CNR and Highway No2, N 44.55.39 W 75.07.63, Riverside Heights, Ontario, Canada Highway 2, the Canadian National Railway and a level crossing road, perpendicular to both, outline where there were once fields, buildings and large deciduous trees the stumps of which can still be seen.This area is just off the shore of the Riverside Cedar Campground, part of the St Lawrence Parks Commission network of parks and public facilities along the shoreline affected by the flooding.
stories
A diver, leading tours or just diving with his buddies, lets the current of the St Lawrence guide him along King’s Highway 2 through villages, past bridges and driveways and the foundations of farm houses.‘It’s like they’re still there’, he says. Everything is encrusted by zebra mussel shells, ready to cut those who are not careful. He reports that the water is beginning to become murky again as the result of yet another invasive species, the Round Goby, feeding on zebra mussels. Polite ladies, young like everyone once was, but without the backyards, fields and streets of childhood that most everyone else can return to. Frustration, even anger, seeps out between mild words about the living museum, Upper Canada Village – with a fence and an admission fee around buildings salvaged from the flood, only there because of the flood but celebrating the 1850s or the 1500s, but never their 1950s. Upper Canada Village advertises ‘two [mediæval and nineteenth century] historic and entertaining experiences for the price of one!!’ The third one, the sunken villages, is not mentioned. A boy from Moulinette listens to authorities explain to his parents a difficult choice: to have their parents, the boy’s grandparents, exhumed to a new cemetery or left to lie where they are.They’re still there; others are not. Riding his bicycle on the road past those graveyards, sheets appeared around some graves, and, thus shrouded, gravediggers proceeded in reverse of their normal order. Their jobs done, the churches levelled, the headstones removed and then one last act of permanence, the dumping of rock and rubble on those graveyards so no coffin or remains could ever emerge again.
A 14 year-old whose grandparents owned a dry-goods store in Farran’s Point and whose mother was born near Wales, wrote a poem in 1958 about his conflicted feelings.The first four stanzas are a heartfelt ode to what was lost, the last two (skipping to another track on a much different LP) justify it as a celebration of progress and industry.When he sent me his poem, he explained that those last stanzas squeezed his feelings into a mould of what he thought he should feel or say in light of the project’s progress and modernity.The social pressure was immense. A sailor from Mille Roches passed through his home area after almost a year away, one of the first to traverse the Seaway.The captain called him to the bridge, half jokingly asking him to navigate because he knew the area. Staring out from that bridge across an expanse of unfamiliar water in a familiar place, the distant look in his eyes 50 years later takes the listener right to that bridge and all its emotion. That same sailor remarks just how gorgeous those girls sitting in a row-boat at Farran’s Point Lock, staring back from a black and white photo, are, as though it were yesterday not 1955. An aerial reconnaissance pilot flying a re-purposed Lancaster bomber photographed, officially and systematically, the incremental change to the landscape. One can well imagine the slow motion dismantling of the landscape and, then, its sudden disappearance. In the story, relayed by the son, his father was asked by those assembling an official record which were the best, most dramatic images of the project. His reply – the dismemberment and moving of Iroquois a mile or two north – dismissed as ‘not real’.
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