My Log 423 May 4 2014: Imaginative scheme for recognizing an important historical and cultural period in Canada’s history struggling on while federal government drags its feet

On a visit to Ottawa last week I was shown a most interesting document outlining in some detail the

proposed changes to the long-used, long-almost-abandoned islands in the Ottawa river between the cities of Ottawa and Gatineau.

The proposal has been drawn up by the Windmill Development Group, Canadian developers, who want to  use the 37 acres of the  property they have bought from Domtar, the paper-manufacturer. The architects of the proposed Windmill development are Perkins and Will, of San Francisco, and the Ottawa architect Barry Padolsky, an expert in the culture and heritage of the city of Ottawa, has been hired as heritage consultant.

These islands  --- Chaudiere and Amelia islands on the Ontario side, and Philomen island on the Quebec side,  outlined by the dotted red line in the map shown here, which delineates the limits of the Windmill proposal --- have been used for more than 200 years, first, by the logging industry on which Ottawa was founded at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and later by pulp and paper interests, as well as hydro-electric companies which still operate four generating stations right there in the middle of the Ottawa river, downstream from the Chaudiere Falls dam. Readers will note that the large Victoria island, to which access is gained from one of the bridges, is excluded from the Windmill scheme.

What surprised me about the document I saw was the scale of the industrial work that has historically been carried out there. It was immense,  and at one time rated among the biggest industrial projects in North America. The timber barons who moved in,  Philomen Wright and his son Ruggles, J.R. Booth, E.B Eddy and others, became immensely wealthy, and in their time were almost all-powerful. Booth was said at one time to trade more lumber than any other man in the world.

The first timber was taken in the form of what were called squared logs --- simply trees cut down and squared off before being shipped to England --- first, by being run down the Ottawa river to Montreal for trans-shipment ---- mostly for use by the Royal Navy in construction of its ships.

Later came sawed lumber, and photos of those years show how huge were the piles that were established before being shipped off, usually by barge. When this timber began to run out, the industrialists turned to creating a pulp and paper industry that made paper for most of the great newspapers of North America, and some in Europe. Later E.B. Eddy established a match-making factory. This lumbering has continued to the present day throughout the Ottawa river basin, feeding for the most part regional pulp mills, and it is still a matter of contention between the governing authorities and the Algonquin inhabitants of these forests who, historically, were simply pushed aside to make way for the loggers, and were thus reduced to a deplorable state of poverty. At no time during this long history have they ever ceased to struggle to have their ownership of these valuable lands recognized, a struggle that is continuing today.

I remember a decade ago, when filming the depredations being made of the traditional hunting territories of the Algonquins in La Verendrye park, coming across the biggest pile of logs I could ever imagine, hundreds of thousands of logs, lined up beside the Gatineau river, ready for dispatch into the waters, to be floated down to Ottawa. (This was discontinued soon after, since when the Gatineau river, almost fatally polluted by the trade, has been cleaned up, and is today available for recreation.

This notable industrial  history, certainly worth preserving as an element of heritage not only for the city but for the nation as a whole, does present proposals for “cleaning up” the site with considerable difficulty, because the remaining industrial structures are admitted to be of little intrinsic architectural interest, however much it might be desirable to preserve them for the education of present-day generations.

The Windmill proposal is for condos, walkways and so on, to establish a viable living community on the Chaudiere, Albert and Amelia islands in the middle of the river. But a cultural and heritage assessment of the plans, and of the possibilities, is under preparation.

Windmill requires a  re-zoning by the cities of Ottawa and Gatineau before it can turn a spade in the ground. Since Hydro Ottawa already plans a fifth 29-megawatt generating station on the islands,  and Hydro-Quebec owns land on the other side of the river, one thing is clear: to work through the maze of different ownerships and jurisdictions will be a process requiring immense finesse, tolerance from both sides of the river, skills of diplomacy and vision for both the past and the future.

At the moment is seems that the municipal governments are on board for this effort, but one thing that I found curious about the overall photos of the area was that Victoria island, at present the most accessible to the public, on which stand the remains of the most handsome of the extant buildings, does not even appear in the photos. 

