Île d’Orléans autumn day

“Île d’Orléans waterfront farm,” by Carol L. Douglas.

Gabriel-from-Quebec tipped us off that Île d’Orléans, just a few minutes downriver from Quebec City, would be a great place to paint. Electronic media puts you in contact with people you would never have met otherwise. They’re frequently excellent sources of information.

The Île was settled in the 17th century and evidence of its feudal system is still visible. Small holdings stretch in narrow strips down to the water. This put tenants close to their neighbors and maximized access to the water.

Quebec City is also a city of waterfalls. Montmorency Falls is 272′ tall, making it nearly a hundred feet taller than Niagara Falls. And it has the requisite suspension bridge, too.

It’s hard to imagine that a feudal system was ever successful in the New World, let alone that it persisted for centuries, but that happened in French Canada. Seigneuries were not granted to nobles as in France, nor did the land grants confer nobility. They were generally given to military officers and churchmen for services rendered. Later, these seigneuries were purchased by canny English and Scottish investors who recognized a profit when they saw it.

The tenants cleared the land, built their own homes and barns, farmed, and paid rent to the seigneur. They were suckers to the Crown, since in New France, land was plentiful and labor was dear. Still, the system was not formally abolished until 1854, long after the demise of New France. The last rents were not settled until—seriously—1970.

Île d’Orléans is too varied to ever be captured in one painting. In some places it is Quebec agriculture, with strawberry fields and apple orchards marching neatly down to the St. Lawrence River. In others, it looks surprisingly like the Maine coast, with seasonal cottages set among woodland. Houses of mellow golden stone dot the landscape.

While I painted, Mary quizzed me on French animal names. Vaches and poulet I already knew; dauphin confused me. Wasn’t that the title for the heir apparent to the French crown? Souris amused me, because I’d just painted in a Manitoba town of that name last week, and it was, indeed, just a little bit mousy. It was a beautiful, warm, autumn day. Abeilles buzzed among the the clover.

“Bas-Saint-Laurent sunset,” by Carol L. Douglas.

I hated to leave Quebec without another painting, even if our detour to Île d’Orléans had been time-consuming. At La Pocatière, I stopped to paint the sun setting over the St. Lawrence estuary. Even this far upriver, the St. Lawrence is vast enough that there are beluga whale nurseries. At the moment, there were also two men parasail-waterskiing in the stiff wind.

The paper mills at Edmunston, New Brunswick and Madawaska, Maine call to me even in the dark.

The Bas-Saint-Laurent is a beautiful area and so is the St. John River Valley, where we stopped for the night. This is home country. In fact, a right turn and we could be home for lunch. In many ways, that knowledge is the hardest thing we’ve encountered so far.

Ces vaches-la sont mes vaches

“Marshes along the Ottawa River, Plaisance,” by Carol L. Douglas.

I set off on this journey with only three pre-conceived painting ideas: Kluane Lakeand the Liard River in Yukon, and Nepean Point in Ottawa. None of them have worked out exactly as planned.

I’ve avoided painting cityscapes, as this was meant to be an exploration of the Great White North itself, not its people. But the Ottawa River curving below theVictorian High Gothic Parliament is a skillful intertwining of natural and created beauty.

Growing up near the twin, starkly contrasting cities of Niagara Falls, NY and Ontario, I’ve often pondered why our Canadian neighbors are so much better at designing public spaces than we Americans. Washington, DC, is an unpleasant city. Our White House huddles behind high fences ostentatiously patrolled with lethal weaponry, and the Mall is usually a cluttered mess. Parliament Hill in Ottawa is gracious, accessible, and beautiful. And still, it’s somehow safe, as the 2014 shooting incident pointed out.

The one that got away: Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

Alas, my painting was not to be. The Alexandra Bridge is closed for repairs, meaning the roads at the National Gallery end are rerouted. After endless circling, we gave up and headed east through Quebec. It was already early afternoon.

At Ottawa, we left the bilingual belt and entered French-speaking Canada. I can decipher small bits of French on paper because of its similarity to English, but I have a tin ear for the nuances of pronunciation. French, in particular, terrifies me. It is an unintelligible sea of strange sounds.

We raised a flock of seagulls along a side road.

I was determined to paint along the Ottawa River somewhere, having missed my opportunity in the city. East of Ottawa, the river becomes a migratory bird sanctuary, low and marshy.

Signs for Le parc national de Plaisance took us deep into farm country. We stopped and asked directions of a very handsome young public safety officer. He didn’t speak English. At that moment, a determination to learn French blossomed in Mary’s heart.

Quebec roadside rest stop.

While I painted, she practiced with Duolingo. The first useful phrase she mastered was “Ces vaches-la sont mes vaches.” From now on, we are going to play “Those cows are my cows” in French.

It is so fine to see farms again.

And cows there were. From Ottawa east, we traveled through farm country. We have seen precious few family farms on this trip. It was lovely to be back among them again, even if the odeur de merde followed us all the way to Plessisville.

