Praise for Restigouche
“Magnificent. A grand and sweeping tale that is also the story of New Brunswick, of the Maritimes, of Canada. What Philip Lee has done in Restigouche is compose a compelling, poetic love letter to the forever river of his life. This book is his plea for conservation, protection and restoration. But it is also, happily, a book filled with love of the river and hope for its future.”
— Roy MacGregor, author of Original Highways: Travelling the Great Rivers of Canada
“Journey down an ancient wild river with a seasoned river man and gifted storyteller. Hear the aspirations and hearts of the original river people of this land called Mi'gmag'i and the newcomers who have grown to love this river and the gifts she shares with all who take the time.”
— Cecelia Brooks, Waponahkew nil and Canadian Rivers Institute Water Grandmother
“A brilliant work; a living, breathing and truly unforgettable account of the great Restigouche River by a master chronicler of our natural world.”
— David Adams Richards, author of Lines on the Water: A Fisherman’s Life on the Miramichi
“In this love story about a wild river, a metaphor for all love stories about wild places, Lee describes the intricate and intimate experience, the profound caring and deep pleasure of a long-term relationship and, in the telling, connects us with All That Is.”
— Freeman Patterson, author of The Last Wilderness: Images of the Canadian Wild
Also by Philip Lee
Home Pool: The Fight to Save the Atlantic Salmon
Frank: The Life and Politics of Frank McKenna
Bittersweet: Confessions of a Twice-Married Man
The Next Big Thing: The Dalton Camp Lectures in Journalism (ed.)
Copyright © 2020 by Philip Lee.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.
Edited by Susan Renouf.
Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.
Cover image and interior section pages: Restigouche River, copyright © 2013 by Jean-Michel Cormier, www.instagram.com/jmcormierphotography.
Interior maps: Copyright © 2020 by Lena Beckley, www.instagram.com/lenabeckley_art.
Printed in Canada.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Restigouche : the long run of the wild river / Philip Lee with an introduction by Roy MacGregor.
Names: Lee, Philip, 1963- author.
Description: Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190181885 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190181958 | ISBN 9781773100883 (softcover) | ISBN 9781773100890 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781773100906 (Kindle)
Subjects: LCSH: Restigouche River (N.B. and Québec) | LCSH: Restigouche River (N.B. and Québec)— History. | LCSH: Restigouche River (N.B. and Québec)—Description and travel. | LCSH: Lee, Philip, 1963-—Travel—Restigouche River (N.B. and Québec) | LCSH: Stream conservation—Restigouche River (N.B. and Québec)
Classification: LCC FC2495.R48 L44 2020 | DDC 971.5/11—dc23
Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of New Brunswick.
Goose Lane Editions
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Fredericton, New Brunswick
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For Butch and Marty
and the Expeditionary Force
Foreword by Roy MacGregor
Time
Water
Flow
Acknowledgements
Notes
Here’s hoping Philip Lee will forgive me for calling him The Mole. It is intended as a compliment.
Mole, of course, was a main character in Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 children’s novel, The Wind in the Willows. Mole, Grahame wrote, “was bewitched, entranced, fascinated” by the river that ran through the forest and meadows where Toad and Ratty and Badger and Grahame’s other imaginary creatures lived. For Mole, “happiness was complete” only when he sat on the banks “while the river still chatted on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.”
Mole, meet Philip Lee. Kenneth Grahame’s river, meet the river that runs through this magnificent book.
What Philip Lee has done in Restigouche is compose a compelling, poetic love letter to the forever river of his life. Like Mole, he sees the Restigouche as a living creature, perhaps not quite the “sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal” that Mole liked to watch, but the beloved main character in a grand and sweeping tale that is also the story of New Brunswick, of the Maritimes, of Canada. There are history lessons inside these covers and also geological lessons, hydrology studies, philosophy teachings and even a touch of theology, as might be expected from the son of a Presbyterian pastor who brought his young family to New Brunswick in the late 1960s. In the more than half century that he has lived in the province, this river has become his spiritual core.
For years, I knew of Philip Lee as a byline on many of the most readable newspaper stories coming out of New Brunswick. Later, when he became a professor of journalism at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, we connected at a one-day forum on the national game. I knew he believed in good journalism and that he liked hockey, but I knew little of his other passions until the summer of 2016, when I was working on a series on the great rivers of Canada for the Globe and Mail, an examination of sixteen rivers that would later be expanded into a book, Original Highways.
Knowing that one of the rivers would be the Saint John, “the Rhine of North America,” I contacted Philip after finding out that he had published a book on salmon fishing called Home Pool: The Fight to Save the Atlantic Salmon. He not only agreed to meet with me and connect me with others along the river, but he also said he would personally get me out on the water. So on a lovely and calm late June day, Philip Lee, looking like a “gillie” about to set out for a secret pool on a Scottish salmon river, poled his square-stern canoe up to our hotel dock. That’s right, dock — the Delta Hotel in Fredericton has a dock as well as a parking lot. “Climb in,” he said. “We’re heading upstream to Burpee Bar.”