I vividly remember being present at a wonderful concert given by Buffy Ste Marie many years ago, outside the tall stone remains of an industrial building on Victoria Island, that is in these days used in the summer for a variety of operations by local native groups. Similarly, the first time I ever heard of Robert Lepage, the innovative  stage director, was when he staged one of his plays in a tall brick building on Victoria island that still stands, in which the audience was able to surround the stage in balconies rising to the roof, looking down on actors who played their parts in a pool of water covering the stage. These two events surely suggest the sort of future use that could be made of these island lands in the middle of one of Canada’s iconic great rivers. Victoria island is the proposed site of the Gathering of the Nations place, which has been suggested by the late Grand Chief William Commanda as a centre for aboriginal cultural and spiritual activity. The Ottawa river was the centre of Algonquin life long before Europeans arrived here, and they have long hankered after having at least Victoria island transformed into such a place as Chief Commanda recommended. This has to happen if Canada is to live up to its self-image as an imaginative and compassionate nation. But the reason why nothing is happening on Victoria island is that it is owned by the government of Canada, which is showing a notable lack of interest in the possibilities of redeveloping, improving and once again using  the centre of this great river.

“There’s not even a whisper of interest from any agency of the federal government,” said one interested architect, who merely shrugged disconsolately when asked for an explanation.

One doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist to discover the reason. The inertia can be traced back to Cabinet level, in other words, to Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself, so this can be just one more area added to the long list of important projects for the health and spiritual well-being of Canadians that have been stalled by the lack of imagination, the failure of vision, and the strange control-freak impulses of our Prime Minister.

It seems unlikely anything can be done to awaken this government to show even a spark of interest in this important proposal, which could help to transform our somewhat sleepy capital city into a more vibrant presence. The only hope, it seems, is that the government is changed at the next election.

As I have written on this web site before --- Harper Out!  ---- should be the slogan for anyone who hopes for a more imaginative and vibrant Canada.

My Log 422 May 3 2014: Demolition of Mirabel airport terminal amazing: in that it has been almost inevitable from the beginning

English: An aerial photograph from a Porter Air Flight of the Montréal Mirabel International Airport. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

  Terminal slated for demolition (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The news that Mirabel airport terminal is to be demolished is an amazing decision, no matter which way you look at it. What is most amazing about it is that it has been almost inevitable from the beginning.

I remember the years in which this bright new star, Mirabel airport was being built. I was a reporter on The Montreal Star at the time. I remember the paper had senior reporter, W.A. Wilson, who for month after month, year after year, kept writing  about the problems of the airport construction . If I remember correctly, he was no great fan of the airport, or where it was being built. In retrospect this reminds me of what happened  in London in the 1960s when the super-sonic  airplane, the Concorde was being built, and The Economist had a reporter, Mary Goldring, who month after month, year after year,  pursued the argument that the plane would never fly.

No one could say Mirabel airport would never be built, because its progress to completion, though anguished, was visible to everyone.

In those days I was  writing a lot about urban planning issues, and I vividly remember the argument of a city planning officer with an interest in Mirabel (whose name escapes me for the moment.) He said Montreal, at that time, was the major point of contact for Canada with the outside world. All airlines made Montreal their first port of call, which gave the city international stature. But, he said, if that should be ended, Montreal would become merely a regional centre, a city serving its Quebec hinterland, and nothing else.

The argument about where to place the new airport was influenced by nationalist considerations. Quebec nationalism was on the rise in the 1960s, following the Quiet Revolution initiated by the Lesage Liberal government, and there was a strong feeling among the various governments that a Montreal airport should be designed to service the province, above everything.  My planner friend pointed out that if the airport were to be located in the south-western corner of Quebec, it would be closer to the population centres of Ontario, and thus have a larger catchment area than in the position eventually chosen for it, which was 24 miles north-west of the city of Montreal in a region of small-scale farming, small, quaint  villages, and not much population. A huge area of land was expropriated to allow for the biggest possible airport, indeed, the largest airport every envisioned up to that time, with a planned area of nearly 40,000 hectares (or nearly 100,000 acres)  Dozens of farmers were bought out, and it became a popular destination for seekers after traditional Quebec furniture to go on weekends in the hope of picking up a beautiful table or chair cheaply.  A friend of mine actually created an antiques business of the things she managed to buy in this way from disconsolate farmers.