Algonquin mystery

“Algonquin Rocks,” by Carol L. Douglas. I was most interested in the flaming soft maples. Lakes? I’ve seen a few this trip.

One of the enduring mysteries of the art world is how Canada’s great artist, Tom Thomson, age 39 and an experienced guide and woodsman, died on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Provincial Park.

A century after his death, the facts are limited. At noon on Sunday, July 8, 1917, Thomson left his cabin to fish. That afternoon, Martin Blecher and his sister Bessie saw Thomson’s canoe floating upside down as they motored on the lake. They did not stop to check it, saying they thought it was another canoe that had slipped its moorings.

On Tuesday, guide Mark Robinson was called in to search for the body. He and others checked portages and inlets for the following week.

Tom Thomson’s guide license. He was an experienced woodsman.

The news of the missing artist spread rapidly. “Mr. Thomson is very well known here and everyone will hope that he will be found safe and well. The other alternative is not pleasant to consider but should it be found that he has been drowned, Canada will have lost one of her most accomplished landscape artists, and a thorough gentleman,” wrote the Owens Sound Sun.

Thomson’s body surfaced on Monday, July 16. Robinson and Dr. Goldwin Howland, of Toronto, examined it. They found a bruise on the left temple about four inches long, “Evidently caused by falling on a Rock otherwise no marks of Violence on Body,” wrote Robinson. The decomposing body was quickly buried at Canoe Lake.

One of the countless streams that form the roadways of Algonquin Provincial Park, a place that promises you backwoods peace and solitude.

On Tuesday, the coroner arrived from North Bay and assembled an inquest. “There is Considerable Adverse Comment regarding the taking of the Evidence among the Residents,” Robinson wrote in his diary. Almost immediately, Thomson’s family sent a steel coffin and requested that his body be exhumed and sent home to Leith, Ontario.

That is where the facts end. Even his final resting place in dispute, with one group of people saying the undertaker balked at exhuming his remains and sent an empty casket back instead. Thomson, they say, is buried at a secret spot near Canoe Lake.

Was it accidental drowning, as the coroner decided? Was it manslaughter, as Mark Robinson came to believe? Was it suicide?

Martin Blecher was 26 when he saw the overturned canoe. He was the son of German immigrants, a quarrelsome, alcoholic recluse who told people that he was a private detective employed by the William J. Burns International Detective Agency in Buffalo. Robinson, who listed local war deaths in his diary, believed Blecher was a German spy.

“I had heard that there was some ill feeling between Tom and some man in that region [Mowat]. It was somewhat casually referred to by someone at Canoe Lake possibly one of the Rangers, but as this was while we were still looking for Tom and I was still hopeful of his safe recovery, I didn’t at the time attach any serious importance to the report,” wrote Thomson’s brother George.

Was the man Blecher or someone else? Daphne Crombie, who was in Mowat that spring, remembered, “Tom and George…they’d had a party. They were all pretty good drinkers, Tom as well. Well, they went up and had this party. They were all tight and Tom asked Shannon Fraser for the money that he owed him because he had to go and get a new suit…Anyway, they had a fight and Shannon hit Tom, you see, knocked him down by the grate fire, and he had a mark on his forehead…Annie [Fraser] told me all this and also Dr. MacCallum. Tom was completely knocked out by this fight. Of course, Fraser was terrified because he thought he’d killed him. This is my conception, and I don’t know about other people’s. My conception is that he took Tom’s body and put it into a canoe and dropped it in the lake. That’s how he died.”

Why did Thomson need a new suit? According to Annie Fraser, he’d gotten local woman Winnie Trainor pregnant and had to marry her. After Thomson’s death, Trainor traveled to Philadelphia to stay with friends, and rumors persisted that she was pregnant. She never married and was protective of his reputation for the remainder of her life.

I started painting Lake Huron in the morning but was rained out. It was a windy, whippy day; I’ll finish this in the studio.

Years later, Robinson elaborated on his finding of the body: “His fishing line was wound several times around his left ankle and broken off.  There was no sign of the rod, his Provisions and kit bag were in the front end of the Canoe when found. The lake was not Rough.”

““You might interview Martin and Bessie Blecher but again be careful. They possibly know more about Tom’s sad end than any other person,” he added darkly.

Even in Algonquin, solitude and peace are an illusion.

Intimations of home

“Rail line along Lake Superior,” by Carol L. Douglas

I foolishly flew past the Old Woman River. The towering cliffs of its bay shimmered in the afternoon sunlight. “There’s always something more,” I reminded myself as I went on, but in this instance there wasn’t. That perfect combination of light and air was not to be repeated. Instead, the sun bore into our eyes across the flatness of Lake Superior.

In a moment, I was distracted. “Maples!” I shouted. “Eastern hardwoods!”

“What kind of maples?” Mary asked narrowly.

“Not soft ones, but other than that I can’t tell unless I get a good look at an older tree,” I answered. That’s not easy at 60 MPH, when you’re the driver.

“And you call yourself a tree person,” she sniffed.