Ellen and I climbed in and spent the rest of the day spellbound by the slow grace of the river and its banks, the silent whisper of a canoe being poled rather than paddled and the intelligence and information that poured out of the man standing at the stern while working a four-metre pole along the river bottom. We saw no salmon at Burpee Bar, but on the way back downstream, we did see two bald eagles. And we learned about another river a few hours away, which our guide said was once the most famous salmon river in the world, a place where a US president was once part of an exclusive club, where the Duchess of Windsor once out-fished the duke, where the man who gave the world standard time once built a bridge. It was a gentle river where, paradoxically, some of the great battles of Canada — French against English, settlers against First Nations, industry against conservation, ownership against public access, common sense against greed — had been fought and were still being fought from the river’s source in the high hills to where it empties into salt water at Chaleur Bay. For centuries, the Restigouche has been a cat’s cradle of competing interests. And in too many ways, it still is.
Philip Lee said he was writing a book on that river — and here it is.
Restigouche is canoe tripping with the best company imaginable. Not only is Philip a great storyteller, but he is a fabulous researcher. You will, of course, meet the rich and famous — the Irvings of New Brunswick, Teddy Roosevelt, the Vanderbilts, the Marquis of Lorne and his wife, Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria — but you will also meet, and often fall in love with, the ordinary people who live along the Restigouche: loggers, fishers, French, English, Mi'gmaq. It is a river that has experienced its own rough waters, from the horrendous expulsion of the Acadians nearly three centuries ago to as recently as 1981, when police and game wardens from Quebec descended on the Listuguj First Nation and beat and arrested members of the Indigenous community for netting salmon.
Salmon, of course, are at the heart of this superb book, just as they are the prime attraction in the crystal clear waters of the Restigouche. Philip is clearly on the side of the salmon, detailing what overfishing, logging, pollution and climate change have done to the fishery. This book is his plea for conservation, protection and restoration.
But it is also, happily, a book filled with love of the river and hope for its future.
— Roy MacGregor
He did not need to get his map out. He knew where he was from the position of the river.
— “Big Two-Hearted River”
For here too there are gods.
— Heraclitus
1 The wild river flows down from the northern reaches of the Appalachian Highlands where for almost half the year it is encased in ice and buried in deep layers of snow. In early spring, as the days grow longer and the heat of the sun grows stronger, the ice begins to crack and shift until it shatters into a rugged slurry that rumbles downriver, scraping shorelines, plowing down trees, rearranging boulders, scouring gravel beds, dividing islands and forming new ones. Every year the ice run leaves behind scars on rocks and trees, witness marks in a story of change that passes through a vast measure of time.
The freshet follows the ice run, the snowmelt from the hills running into a torrent that breaches the banks and spills into the floodplains, back channels, gullies and swamps. As the flow subsides, the water clears, and the river recedes into its banks. Summer blooms in a rush of greens, sweeping across the floodplains and hills, as if in a hurry to make the most of the season. When cool nights sprinkle frost in the valley, mists swirl over the water, and hardwoods on the hillsides turn orange and crimson until winter winds strip the trees bare and the ice and snow return again.
The wild river is creation in motion, yet each season when we return to the valley, we recognize landmarks from stories centuries old, the names passed on from one generation of travellers to the next: Campbell’s, Jimmy’s Hole, Cheyne, Trotting Grounds, Stillwater, Devil’s Half Acre, Three Sisters, Shingle, White Brook Island, Pine Island, Cross Point, Two Brooks, Chamberlain Shoals, Chain of Rocks, Rafting Grounds. We know these places as we know the timbre of the river’s voice, the texture of its waters, the shape of its meanders, the colour and polish of its stones. No two rivers are the same; in all the world, there is only one Restigouche. That’s why long ago the river gods were many and the sea god was one.
The Restigouche River runs northeast for 200 kilometres, marking the border between the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec, before spilling into Chaleur Bay. The narrow bay, 130 kilometres long, bends northeast toward the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Atlantic Ocean. The headwaters of the Restigouche rise in streams that spill into the Little Main Restigouche from the southwest and the Kedgwick River from the northwest. The main river begins where the currents of the Kedgwick and Little Main collide in a deep, swirling pool we call the Junction. Below the Junction, the river continues to collect water from countless small streams and three major tributaries: the Patapédia from the north, the Upsalquitch from the southwest and the Matapédia from the northeast.
The Matapédia, which runs through the province of Quebec, is the only tributary that passes through towns and villages. The others flow through wild spaces broken by a scattering of logging roads and isolated fishing lodges, some of them more than a century old, built by a handful of the wealthiest people of their time who came to the river when Canada’s Intercolonial Railway connected this valley to the outside world in the summer of 1876.
