DE BIG-SHOT TRAIN, Chapter 7 | Camp Building

DE BIG-SHOT TRAIN: A Northern Love Affair with Algoma Central Country

A Rough and Ribald Story of a Lifetime in the Bush

~ Robert Cuerrier

Chapter 7 Camp Building

WISDOM

“It’s a hard road for an old dog, a sidewalk for a puppy.” ~ Leonard St. Jean Baptiste

THE FIRST CAMP

It was the late 60’s and maybe the whole idea was clouded in smoke. I wanted to build a log cabin: it was the Woodstock, Dylan and the back to the land to set your soul free era. Well, I can’t explain it but –as they say, if you can remember the 60’s you missed them. I wanted to live my pipe dreams.

Shoney, my partner, and I had little cash and few skills but we did have the will. You could get an ACR land lease on pristine waterfront for seventy-five dollars a year. There was a minimal stumpage fee for logs cut off the site. We bought a rusty set of tools at a pawnshop, an old canoe and a chain saw that we didn’t run.

We could start building right away since there was very little in the way of meddlesome bureaucracy then. The railway gave us a map showing where the existing leases were and you could build anywhere else conditional on a health unit approval.

We chose a good site, built the cabin and reported it as a completed fact afterwards. It was like the end of the frontier era. Today you’d need time, lawyers and a packsack full of papers before building anything.

It was something. We cut every tree with the bucksaw and axe. In order to skid them out, we peeled them in the bush and knocked off all the little knots were the branches were so the log would slide easily. We snagged the top with a cable chocker and snaked the logs by hand down to the lake. Shoney and I were not big men. It was brutal; we were laboring like horses, often in heat and flies. We’d walk the log right into the lake, submerge, sputter and shake. Logs ranged from 18 feet to the longest (ridge poles) at 27 feet, all with a minimum of an eight inch butt and six inch top.

To get the logs to the site we secured them one behind the other in a long line and towed them through the water by ropes over our shoulders- up to half a mile. It was entertaining, sometimes frightening, if you stepped into a drop off and were left swimming with the whole rig. If the logs got away a roundup would be timely.

Every log-fitting was whittled with the axe, and I quickly became ambidextrous with that tool so I didn’t have to always be hoping over a log to whittle the other way. We had to lift each log up and down several times, mark it with a pencil, whittle, and put it back up. Without a chain saw I realized that what we had done was like building three of four camps. Lifts, especially the foundation logs, were difficult since we did them by hand not wanting to take the time to set up rigging. We learned that you can lift more than you think; it’s just a question of want to.

Of course we had to carve the lot out of the bush, and we did this by degrees. We released an area around the campfire and an alley to the lake. A spot was cleared for the cabin, and perimeter trees leaning over that space were removed for safety before we built. The rest of the trees we took out over time and made firewood out of them.

Some of the stumps were left for aesthetics, wildflowers and potatoes were planted around them. Most were dug and chopped out, one at night after supper and only when I felt like it landed on the fire.

To economize we ate a lot of fish. We’d pull a live one in off the nightline and have it in the fry pan in under a minute. We noticed that a very fresh fish twitches in the pan and can near turn itself over. We learned how to hunt partridge with a stick. Bring a ten-footer down very slowly over the partridge. At about eighteen inches smack it down, drop the stick, and pounce.

By September the place was ready to move in. Shoney left it to me to do the inside trim and moved back to Toronto saying that he had been jolted back to his right mind. My wife and three year-old son joined me. We had a stove not quite big enough to heat the shack. It was getting colder each day. We were all sick. Near broke. We could never winter there. Oh the darkness!

Days before freeze up on the lake a boat came in out of a fog. Some American sportsmen had heard that the place was for sale and came to have a look. They were pleased and bought at the asking price –no haggling. What an affirmation!

I was back in at the spring break up with a chain saw, boat, motor and a daydream about a workhorse for skidding the year after.

DOGS

Back in my camp building days I got up a dog team to freight in building supplies over the frozen lakes in the wintertime. That was easier than boating and then humping the outfit on your back over portages.

I had to train the team and thumbed through a few manuals before settling on the traditional Métis way. For the Métis long ago, good teams could mean life or death. I figured that they had front-line training experience and were credible. I decided to go that way.

Now I know this is going to go down hard with some folks, but their methodology was both fast and effective. The musher becomes the dominant dog. You encourage the other dogs to pull with little rewards –chunks of fat and petting. You bring them on slowly and within their capabilities. But it gets ugly when they slack off and want to quit on you. A few kicks in the ass usually does it but punishment escalates for real miscreants.

The Métis were good Roman Catholics. A dog on breach of recognizance would be smacked on the head with the whip stock, sometimes knocking the dog out. In Métis parlance this was ‘Sending the dog to Rome’ which to them meant half-way to heaven. Now I never did get that rough but trained them effectively on the Métis fast track.