That most of this land was never needed is just, I suppose, a by-product of the foolishness of the whole enterprise. Indeed of the 98,000 acres expropriated more than 85,000 were eventually deeded back to their owners.

At first it was mandatory for foreign airlines to use Mirabel, but gradually the airlines realized the airport was in the wrong place, was unaccompanied by any of the promised rapid transit connections to the city of Montreal, and in short was not a good place for them to do their business, not any more.  So, one by one, they transferred their terminal operations to Toronto, which at this time was Canada’s second largest city, but rapidly thereafter began to outstrip Montreal in population, industry and economic vitality.  Montreal had been dreaming of becoming a metropolis of 7,000,000 people, but in the event, it is Toronto that at last count has become the  centre of an urban agglomeration of 8,700,000 people, while Montreal region has 3.800,000.

Of course many people will argue that is a good thing. But let us stick to the phenomenon of Mirabel airport. Designed to accommodate up to 20,000,000 passengers a year, with space to expand to 70,000,000, Mirabel never attracted more than 200,000 a year, while the Pearson airport in Toronto (only 14 miles north-west of the city) has grown to handling 36,000,000 passengers in 2013.

Abandoned by the scheduled airlines Mirabel was used for charter flights: I remember well, a resident of Ottawa at the time, having to connect to flights leaving there in the early mornings. It was a damnably awkward place to get to. If one drove over the night before, it added to one’s costs; and if one decided to come on the day of the flight, it meant getting up about two a.m. to have any prospect of making the flight.  Having assured a parking place for one’s car, one then had to stand in huge, inchoate, queues of unhappy and discontented travellers bent on going on what was laughingly called a holiday. When charter airlines began to abandon Mirabel, it became a cargo airport in addition to which it has been used by various manufacturing plants to do with aviation. But as the biggest airport ever built, it has always been nothing but a white elephant, whose maintenance, even when not being used, is said to have run to $30,000,000 a year.

To me, the interesting thing is that any wise city planner could  have foreseen all of this (and at least one did to my certain knowledge).

Of course, this sort of thing is not exactly unusual. I remember writing about the planning problems of Britain in the 1960s, when governments were anxious to divert population from the overcrowded south of the country, London-centred as it was, to the economically deprived northern parts. Many plans were introduced with that objective. But the fact is, most of them never worked. The build-up of people in the south seems to have been inexorable.

It had to do not only with the preferences of people, but with the fact that it was part of a scarcely acknowledged belt of intense urban development that stretched right across Europe from the industrial areas of northern Germany (the Ruhr valley, and so on) through northern France, Belgium and Holland (the latter country being among the most intensively populated countries in the world), and across to southern England, apparently totally skipping the English channel.

Hard are the ways of the economic and physical planner.

But then, I am constantly being reminded that the people who almost brought the world economy to its knees in 2008, were all regarded as geniuses at Harvard university.  Too much brain-power doesn’t really seem to be the answer to humanity’s growing, and manifold problems.

Mirabel’s about-to-be-demolished air terminal is a symbol of that.

My Log 421: Antarctica, barren end of Earth, yet teeming with life: Peter Matthiessen’s unforgettable description of it

Map showing the second voyage of Captain James Cook. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Official portrait of Captain James Cook (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Peter Matthiessen (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Since Peter Matthiessen died 10 days ago I have been reading a book of his I had not previously seen. It is called End of the Earth, and is an account of two voyages he made deep into the Antarctic on board a Russian icebreaker which was taking time off its normal duties around the northern coasts of Russia to undertake some cruising for adventurous people.