There are small cities in New Brunswick on the south side of the Restigouche estuary, Campbellton and Dalhousie with its deep-water harbour, and the remote hills of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula across the river to the north. Listuguj is on the northern shore opposite Campbellton, Ugpi'Ganjig on the southern shore just beyond Dalhousie, both communities of Mi'gmaq, the First People of this river. Their territory is called Mi'gma'gi, and it includes the Gaspé Peninsula, the islands in Chaleur Bay, the Atlantic provinces of Canada and part of the state of Maine. The Restigouche flows through Gespe'gewa'gi, the last land, the seventh and largest district of Mi'gma'gi, extending from the Miramichi River in the south to the farthest reaches of the Gaspé Peninsula in the north.
Each of the Restigouche tributaries has its own personality, yet they all share the primary characteristic of the main river, which is the startling clarity of the water. Over the years, I have floated hundreds of kilometres by canoe on these waters. On clear days I can see every stone on the river bottom from bank to bank. And when I look down into the deep ledge-framed pools and hollowed-out pockets below cold-water brooks, I see silver Atlantic salmon that have returned to spawn on the same gravel beds where they spent the first seasons of their lives before migrating thousands of kilometres to distant oceans and back again. For generations, the Restigouche salmon has defined, united and divided this valley and the people of the river.
A well-travelled American journalist who came here in the 1860s wrote of a great river flowing through one of the most “superb and fascinating” landscapes on the continent, where mists swirl along cliffs and chasms and across “far-reaching sweeps of outline and continually rising domes,” the water “gleaming like polished steel.” He published a long feature in Harper’s New Monthly magazine in March 1868 that opens by stating matter of factly that the Restigouche valley affords “unquestionably the best field for the sportsman to be found in America, east of the Rocky Mountains.” The writer suggested that if artists followed him and captured what they saw on canvas, they would paint another Heart of the Andes or Valley of the Yosemite and call it Restigouche.
2 The course of my life turned toward the river when my family moved north from Montgomery County, Maryland, to the seaport city of Saint John, New Brunswick, where my father had taken a job as the pastor at a downtown Presbyterian church. It was the spring of 1969, three months after my sixth birthday. In Maryland we lived in a two-storey brick manse across the road from a country church with a white clapboard steeple, surrounded by farms, flat dirt roads and wire fences. In Saint John we moved into a duplex in a working-class Irish Roman Catholic neighbourhood on the west side of a deep-water harbour where weathered saltbox row houses lined the streets that ran up the hills that frame the mouth of the Saint John River. There the water rushes into the Bay of Fundy through a deep gut carved by the current known as the Reversing Falls, named for the dangerous rapids that turn and run upstream on the incoming tide.
We came to this rough-hewn town at a time when mothers and fathers pushed their sons and daughters outside in all seasons and told them to return only for meals or treatment of serious injury. When I stepped out my front door, I fell into the embrace of gangs of boys and girls who mapped their playgrounds through a maze of grassy clifftop paths, rugged beaches and railway yards, through the remains of crumbling cattle sheds, longshoremen’s shelters and the long cargo sheds along waterfront docks. In the days of my youth, we were all explorers, and the freedom I discovered in my new Canadian home suited me just fine. This was the time of my second birth, when I awoke to feel the salted winds on my face and the rocky earth beneath my feet.
My father grew up in Tampa, Florida, exploring the sandy Gulf coastline and Everglade swamps with fishing rods and rifles. Later, when we lived in Maryland, he fished and hunted along the wild streams of the West Virginia hills. We arrived in Saint John at a time when the calamity of the Vietnam War and the assassinations of a president, a civil rights leader, and the president’s brother had caused my father to lose his passion for shooting. He stored his hunting rifles and shotgun when he came to Canada, but it was not long before he started looking for places to fish. When I was old enough to hike through the forest and wade in flowing water, my father started taking me with him as he explored the rivers and streams near our home.
My father is slight but sturdy, straight-backed and deceptively strong. In the southern tradition, I was named after him, as he was named after his father. Like many men of his generation, he has perfect manners and tidy presentation. He fearlessly took up winter sports when we moved north, teaching himself to ski and skate, although he never learned to do either particularly well. One Sunday morning he processed into the sanctuary sporting a weeping black eye that he earned by falling on his face playing hockey on a frozen pond the day before. He always preached the revolutionary message of the New Testament, that we must love our enemies and the meek shall inherit the Earth. I learned to write by listening to the cadence of the sermons that he scribbled on unlined paper and read aloud before leaving for church.
