ore and lumber in hulls that
are all hold. They come and go incessantly. "Soo," indeed, handles
about three times the tonnage of Suez yearly, and there is the American
side to add to that.
With this brisk movement of commercial life within her, "Soo" has
thrived like a cold. Where, in the old days, the local inhabitants
could be reckoned on the fingers of two hands, there is now a city of
about twenty thousand, and it is still growing. It is a city of
graceful streets and neat houses climbing over the Laurentine Hills
that make the site. It is breezy and self-assured, and draws its
comfortable affluence from its shipping, its paper-mills, its steel
works, as well as from lumber, agriculture and other industries.
It met the Prince as becomes a youth of promise. Crowds massed on the
lawns before the red sandstone station, and in all the streets there
were crowds. And crowds followed his every movement, however swift it
was, for "Soo" has the automobile fever as badly as any other town in
Canada, and car owners packed their families, even to the youngest in
arms, into tonneaux and joined a procession a mile long, that followed
the Prince about the town.
It is true that some of the crowd was America out to look at Royalty.
Americans were not slow to make the most of the fact that they were to
have a Prince across the river. From early morning the ferry that runs
from Michigan to the British Empire was packed with Republican autos
and Republicans on foot, all eager to be there when Royalty arrived.
They gathered in the streets and joined in the procession. They gave
the Prince the hearty greeting of good-fellows. They were as good
friends of his as anybody there. They did, in fact, give us a
foretaste of what we were to expect when the Prince went to the United
States.
There were the usual functions. They took place high on a hill, from
which the Prince could look down upon the blue waters of the linked
lakes, the many factory chimneys, the smoke of which threw a quickening
sense of human endeavour athwart the scene, and the great jack-knife
girder bridge, that is the railway connection between Canada and
America, but above the usual functions the visit to "Soo" had items
that made it particularly interesting.
He went to the great lock that carries the interlake traffic. He
crossed from one side of it to the other, and then stood out on the
lock gate, while it was opened to allow the passage of several small
vessels. From here he went to the Algoma Railway, at the head of the
canal, and in a special car was taken to the rapids that tumble down in
foam between the two countries.
The train was brought to a standstill at the international boundary,
where two sentries, Canadian and American, face each other, and where
there was another big crowd, this time all American, to give him a
cheer.
He then spent some time visiting the paper mill that helps to make
"Soo" rich. He went over it department by department, asking many
questions and showing that the processes fascinated him intensely. In
the same way he went through the steel works, and was again intrigued
by the sight of "things doing." It was, as he said himself, one of the
most interesting days he had spent in the Dominion.
III
"Soo" let us into a wonderful tract of country.
Still in the sumptuous C.P.R. train, we swung north over the Algoma
Railway track into a land so wildly magnificent and yet so lonely, that
one felt that the railway line must have been built by poets for
poets--we could not imagine it thriving on anything else.
As a matter of fact, it does link up rich mining and other territory,
and, in time, will open a land of equal value, but just now its chief
asset is scenery.
The scenery is superb. Its hills are huge and battlemented. They leap
up sheer above the train, menacing it; they drop down starkly, leaving
the line clinging to a ledge above a white, angry stream on a white
rock bed. They crowd the line into gorges, from which the sun is
banished, and where the moveless firs look like lost souls chained in
the gloom of Eblis. They expand abruptly, suddenly, into swinging
valleys, on whose great flanks the spruce forests look like toy
decorations hanging above floors of shining sapphire--lakes, of course,
but one could not think that any lake could be so blue.
Lakes fretted into lagoons by thin white slivers of shingle; rivers
full of tumbled and dishevelled logs; forests in green, in which the
crimson maple leaf burns brightly; vast amphitheatres of cliff-like
hills; mounds of the stark Laurentine rock pushing up through trees
like bald heads through the sparse covering of departing hair; miles of
blanched trees and black trees standing like skeletons or strewn
all-whither, like billets of stick--acres of murdered stumps, where
evil forest fires have swept along; and we had even an occasional
glimpse of that scourge of Canada seen smoking sullenly in the
distance--all this heaped together, piled together in a reckless
luxuriance makes up the scenery of the Algoma country.
Only rarely does one see the hut of rough logs and clay that denotes
the settler, only occasionally is there a station, or a mill or a
logging camp in this womb of loneliness. Only occasionally does one
cross one of those lengthy and rakish spider bridges that give a hint
of man and his works.
On a long bridge, over the Montreal river, we made the most of man and
his works. It is a lengthy, curving bridge, built giddily on stilts
above the boulder-strewn bed of a wicked stream. We were admiring it
as a desperate work of engineering, when the train stopped with a
disconcerting bump. It stopped with violence. And when we had picked
ourselves up we looked out of the train and saw nothing--only that
particularly vicious river and those unpleasantly jagged rocks.
When one is on a Canadian bridge this is all one sees--the depth one is
going to drop, and what one is going to drop on. The top of the bridge
is wide enough for the rails only, and the sides of the carriages hang
beyond the rails. And there are no parapets. One just looks plumb
down. We looked down, and back and forward. The struts and girders of
the bridge seemed made of pack-thread and spider's web. We wondered
why we should have stopped in the middle of such a place of all places.
And the train looked so enormous. We asked the superintendent if the
bridge could hold it.
He said he thought so, but it had never been tested by such a weight
before.
From the way he said "thought," we gathered he meant "hoped."
Somebody had wanted to show the Prince the view. It was a fine view,
but we were not sorry it wasn't permanent. With the view, the Prince
took in a little shooting at clay pigeons in view of the days he was to
spend in sporting Nipigon.
We ran straight on to Nipigon, only stopping at Oba, and that in the
night. But before the night came Canada and Algoma gave us an
exquisite sunset. We saw the light of the sun on a vast stretch of
hummocks and hills of bald rock. They had been clothed with forest
before the fires had passed over them. As the sun set, an exquisite
thin cherry light shone evenly on the hills and bluffs, and on the thin
and naked trees that stood up like wands in this eerie and clarified
light. In the distance there was a faint vermilion in the sky, and
where the tree stumps fringed the bare hills, they gave the suggestion
of a band of violet edging the land. And all this in an air as clear
and shining as still water. It seemed to me that Canada was waiting
there for a painter of a new vision to catch its wonder.
Even in the loneliness we were never far away from the human equation.
During the afternoon we had a touch of it. It was discovered by the
Prince that his train was being driven by a V.C., or, rather, one of
the men on the engine, the fireman, was a V.C. This man,
Staff-Sergeant Meryfield, had won the distinction at Cambrai, and had
returned to his calling in the ordinary way. He came back from the
engine cab through the train, a very modest fellow, to be presented to
the Prince, who spent a few minutes chatting with him.