I found the book in my favorite book store in Montreal The Word, run by Adrian  King-Edwards, whom I had chafed when he did not run a Peter Matthiessen window, as I would have expected. He said it was because they had

not been able to find enough  Matthiessen books to make a window among their remarkably comprehensive stock of second-hand books, an inventory that has been built up through the devotion and remarkable knowledge of the unassuming proprietor.

I noticed the next morning that they had found one book, at least,  and had put it in the window, so I went in and bought it. “The fact we don’t have his books in stock is a tribute to his stature, because it means people are not getting rid of his books.,” Adrian said when I ran into him on the street.

This book, like almost everything else I have read by Matthiessen, is a wonder. Embarking into the most remote area on Earth, he treats past voyageurs to the region, reaching back beyond Captain Cook’s two eighteenth century forays into the heavy ice, almost as fellow-voyageurs, and tells us the most enthralling details about each of them. Furthermore, his knowledge of bird-life is so profound that his pages are filled with descriptions of the few species that are either born down there, or visit the south during its least ferocious months, and he seems to be able to recognize immediately the many varieties of shearwaters, petrels, albatrosses and penguins. He had not personally seen the giant among the penguins, the Emperor, until his second voyage, but his background reading had been so voracious that he was able to describe their amazing life-cycle in detail.  Far from only visiting the region in the more clement weather, the Emperor --- the author says it is the only bird that never touches solid land in its life ---- breeds in the middle of the Antarctic winter. In other words, it chooses the toughest conditions available anywhere on Earth in which to lay its fairly rare eggs, nurture them against all temperatures, gales and storms, bring their chicks to life and eventually set them off on their journeys by depositing them into the ocean, and expecting them to return in a couple of years when fully grown. In itself a story worth the price of the book.

I had an especial interest in the subject of this book because he was sailing around in latitudes  not that very far from those in which I was born. On the return journey, for example, the little ship is tossed around by one of the most ferocious storms imaginable in the latitudes of the fifties, as they try to make their way to the New Zealand-owned Campbell islands, some hundreds of miles south of where I grew up. He talks of the Roaring Forties, those latitudes across which huge winds blow persistently south of Australia. They hit the Southern Alps of the South Island of New Zealand, drop immense quantities of water on the fiordlands of the south, and then pass on innocuously to my home town, Invercargill, a city  --- “the southernmost city in the British Empire”, we used to call it --- that is always noted in the guide books as having only one virtue, that is, of being a place to leave on the way to somewhere more interesting. Directly south of my hometown lies Foveaux Strait, a 26 mile stretch of turbulent water between the South Island and Stewart Island, which I remember from my one crossing in my late teens was as rough as I ever expect an ocean to become.

Matthiessen doesn’t mention it but Foveaux Strait is home to what those of us from that part of the world acknowledge to be the world’s finest oysters. But in the context of his description of the wildlife in Antarctica that should come as no surprise to anyone, because although one thinks of the Antarctic as the most barren area of Earth, in fact it is teeming with life, sustains vast colonies of sea-birds, seals, whales, all of which it feeds by providing huge clouds of  millions of krill, the primary food for the immense whales, grossly fat elephant seals,  and other amazing species.

Even more astonishing is his description of what is called the West Wind Drift, the biggest and most powerful  ocean current on Earth that circumnavigates the globe, and is indexed in the book under the title “circumpolar river…” of which he writes: “…whose depth and width, spanning the latitudes, make it the mightiest of currents, with a volume equivalent to all of the Earth’s rivers 135 times over.”

Matthiessen spends a lot of space writing  about “the Antarctic Convergence”, or Polar Front, that area where the intensely cold Southern Ocean (a term first used, he notes, by Captain Cook) “heavy and more dense, sinks hundreds of feet below the surface of the warmer ocean before continuing a northern ‘creep’ that is detectable by hydrologists all the way to the Equator and beyond. He goes into great detail about the separation of the various continents from Gondwana, at the period millions of years ago when they were all joined, noting that much animal life from those times --- for example, the strange animals that populate Australia --- got their characteristics and their particularity from that time.