One summer we launched a canoe into a stream called New River to search for a stretch of water called the Diamond Pools. A man at a rural general store had told my father that the pools were filled with brook trout. We didn’t know precisely where they were, only that they lay somewhere above the highway bridge. So that’s where we set out, in a canoe filled with camping gear and fishing rods, pushing against the current in a stream so shallow and rocky that we were soon wading and dragging instead of paddling.
Our trips were often this kind of Presbyterian enterprise, based on the assumption that good fishing waters would be reached after a long slog that only those of sturdy faith would have the fortitude to endure. For two days we dragged the canoe upstream, portaging around a small waterfall, camping at night on grassy bluffs above the stone beaches beside the river. We never found the Diamond Pools on the New River, but I’ve always carried with me memories of that trip, the anticipation of turning another bend with nothing but unexplored territory ahead. Most importantly, I was learning to seek grace through perseverance, that the inevitable difficulties and hardships we encounter on trips such as these, and in the passages of our lives, are necessary obstacles to overcome. Sometimes we have no choice but to pull our canoe over a shallow gravel bar or shoulder it across a portage. In my life, I’ve done my share of both.
As the years passed, my father and I ranged farther north to the remote border region of New Brunswick and Quebec, into the valley of the Restigouche, and after our first season on the river, we returned to it at every opportunity. For more than two decades, first with my father and later with my friends and other members of my family, I’ve been following the clear currents of the Restigouche along high-cut banks, dropping over the tumble of rapids into deep pools. At the end of long summer days, we’ve swung our canoes out of the flow, pulled them into the high grasses on the shore and camped in splendid isolation on wild islands. We’ve watched eagles and osprey dive for fish in the shallows and moose ford the river with spring calves. We’ve climbed mountain trails that follow the river’s feeder brooks cascading down from cold springs over moss-covered rocks, cooked over open fires on polished gravel beaches, slept in rustic cabins, and cast flies for salmon on cool mornings and at dusk in driving rainstorms. We’ve made our beds beside the water, watched the last light reflect off the tops of towering balsam firs heavy with moss, and then stood in a warm circle of first light by the river to drink a cup of coffee brewed over a morning fire.
3 For me, the Restigouche has always been an expression of nature’s fragile grace flowing through a world that affords little value to wild rivers and the lands that sustain them. In each new season I watched assaults on natural systems spread through the valley. Some I have seen with my own eyes: the logging trucks rumbling down from the hills twenty-four hours a day; the cuts growing larger and creeping ever closer to the river; feeder brooks that once flowed through the summer now dry and choked with sediment washed down from nearby logging and more distant industrial enterprises. The hills have been sprayed from the air with pesticides and herbicides, and the old mixed forests transformed into new monoculture tree plantations. Through it all, the salmon still return to spawn in the river, although they are now engaged in a grim survival game, both in their home waters and in warming and rising seas.
We recognize that the river and all the life systems that it supports are not what they once were, even in my lifetime. But how did this happen? This is a complex and challenging question, but one surely worth exploring, for it goes to the heart of understanding how we might preserve the natural systems that support life on Earth. We know the river is thousands of years old. We know that on this river, the greatest changes in natural systems came during the past 150 years, accelerating during the last fifty. We know that the changes to the Earth’s climate that began a century before that now threaten the river’s systems in ways we never imagined possible. There are many things we don’t know about the history of the river and the great mysteries of nature, but there are many things we do know to be true. The enduring mysteries don’t cancel out the facts, although we often interchange the words believe and know, as if they carry the same meaning and weight in the life of a wild river.
Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution humans have accepted that disruptions in natural systems are the price of progress, preordained and unstoppable. The one thing each new generation could count on was that their world would not be the place of their mothers and fathers. The all-consuming idea that we could impose our will and reason on nature, that everything new was superior to a distant past, has been so compelling that we are still seized by it today. Only now we are beginning to recognize with some alarm that perhaps all the world was not ours for the taking, and many things have been done that should not have been done.
Our knowledge of natural systems is deeper and richer than at any time in human history, yet it is still so awash with mysteries that our actions run ahead of our understanding of their consequences. Our imperfect knowledge is used to dismiss both those who call for caution when we seek to disturb the natural order and Indigenous communities who suggest their ancient and traditional knowledge of the ways of lands and waters and the lives they sustain might well provide a foundation for modern systems of understanding. Instead the debate has been and continues to be confined in a strongbox of utility, calculating the greatest good for the greatest number, measuring what we save and what we can afford to lose. The case for disruption of natural systems is supported by measures of economic necessity and acceptable risk, and the inevitable imperfections and lack of definitive evidence in the Indigenous and conservationist appeals are used to dismiss their warnings and concerns as sentimental and idealistic. What’s good for the wild river is rarely factored into the equation, as if its waters are disconnected from us, as if we ourselves are not children of nature.