Here and there, the eastern mixed forest shows its lovely face.

We’ve seen a lot of roadside attractions in our 5300 miles. There was the World’s Biggest Moose, and the World’s Biggest Dinosaur, and Huskie the Muskie. Wawa, Ontario has not just one but three giant Canada Geese. But to paraphrase Lloyd Bentson, “I know Canada Geese. Sir, you’re no Canada goose I ever saw.” For some inscrutable reason, the geese of Wawa have white plumage.

Sir, you are no Canada goose.

Wawa is named after the Ojibwe word for the geese. The Ojibwe were one of the combatants in the war between the Huron and the Iroquois Confederacy, supported by the French and British, respectively. (We now call this the French and Indian War.)

That puts us in the geographical area of the historic Province of Upper Canada, established to accommodate and govern the United Empire Loyalists pouring across the border after the American Revolution. Since that includes the Niagara Region, I am very close to my birthplace.

The Province of Upper Canada, confusingly, is south of the Province of Lower Canada. It’s the same principle that makes Down East the northernmost part of the American coast: place names by navigation, not geography.

The light on the lake made painting impossible.

Sault Ste. Marie used to be one city until the War of 1812 firmly fixed the border right through the middle of it. The Soo Locks, which are the greatest inland shipping canal in the world, are located on the American side. This being a strictly-Canadian trip, we didn’t stop.

Instead, we hustled on to Iron Bridge, Ontario, putting us on the Lake Huron coastline. We hope to make Algonquin Provincial Park today. This is where painter Tom Thomson lived, worked and died.

Heart of the Continent

“Eastern Manitoba forest,” by Carol L. Douglas

As our tow truck brought us back into Brandon, an enormous fireball erupted to our right. “Oh, that’s just the airport,” the driver, Gerald Dedieu, said. It turns out that they do firefighting practice there in the off hours.

It was clear that we were going to kill some time in Brandon, so Gerald suggested we head down to his hometown of Souris in our loaner car. Souris has a creek, a suspension bridge, and a pretty setting, he promised us.

“Downtown,” by Carol L. Douglas

The suspension bridge is Canada’s answer to the Jubilee Memorial Watering Trough. Every town apparently has one, Souris included. Instead of painting that, or Souris’ peacocks, I decided to paint a block of their downtown.

There is some debate about where the geographical center of America falls. It’s either in Rugby, ND, or just east of Winnipeg, MB. It hardly matters. Either way, virtually everyone on our continent is a southerner. Furthermore, most have not ventured north of the true Mason-Dixon Line, which is the 49th Parallel.

Minnesota owns a wee bit of land north of the 49th Parallel, due to a surveying error. The Northwest Angle, as it’s called, is cut off from the United States byLake of the Woods. To get there from the US, you need a boat, an ice bridge, or a passport, because the only roads come in from Manitoba. It’s got a population of 152 people and a land mass of about 600 square miles, of which 80% is water. This being a strictly Canadian visit, we did not detour there.

West Hawk Lake is surprisingly huge.

We did, however, visit West Hawk Lake. This is Manitoba’s deepest lake, at 115 meters. It was formed by a giant meteor, and its size is impressive.

West Hawk Lake is on Historic Route 1, so we ventured up that road looking for a glimpse of history. Alas, it was apparently recently bombed, so broken was the asphalt. We turned back.

“Lake of the Woods,” by Carol L. Douglas

I set up to paint Lake of the Woods from the Discovery Center at Kenora. It was a great bonus, in my opinion, to have genuine running water and a soda machine at my disposal. Alas, there was a wedding being held there later in the day, so I was shooed along. I relocated a mile or so to the north.

I’ve switched mediums to Galkyd Light, since it’s all I could buy in Calgary. I’m having a hard time adjusting to it. It feels soupy. This is showing up particularly in my mark-making and in water reflections. I was struggling so much trying to find a workable scheme for the water at Lake of the Woods that I forgot to paint in the remainder of the sky.

“Thunder Bay,” by Carol L. Douglas

Western Ontario looks a lot like the Maine woods: granite and spruces and Jack Pines, and a whole lot of water. I was shocked, therefore, on arriving at Thunder Bay. Growing up listening to Canadian radio, I had always pictured it as a romantic place far west on the Great Lakes. Its waterfront is actually a lot like South Buffalo, which is where my people come from. The same neat workingman’s cottages march down to the same vast grain elevators.

The difference is that Thunder Bay’s grain elevators are still working. That’s because freighters take on grain here, rather than offload it. Today that grain goes right out the St. Lawrence into the world. Buffalo—the world’s first cross-docking station—is unnecessary.

Dusk falling on Lake Superior.

I expected that one Great Lake shore was pretty much the same as another, but I was wrong. Here, red granite tops rough hills that drop to the lakeshore. This exposed granite is part of the vast Canadian Shield that forms the bedrock core of our continent.

As we drove east along the lakeshore, dusk dropped like rose-colored silk. A bear cub gamboled along the shoulder of the road. We were back in moose country. It was time to stop for the night.