Around the Rowan Tree, Day 41

“Many interesting people passed through Lindberg’s Landing. I listened endlessly to the tales brought home by Grant and Lindsay

Ed had a boat of his own for general use. For so long the only way to get to anywhere at all had been by boat down the river in summer and by ice road on the river in winter.

Ed also had a dredger. There was gold in the Liard River – thin films of it that were difficult to extract from the mud. A way had been found.

“One day I’ll get round to it,” Ed kept saying. When the Liard highway came near to completion, Ed got the contract to construct the Blackstone Park.

A surveyor was sent to lay it out. She was a woman and had problems with the clouds of mosquitoes, the threat of the ever-present bears, and the thickness of the bush.

Grant was sent to help her fix up the yellow ribbons. Later he got the job of clearing the 40 bays marked out that would be used for visiting campervans or RV’S as they are called (recreational vehicles). He was praised for his work.

He was also given the job of constructing the picnic tables and helping with the loos.

Because he had done so well in clearing the bush for the Blackstone Park he was asked, some time later, to take on the much larger job of felling trees in a big area of bush near Fort Simpson.

Sizable

The Pope was paying a visit to Fort Simpson while on crusade in Canada. “Why Fort Simpson?” I asked Grant. “Dunno, really,” came the reply.

“Perhaps they just stuck a pin on a map of the North West Territories with their eyes closed and chose where it landed.”

They needed to clear an area of bush to allow the First Nation people, as the Indians were now called, to congregate; different tribes coming from from far and wide, somewhere to put up their tents.

This project happened to come up in the same summer that Lindsay was at the Lindbergs’.

Grant and Lindsay, as well as a crew of 15 First Nation men, set out to tackle the job. They started work at 7am.

Lindsay and Grant were felling sizeable trees with power saws. Lindsay, never having done this in his life before, had to react quickly when a tree fell in the opposite direction to the one he had anticipated.

At one point Grant put his power saw further in to the trunk of a tree than he should have done and it stuck with the tree on the point of falling.

If this happened, safety instructions are to leave the saw and scarper.

Grant was determined to release the saw and did so but had to take a tremendous leap at the last moment as the tree came crashing down. The saw was undamaged.

Fortunately I didn’t hear, until much later, about all the dangerous situations they got themselves into. By 11am the 15 First Nation men knew it was an impossible task they had been given.

The boss came round to see how they were getting on and they demanded more money.

They didn’t get it, so took what they had earned that morning and went to the beer parlour.

For a while Grant and Lindsay carried on. One of the First Nation men hadn’t left with the others. He was an older man who sat under a tree and sharpened the saws for the boys.

Sitting still with his back straight, Grant said he looked like a figure carved out of stone.

The next time the boss came round, he realised that it was indeed an impossible job that he had given the boys to do in the time allotted and immediately got the bulldozers in.

Trapline

On the day the Pope was due to arrive, a thick mist hung low over Fort Simpson. Planes couldn’t land. The Pope didn’t see Fort Simpson that time, but journeyed there two years later.

One winter Grant spent a week on the trapline with one of Ed’s helpers called John. They visited all the traps on the line, sleeping at nights in a tent warmed by an airtight wood stove.

Not so long ago this had been the only way of making a living to survive in these far north places.

Trappers lived by the money they got for the furs of martin and lynx, whereas the moose and caribou they shot to eat.

In winter the traps were visited on a regular basis and the captured animals removed. Usually they were dead and frozen solid.

Grant said that only the lynx, with its remarkable coat, might survive.

In the last trap they came to, on that particular excursion, there was a live lynx – a beautiful creature.

Grant would have liked to have let the lynx go but knew that he couldn’t do that without the animal tearing him to pieces.

Grant didn’t seek to go on the trap line again. He didn’t like this way of making a living but knew that, not so long ago, it had been a necessity in order to live there.

Life was tough in these northern lands and you had to be tough to survive.

Many interesting people passed through Lindberg’s Landing. I listened endlessly to the tales brought home by Grant and Lindsay.

Many visitors came to see the Lindbergs – adventurous people who had sailed up the Liard in summer.

Over the course of hundreds of miles, there were few stopping places.

No one would bypass the Lindbergs’. Ed’s father, Ol’ Lindberg, had been there before him and was now a legend. Ed and Sue entertained them all.

Daring

Then there were the daring bush pilots who looked in, from time to time, and men looking for logs.

The summer that Lindsay was there, three huge men came from Norman Wells looking for logs to build houses.

“Having worked in the woods a lot they had six fingers between them,” Lindsay told me, “and they smoked tobacco that was so strong we couldn’t go near them without spluttering and choking.”

The men got the logs that they wanted, bored holes at the ends and lashed them tightly together to form them into a raft.

It had to be strong enough to take them down the Liard River that flowed north east to the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Circle.

Six hundred miles or so they had to sail, down to Norman Wells, negotiating, in places, beaver dams and rapids.

On this raft they tied down a tent and sailed off one sunny day. What a picture; these big men sailing away on this tremendous raft smoking the strongest of strong cigarettes.

To add to the picture, one of them owned a brightlycoloured parrot which sat on his shoulder wherever he went.

More on Tuesday.