The arguments for resource extraction and destruction of natural systems are supported by reports that predict the numbers of direct and indirect jobs that will be created and tax revenues that may be collected. To counter this argument, conservationists commission reports about the economic value of the sport fishing and tourism industries in a river valley. Or they argue that preserving wild spaces will help us to better understand the effects of changes in climate in our communities, or that wild spaces contribute to human health and general pleasure. Or more abstractly, they assign spiritual value to wild spaces, making vague references to their sacred contributions to the human psychological condition.
How different the conversation would be if we were to begin by stating that we hold this truth to be self-evident: that a wild river supports a grand tapestry of life, and since the moment of its creation, and in every movement since, it is in itself beautiful and complete.
When I worked in the newspaper business, a great editor and friend taught me how a true story well told becomes a parable. He was a libertarian editor in the old school who saw his newspapers as daily journals of moral conduct. When something is broken, it is the work of the moralist, the storyteller, to place a finger on it and then ask who’s responsible for fixing it. I’ve carried his lessons with me throughout my life, for once a person adopts the habits of the moralist, it’s hard to let them go. This compulsion, I admit, tends to drive those I love most to distraction. We now have a house rule that I’m not to engage in this kind of talk at least until the morning coffee has been poured, and talking back to radio newscasts in the kitchen is strictly forbidden. I’ve learned to honour the contract, but the questions still run hard through each passing season.
How did it come to be that all the great political movements of the industrial age have proven themselves incapable of pursuing their ends without destroying the life sustaining systems of the Earth itself? What marked the turning point when we set out to become alienated from that upon which we depend for life itself? Was it when Henry the Navigator sent his sailing ships out from the beaches of southern Portugal to explore what lay beyond the seas, or when Copernicus and Galileo championed the heliocentrism that helped to launch a scientific revolution, or when the steam engine and railway lines released us from the constraints of time and place?
What has allowed us to treat our wild rivers and the lands that sustain them so carelessly? In T.S. Eliot’s poem, we lost sight of the river gods, seeing them first as a frontier, “useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce,” then as problem for builders of bridges. But when that problem was solved, the rivers were all but forgotten. By the time the first railway lines and bridges were being built in the wilderness of the Restigouche valley, the Industrial Revolution had been fouling European rivers for a century. In the opening passages of Bleak House, Charles Dickens wrote of the Thames that flowed through London, where the fog rolled “defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.” New York City was using the Hudson River as an open sewer and garbage dump, and the Chicago River was so polluted that engineers had reversed its flow into the Mississippi River and away from the city’s source of drinking water in Lake Michigan. Rivers such as the Thames and Hudson have gone through extensive rehabilitation since then, but they are nothing like what they were in their pre-industrial state. Rivers are remarkably resilient, but they do not wash away our sins.
The more I thought about the wild river the more I began to consider a new kind of inquiry. I began to wonder if, in all our evaluations of what’s worth saving and what we can afford to lose, we were even measuring the right things. Could a truer measure of what’s worth saving be found in the story of the life of one wild river?
I set out to test this proposition by travelling into the headwaters of the Restigouche River and over the course of one season following its lines and stories to the head of tide. When I set out, I had no idea what I might find. When I returned, I lay awake long into the winter nights, trying to unweave and unwind all that I had seen and learned. At the end of my exploring I didn’t have all the answers and still wondered what the future might hold. What I did know was, like the man who washed his eyes in the Pool of Siloam, I had come back seeing.
4 The thaw came late that spring. By the third week of April the ice was still holding in the Restigouche as I drove four-and-a-half hours north from my home in Fredericton, New Brunswick’s capital city, into a village called Tide Head to discuss my plans with a man who knows the Restigouche as intimately as anyone on Earth. Alan Madden is the former New Brunswick government biologist in the region, a scientist by training, a naturalist and natural theologian by vocation.
Alan and his wife, Annette, live in a bungalow beside the river, just below the head of tide, surrounded by untamed gardens, a fish pond, bird feeders and projects in various stages of completion, the habitat of a man with an active mind and restless disposition. When they settled here in 1973, he began to plant grapes, flowers and shrubs and an orchard, grafting dozens of varieties of trees onto rootstocks, and now he has forty apple, thirty plum and two pear trees bearing fruit in the fall.
For thirty years his responsibility was to study and help manage the Restigouche River. He left the office two decades ago but his life’s work has continued without pause. He’s tall and lean, still fit enough to hunt and fish and run the river as he always has. He keeps an old canoe on the shore and when the river ices over and the snowfalls come, he and his wife travel to wild spaces where he takes photographs and later compiles journal notes that document where he has been and all the birds, animals and fish he has encountered. His journals show that in just the first five years of his retirement he fished 156 named bodies of water.
