Lumberjack [antikvár]

FOREWORDMen have gone into the bush for many reasons. The first time 1 went was in the summer of 1946. I did it to prove to my father (and myself) that I could make it on my own. Like many immigrants, my father had worked in the bush when he first came to this country. And like many fathers, he did not believe that a son could take the hardships he had endured.I felt I had to go when I did. I was nineteen, in my second year at college, yet I had hardly ever been away from home. Physically, I could do a man's work for, after all, I had been raised on a family farm. But emotionally I felt very immature and dependent on my parents. So when students were being recruited on the campus for a summer job in a lumber camp in northern Ontario, I signed up.My father was furious. He described the dangers and difficulties of bush life he had known in the twenties and thirties and predicted all kinds of disasters. Trees would fall on me. Bears would attack me. Mosquitoes would eat me. He insisted I was not to go.His anger lasted until the very morning I was to leave. The day dawned overcast and chilly, to match the depression and guilt 1 felt about going against his wishes. Then, suddenly, he seemed to relent I could sense the snap even as it happened. He held $20.00 out to me and asked if I would like to have some of his work clothes to take with me.I guessed the money was just so I would have return train fare when I found it too tough and wanted to come home.That, he reassured my mother, would be in a week's time. But 1 stayed the full summer. It was in 1946, and the camp was above Neys, Ontario, directly north of Lake Superior.When I returned to the bush in 1951,1 worked nearly a year, first for a month in a French-Canadian camp near La Tuque on the northern Quebec route of the Canadian National Railway, then at a camp near Fraserdale, Ontario, south of James Bay.In the past two decades, work in the bush has changed more than it had in the preceding two centuries. It is surprising how little has been written about that remarkable life, and it seems to have been illustrated even less. To re-create it, I have had to depend on my memory fortunately vivid and on the few sketches I made then, as well as old photos I sent home. As a painter, I feel very lucky to have experienced traditional lumbercamp living before it disappeared forever.In some respects all of the camps were as alike as the wood we cut mostly spruce as pulpwood for the newsprint industry of Canada and the United States. But in other ways, the camps varied according to the national backgrounds of the men who worked in them.At Neys, Ontario, we were several hundred students working under foremen who were usually of Slavic background (Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Polish). Toward the very end of the summer, when only two other students and myself remained, I worked in a camp with Japanese Canadians fromCr iz ARM