Dogs run well when you can convey excitement, get their blood up. The Métis did this with bluster. To get them hot they cursed. In fact, mushers would often have cussing contests where winners had the same cachet as a man with a top racing team. The challenge was to unleash a string of profanity, curses, and threats, the winner being the one who could go on the longest without repetition. After a few years I built up a fairly extensive vocabulary, and even the dog I have today responds well when addressed by colourful expletives.

I worked, lived and even slept with ‘the boys’. They gave me their heart. Once I had a packed trail over the lakes, I could make trains by pulling toboggans behind the sleigh –thousands of pounds of stuff. I’d break them up and take them one at a time over portages where the going was tough and reassemble on the other side. On the trip back to the track for more supplies I’d wrap up in a blanket and sleep in the basket.

They fed themselves. While they were in their prime we’d enter the dog pull at the Sault Ste. Marie Winter Carnival. They always won. We’d leave there with a pick-up full of dog food. You didn’t have to wave a wiener in front of their noses. I kept every one of the team through retirement and look forward to meeting, cursing, and running them again when the Good Lord gives me my release.

WISDOM

“I like the honesty of a dog over that of people. They come up to you, sniff your crotch, and right away you have an understanding.” ~ Leonard St. Jean Baptiste

SPIRTUALITY

There is deep and real spirituality in the bush. The earth is my cathedral, the stars my guiding spirits, and all that stuff you’ve heard before and pontificated by everyone who has ever stepped outdoors. It’s a singular feeling, different for everyone and hard to talk about without being seen as a person a step away from wearing white flowing robes.

I was however a discipline of radio preacher Garner Ted Armstrong and his World Tomorrow show during the early 70’s. He was on every night at six, and that’s when Earl and I stopped work on the log camp we were building and answered the higher calling of our Lord. I fried the salt pork and boiled potatoes, Earl split wood for the next day’s cookfire, and we both caught the Rapture.

Garner Ted had a good rant –and some good points. He was way ahead of the rest of us in forecasting globalization, blending world economies and joint military actions. A prophet. I take it from a memory that he spent a lot of time on the spiritual benefits of heavy tithing on the evils of the uncircumcised Philistine. Interesting alloys.

We were truly saddened when he got in a fight with his evangelist Dad over the dough, got caught boinking a choir lady around the same time and, of course, the show ended.

After all, he did build our spirits. When you work for months with another man in isolation you get talked out, your interaction listless. Garner Ted gave us conversational fodder – some serious, some frivolous.

“And now folks…everyone throughout the USA and Canada…brothers and sisters…just reach out…reach out now…and touch that radio.”

SLAP STICKS

It’s not all apple pie and maple syrup. The bush can be dangerous with its hard weather, chancy work, sinkholes and skunks. It’s something you don’t talk about when you are there lest you be considered maudlin. So far only arthritis has got me and anyway, I’m not worried about a sudden cataclysm because I don’t think Heaven can get ready for me on short notice.

The biggest risk is the simple slap that you get as your daily due from branches, twigs, and brush. You get them especially when logging and skidding and even walking through the bush will many times fetch you a good slap. Of course getting one in the eyes is what I’m really talking about.

Now I can take a hard slap without emotion, no surge of anger or adrenaline, no blasphemy. I can take the worst with benign resignation: that’s how many times I’ve been belted. One time, when living alone, I was nearly blinded for three days after a slap. I took it in one eye, the other went all commiserating, I could see only in the briefest, vaguest tear-filled squints and God it hurt. So I took to my bunk and lay there in the comforting osmosis of strong drink ‘til I came around. Visited the eye doctor a few years back – another slap, and he told me he’d never had anybody in his office with as much scar tissue on the eyes as I had.

*****

Robert Currier, or as many know him- Farmer Bob, has lived on the land traditionally most of his life. He has built wilderness log cabins, logged, guided and prospected. He was the first recipient of the CBC/Big Brothers “Northern Moose Award” for best personifying the spirit of Northern Ontario.

Farmer Bob lives on his Mockingbird Hill Homestead Farm in beautiful Hiawatha Highlands, which backs onto Odena, Mile 9 on the Algoma Central Line. The farm is a singular burst of colour and beauty and one of Sault Ste. Marie’s premier attractions. It is open to the public year round.

Mockingbird Hill is a horse drawn replica of a Métis homestead in the thirties and forties. In summer the farm features wagon rides, market gardening, a petting barn, a corn maze, and a spectacular wild flower walk.

In winter Mockingbird Hill offers horse drawn sleigh rides and cutter rides on trails that are breathtakingly beautiful by day and romantically lantern-lit by night.

De Big-Shot Train by Robert Currier can be purchased at the Art Gallery of Algoma.

www.mockingbirdhillfarm.ca

1.705.253.4712