That afternoon the spring sun melted the snowbanks outside his kitchen window and the ice creaked in the river while we sat in his living room drinking his home-pressed apple cider and discussing various scenarios for my river trip. He suggested I begin at an old portage route in the headwaters of the Little Main Restigouche. This long-forgotten route was once the most important link between the Restigouche and the Saint John River, the longest and largest of the great rivers of New Brunswick. The Saint John rises in northern Maine, flowing the length of the province from north to south, through the Grand Falls gorge, the highest waterfall east of Niagara Falls, and empties into the Bay of Fundy at the Reversing Falls in the city of my youth. The First People of the valley call the river Wolastoq, the beautiful river, and they are Wolastoqiyik, the people of the beautiful river. A tributary of the Saint John River, called La Grande Rivière, near Grand Falls is the first stage in the old portage trail to the Restigouche that continues twelve kilometres overland through the forest to a narrow, swampy waterway called Waagansis Brook. The Waagansis winds through marshland and alder thickets and empties into the upper reaches of the Little Main Restigouche. Once the railway came to the mouth of the river in 1876, the trail was followed less frequently and today it is followed not at all. I decided that afternoon that I would attempt to make Waagansis Brook my starting point.
Through the rest of the afternoon Alan and I talked about fly fishing, canoeing and various books he thought I should read. As the sun dropped in the sky, our conversation turned to the difficulty we all have in perceiving change in the natural world. The work of the naturalist demands both attentive observation and the collection of data to track patterns of change over time. For decades, in addition to the records of his own observations on the Restigouche, Alan collected historical accounts of the commercial fishery and records from fishing lodges and filed them in his office. When he canoed over pools and gravel bars to supervise the counts of salmon and their nests (called redds) in the fall, he compared these numbers with the historical data.
Alan has studied the reports of Moses Perley, a Fredericton lawyer who in the 1840s was commissioned by the colonial government to describe and quantify the various commercial fisheries along the coastlines of New Brunswick. Perley’s comprehensive report included the salmon catches of a Scottish trader named Robert Ferguson who in the early 1800s introduced commercial net fishing to the Restigouche. He exported an average of 1,400 barrels of salmon a year. Each barrel held between eleven and fifteen fish, which means that Ferguson caught between 15,400 and 21,000 large salmon every season for many years. During the same period, a fisherman named Robert Christie was exporting two thousand tierces of salmon a year. A tierce, which is an old English unit of measurement, holds between twenty and twenty-five salmon, so his catch amounted to between forty thousand and fifty thousand large fish. Madden thinks Christie fished at a place known today as Christie’s Run, one of the four channels among the lowermost islands in the river about two kilometres upstream from the head of tide. Therefore, Ferguson and Christie captured and exported fifty-five thousand to sixty thousand large salmon every year. That was the harvest of two netsmen. There were many other unrecorded harvests at the same time, and still enough salmon left to spawn and maintain the population at these levels. One fisherman reported that he fished six nets tied in tandem upriver from Ferguson and Christie and captured three thousand salmon in a two-night operation and others had taken a great many more than that. The entire commercial salmon catch in upper Chaleur Bay during the season of 1971, the last year of the commercial salmon fishery there, was three thousand fish.
What this tells us is that the size of the Restigouche River salmon runs in a not-so-distant past was prodigious. Yet instead of measuring what we’ve lost, we sweep away these historical records as if they were stories from a long lost mythical age that has little connection to the river we know today. How did it happen that the runs of salmon have been reduced to what they are today and what is the larger ecological significance of this change? Instead of addressing that question, we lower the bar and declare the salmon runs to be healthy when the river meets the government’s new conservation targets of fifteen thousand spawning fish.
Late in the afternoon I left Alan Madden’s home and drove back through the valley across the Upsalquitch River where the road rises and crosses a high plateau with clearcuts of the logging companies stretching in all directions as far as the eye can see. At the foot of the plateau, I passed the sawmill at the entrance to the town of Kedgwick and stopped at a store on the corner to buy a bottle of wine. I turned off the main road and wound down deep into the valley to the village of Kedgwick River, crossed the Little Main Restigouche just above the Junction Pool at the Montgomery Bridge and turned down the dirt road toward Chalets Restigouche, a collection of cabins and a campground owned and operated by sisters Manon and Pascale Arpin.
I arrived just before dark and parked on a layer of slushy snow that covered the driveway beside a cabin that I had called to reserve earlier in the day. The Arpin sisters had gone home but they left the cabin door unlocked and the key on the kitchen table. In the fridge, I found they had left me a mason jar of chicken stew and half a loaf of home-baked bread. I warmed the stew on the stove, opened the wine and sat with a glass at the kitchen table. I was the only person staying in the cabins that evening. There’s no cell phone service in the valley, so for the first time in a long time I was alone and disconnected. The forest all around me was dark and the silence was deep. The river ice moaned and cracked in the distance.