Although he has provided fascinating snippets of information throughout the book about his predecessors over the centuries in Polar voyaging, he devotes a whole final chapter to estimating their various achievements, or lack of them, in some cases. He is an unrepentant admirer of Captain James Cook, who set off south during his Pacific voyages with the hope of discovering the Terra Australis Incognita at the bottom of the Earth, and had to give it up because of the barrier of the ice. He admires Shackleton, and particularly the great scientific adventurer Dr Edward Wilson. He is not an admirer of the fabled Captain  Scott, sold to every child in my boyhood as a huge hero of the British Empire, but revealed in the 1960s by Roland Huntford to have been a complete bungler, whose poor decision-making, stubbornness and false heroics unfortunately doomed not ony himself but his whole party of brave men, who perished on the way back from his ill-planned, ill-judged, impetuous journey to the South Pole in 1912, where he arrived only to find that the more methodical Norwegian Roald Amundsen had beaten them to it.

Matthiessen returns repeatedly to wondering what is the mysterious attraction of the Antarctic, and quotes several of the more thoughtful of the explorers of the past. “A man on such an expedition lives so close to nature,” wrote Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who wrote the best book about the experience, “ in whom he realizes a giant force which is visibly, before his eyes, carving out the world.” Shackleton spoke of “the longing for the ice,” a feeling Matthiessen himself obviously felt, although he confessed unable to describe it in more detail.

Since Matthiessen’s death I have seen some interviews with him reproduced from earlier years, in which he claimed to be primarily a fiction writer, not a naturalist, and I certainly agree with one reviewer quoted on the book’s back cover who said that “I found myself constantly re-reading sentences or paragraphs to savour all of their rich resonances,” something I found myself doing as well. Matthiessen was not only a supreme observer of the natural world, but a master of English prose, as proof of which I  end with this quote:

“I am quite content with the material simplicity of shipboard life. Though scarcely hermetic, it offers a cocoon free of incoming mail, the clamor of the telephone, intrusive voices. In my spare, small cabin with its bunk and desk, its big porthole like a window on the sea,my books, binoculars, warming whiskey and rare solitude….I am somehow complete. In the sea rhythm and the wind on deck, I fill my lungs with ocean emptiness and the pure wind circling the Earth; in hard weather, driven below, I kneel on the spare bunk and peer out of my window at the waves, awaiting the passage of light-boned ocean birds in their fragility and their taut strength, astonished anew by those ancient adaptations that align them with the elements so that waves, wind, and wings all move as one. And to the degree that I am able to let go of mind and body and escape all boundaries, I soar with them in the unity of being.”

As someone has said since Peter Matthiessen’s death, we may never see his like again.

My Log 420 April 6 2014: Death of a giant among writers: Peter Matthiessen left behind a body of work that I hope will be read forever

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (book) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Peter Matthiessen (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: F.B.I. photograph of agents' car after the shootout at Pine Ridge. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Cover of Killing Mister Watson (Panther)

One of the writers I have most admired has just died. Peter Matthiessen was a giant not only among American writers, but among all writers in the English language.  For many years I have wondered why he was never granted the Nobel Prize for literature, of which he was a master in both fiction and non-fictional books.

Perhaps a clue to this was given in a moving tribute to him written this weekend by Leonard Peltier, the long-imprisoned victim of a miscarriage of justice arising from the events around the fiasco in Pine Ridge reservation in Dakota in  1973. Known among native people as the Wounded Knee incident, it arose from an occupation of part of the huge Pine Ridge reservation, known far and wide for its corruption,  by the radicals of the American Indian Movement. Two FBI agents were killed during this imbroglio, and Peltier was convicted of their murder (with, it has to be said, Canadian cooperation). Matthiessen wrote a book, In The Spirit of Crazy Horse in defense of Peltier, who said that because of the book the FBI targetted Matthiessen.

