King’s Highway No. 2, N 44.58.59 W 74.59.11,Woodlands, Ontario, Canada
A submerged highway running through the hamlet of Woodlands. Founded in 1784 by German-speaking Loyalists from New York it had a population of about 70 people and was known, in the 1950s, for the cottages that lined the road adjacent to the then bank of the St Lawrence River.
Peering across Canada’s history and geography, the narrative of endless prosperity and boundless opportunity that justified the Seaway project is perhaps the only single consistent story Canada has about itself. The cod of the Grand Banks in 1500s, the fur trade run largely by the Hudson’s Bay Company through royal charter, the gold rushes of the Cariboo, the Klondike and northern Ontario, the logging of ‘endless’ forests of pine, spruce, and fir in eastern and, then, western Canada, and now the rush on the ‘world’s largest’ petrochemical reserves in northern Alberta – each is a variation on the same theme, which arrives each time with fresh, contemporary promises of forever and ever. Each project begins anew and must, by its logic of endless growth and prosperity, ignore all previous booms, for these have always been followed by busts – if not complete collapse, and shattered promises. It might be a little too easy with the perspective of hindsight to simply judge what was done in the 1950s with the Seaway as wrong, but by the standards of the time officials were probably acting in good conscience. Consider the almost concurrent Alcan project in northwestern BC: here authorities told the Cheslatta people a few weeks before the flooding of the Nechako River for a reservoir that they were going to need to move. Coffins
and human remains floated on the surface for years. Where the failure largely resides is not in previous actions or mistakes, but in not being prepared to acknowledge, re-examine and ask hard questions about these past actions. Canada’s record suggests we appear to be doomed to be a-historical, to forever be captive to our peculiarly Canadian myth of boom but no-bust, never to learn from our past experience and mistakes. If the two hundred years since the War of 1812 have dimmed our understanding of the relevance of the Battle of Crysler’s Farm, we do have, well within living memory, the personal stories, experiences, opinions and feelings from these drowned small towns – the best conduit to whatever truths can be gleaned from the experience of the Seaway project. Making an effort to understand this is to make an effort to understand ourselves; to ignore this is something that we as a country do at our own peril. –
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