In the morning I drove back across the Montgomery Bridge to visit my friend Marie-Christine Arpin, who is Manon and Pascale’s cousin. As I crossed the bridge I could see patches of open water and bubbling bands of current and I figured the ice would be moving before long. Marie-Christine lives at the top of the hill but I was meeting her at her father’s house down in the valley beside the river next to her business, Arpin Canoe Restigouche. For years she and her father, André, have been shuttling me and my friends and family and our canoes to various points throughout the valley. I parked by the office, which was still closed for the winter. The canoes were racked on the edge of the trees above the melting snow banks.
Marie-Christine walked across the yard to greet me. She is small but powerful, with a wild tangle of long dark hair. Her staff call her boss des bécosses, an untranslatable expression that means something like the Big Boss, which is an inside joke. She drives trucks and buses, loads canoes and grows vegetables in her gardens that she cooks and serves on guided river trips. She also raises chickens, works in the maple syrup industry in the winter and plays guitar in an all-female gypsy jazz band. She built her house with the help of her father and friends out of lumber sawn from trees harvested from her property using a portable mill. It’s the way everything happens in this valley: if you want something done, you do it yourself; if you need help, you know who to call.
Marie-Christine’s business now sends about six thousand people in canoes on the river each season. Her partner, Rémi Bergeron, nicknamed le barbu, the bearded one, is an Arpin guide and an infinitely resourceful man on a river trip. He has a side enterprise crafting wooden canoe paddles, a business he has named Waagansis.
André Arpin is a gentle man with a long grey beard and a fierce energy that supports the many enterprises he has taken on during his life beside the river. He worked as a carpenter and raised sheep until one fall he counted his assets at the end of the season and concluded that all he had to show for his work was a large manure pile behind the barn. He sold his sheep and in 1993 bought six canoes that he stacked on a trailer at the end of his driveway under a For Rent sign. Seven years later, he had a hundred canoes for rent and the first adventure tourism business in the valley, its headquarters strategically located a short walk above the confluence of the Little Main and the Kedgwick. This allowed him to shuttle canoeists upstream to various points of departure so they could paddle down to their vehicles parked in his yard, or they could set out from his beach into the main river and he would collect them at pre-arranged times at landings downstream. When André decided to retire, Marie-Christine, his eldest daughter, took over the business.
That morning we drank coffee in the kitchen of André’s log home and discussed the logistics of a trip from the old portage route as well as various other arrangements that would need to be made for shuttles and pickups downstream. Marie-Christine said she would be happy to drive me into Waagansis Brook but we would have to pass through a two-hundred-thousand-hectare tract of industrial forest owned by the multi-billionaire Irving family, more precisely by the forestry company J.D. Irving Ltd. All roads into the land around the Waagansis portage are now gated. The company has transformed this land it calls Black Brook into one of the most intensively managed tracts of private industrial forestland in Canada with more than 40 per cent of the landbase converted into spruce plantations. Marie-Christine promised to send me a phone number to call to try to secure permission to pass through what the company calls the Veneer Gate.
I wasn’t surprised at this news. J.D. Irving Ltd. is named for James Dergavel Irving, the father of industrialist Kenneth Colin Irving who, in the years following the Second World War, swept into the forests of New Brunswick and New England to assemble a network of timberlands and mills. He also built the largest oil refinery in Canada in Saint John. He was known in New Brunswick and beyond as K.C., and his influence and the work of his sons and grandchildren and great grandchildren, now dominate the economic landscape of the province. When we travel the roads and rivers of New Brunswick, we are surrounded by the Irving presence. Almost every community has an Irving gas station and store. The family owns five sawmills in the north, three sawmills in the centre of the province and pulp and paper, tissue and cardboard mills in the south, the largest in Saint John beside the Reversing Falls. It owns trucking companies, a railway line, a building supplies chain, a modular home manufacturer, the refinery in Saint John, a nearby liquified natural gas terminal and a chain of newspapers where I once worked as a reporter and editor. None of the businesses dominate the landscape more than J.D. Irving Ltd., which controls 2.4 million hectares of forestland, about half of it freehold and half public land where it holds timber rights. Within its holdings, many rivers and streams flow, including, I now learned, the upper reaches of the Restigouche River.
I left Marie-Christine and André and drove back toward the Saint John River valley across the highway that runs through the Black Brook property where every side road is barricaded and posted with no trespassing signs. I thought that while this was an obstacle, it surely defined one of the central issues of the inquiry from the outset. What responsibilities do those who hold legal title or timber rights on a property have to the natural systems on the land? What responsibility do we have to the land around our property, to the water that flows through lands we occupy, to the atmosphere above us? What responsibilities do we have to each other? What responsibilities do we have to the other forms of life that share these spaces with us? What does it mean to have legal title to a property in New Brunswick? What does it mean to have title to property in Mi'gma'gi, on lands that were never ceded to the Crown? These questions came at the beginning of the journey, and I would continue to grapple with them long after I returned.