Peltier wrote:

 “F.B.I.  first tried to ruin his career by filing false, multi-million-dollar libel suits against him and his publishing company, also effectively BANNING the book during the lawsuits.  When that did not work, they threatened his life and the lives of his family. In true warrior form, Peter told them to get off of his property. Peter told me ‘Sure I was concerned,’ but his beliefs in the Constitution and his belief in America were stronger than any fear they could put on him. Others who were threatened and became afraid, burned thousands and thousands of copies  of our book; yes!… in modern times they burned In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. 

Governor Bill Janklow threatened all of the book stores in South Dakota to BAN the book.”

Peltier wrote of Matheissen:

“Man, I thought he was going to live forever. Peter was one-of-a-kind. Truly --ONE that will go down in history. He fought for the poor and the weary, the sick, and anyone who had problems that were brought to his attention. He took time from his own life to try to help them in whatever way he could. He  ALWAYS gave freely when someone needed anything, fought for those who were being mistreated. I mean, this man's life was like a movie script.  Not to mention the great books he wrote. Some of them are mind blowing.  This man had the kind of talent that we may never see again.”

The New York Times, just before he died, published an interesting interview of  Matthiessen this weekend, but without mentioning his book in favour of Leonard Peltier.

The writer mentioned as two of his greatest books the environmental-spiritual account of his trip into the Himalayas in search of The Snow Leopard,  which basically was an account of his devotion to Zen Buddhism, a religion to which he devoted much of his life. This, of course was a non-fiction book, and was generally regarded as his master work (although it is the one book of his that I was not especially impressed by, perhaps because of my distaste for all religions).

The novel the New York Times writer regarded as a masterwork was the fascinating  Far Tortuga, an account of a trip made down the coast of Honduras to catch turtles, written in a dialect of the people living in that part of the world (in itself an amazing feat), and a book that provided me as its  reader with all sorts of difficulties, until, halfway through, I found  myself irrevocably caught up in its story, in the characters, in their tale.  Just one of the amazing works of fiction written by Matthiessen. His first novel, an attack on the Christian fundamentalist missionaries who have penetrated the tribes of the Amazon forest, was called At Play in the Fields of the Lord  and is a very funny book that succeeds in denouncing the missionaries and their evil works while at the same time making fun of them.

I was surprised that the Times article did not menton his wonderful trilogy, Killing Mister Watson (1990), Lost Man's River (1997) and Bone by Bone (1999).

The three books deal with the killing of an early settler deep in the Florida Everglades an event that is described from three different points of view. As in  other of his books, he makes no concessions to the reader. His books as a general rule  were  quite difficult to get into, and required attention and persistence, but the detail, the depth of understanding he showed of  human nature and human motivations more than rewarded the considerable effort a reader had to put into them. I believe that later he worked on reducing these three great novels to one huge 800-page epic called Shadow Country, a new rendering of the Watson legend (2008).

Another of his books that I have recommended to many of my friends is called Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in the Stone Age (1962).  As an anthropologist he visited a valley in New Guinea a mere two years after its inhabitants had first been contacted by the outside world, and his account of the habits of life, the beliefs, the wars and peace-making conducted by these people reads more like a novel than a scientific study, but is an enthralling read from cover to cover, giving one plenty of food for thought about the true nature of homo sapiens. As a search of his works reveals, he  wrote extensively on the environment of some of the most precious places on Earth ---  wildlife in America, the South American  wilderness, the Atlantic coast, Baikal, Sacred Sea of  Siberia and End of the Earth: Antarctica.  He also devoted much of his life to exposing the dangers to noble creatures that humankind is threatening, as his book titles testify: Shorebirds of America, the Search for the Great White Shark, and Birds of Heaven, Travels with Cranes.

His Buddhism itself was informed by a deep concern for Nature, as reflected in the title of his Zen journals, 1969-1982: Nine-headed Dragon River.

In a world in which men and women  seem to be so unconscious of the effects of  their actions on other creatures, we can scarcely afford to lose a man like Peter Matthiessen. And I for one deeply mourn his passing, while wishing I could live up to his example in my own small life.