5 Two weeks after my trip to Tide Head, the Saint John River overflowed its banks and spilled into my city. We live in a century-old house in an elm-shaded neighbourhood a block from the river in downtown Fredericton. Every spring we watch the river levels with apprehension as the crest of water from the snowmelt in the north migrates through Grand Falls toward us. Below Fredericton is a vast chain of lakes and wetlands called the Grand Lake Meadows. Most years, the meadows act as a giant natural sponge as the river fills up during the freshet and gradually drains. But there is a delay in the drain at the mouth of the river caused by the powerful Bay of Fundy tides that turn the river currents back upstream at the Reversing Falls twice a day. The heavy tide runs all the way back up to Fredericton, 125 kilometres above the mouth of the river. In the spring of 2018 the Grand Lake Meadows were swollen with water after a sudden thaw accompanied by heavy rain. But we didn’t worry too much because government forecasters who have tracking systems up and down the river were predicting that levels in Fredericton would stay below eight metres above sea level, the danger point for my neighbourhood and most of the city. Since our house had been built, the water had exceeded eight metres only three times: in 1926, in 1973 and in 2008, the one flood we had experienced when the river water pushed up through the city storm sewers and filled our stone basement.
I woke at dawn on the morning of May 2, 2018, walked out onto the street in front of my house and found the river bubbling up through the storm sewers. I went back inside and turned on the radio news. The river had risen faster than anyone had predicted to 8.36 metres. I went down into the basement, checked on my electric sump pump and started moving the few odds and ends we keep down there to higher ground. For the next eleven days my singular focus was the rising river and protecting the house. It took a couple of days for the neighbourhood to fill and then the water began seeping in through the stone walls of the basement. During the flood a decade earlier, my electric pumps had controlled the flow as the water came and went within a couple of days. This time the water came and stayed, rising up against the outside walls of the basement. I placed sandbags along the foundation and bought a gas-powered pump when the electric pumps were overwhelmed.
I was setting my alarm through the night to start and stop the gas pump to keep the water levels below the electrical systems in the house without draining the basement completely because the water pressure outside without equal pressure inside could crack the foundation. It was a strange time in the neighbourhood. I’d wake up at four in the morning and go outside to manage the pump and see my neighbours splashing around their yards in waders, the sound of their pumps rumbling up and down the street. Meanwhile, south of the city the situation was far worse. The crest roared downriver, swamping homes in the farming communities below us. The Grand Lake system rose to the highest levels on record, and then during a day of high winds the waves kicked up and smashed against the sides of waterfront homes and cottages, tearing some of them off their foundations and leaving them as piles of rubble in distant fields. In Saint John, families with waterfront homes raced to build sandbag barriers as the river there rose to record heights before finally releasing into the sea.
This wasn’t the first time the Saint John River had spilled into Fredericton. But there was a feeling that this flood was different. The river wasn’t behaving in a predictable way and the reasons why remained unclear. Why did the snowmelt come so quickly from the northern hills? Could it be related to years of intensive logging that has removed forest cover that regulated the melt? Why didn’t the Grand Lake Meadows do its job as a sponge when the water came? Could it be that a new four-lane highway that filled in and divided the meadows forever changed this sensitive landscape? Were weather patterns changing in a warming climate? There were no immediate answers. But one thing was clear. We all had a front-row seat to witness the untameable power of a river, which should be a reminder of our hubris in imagining that such a grand and complex natural system might operate within our control. It also should have woken us up to the fact that the changes we had made and continue to make in the river valley and beyond have not been benign, but rather are a high-risk experiment that might result in all of what we have built being washed away, but I’m not sure that it did.
6 When the flood waters receded, I packed away the pump and hoses and turned back to my Restigouche inquiry with a greater sense of urgency. I spread topographical maps of northern New Brunswick on the floor of my office, tracing the meandering lines of Waagansis Brook to the Little Main Restigouche. For thousands of years rivers were the only highways through this wilderness. Indigenous travellers established trails that linked these rivers in the area around a small mountain range in the centre of the province where the three highest points in the Canadian Maritime provinces — Mount Carleton, Mount Sagamook and Mount Bailey — rise more than eight hundred metres above sea level on a delineative plateau. From there water flows north into Chaleur Bay, south into the Bay of Fundy and east into the Northumberland Strait and the Atlantic Ocean. The chain of cold-water lakes at the base of Mount Carleton are the source of both the Tobique River, the major tributary of the Saint John to the south and the Nepisiquit River to the north. The Nepsiquit, which empties into Chaleur Bay east of the Restigouche, is connected by an overland trail to both the Upsalquitch River and the splendid sprawl of the Miramichi River system that empties into the eastern ocean.