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MATTAWA, ONT.—I have stared into the Gates of Hell.
And no, it does not contain a majority government for either Stephen Harper or Stéphane Dion.
The gate – called Porte de l’Enfer by the early voyageurs who believed it housed a man-eating demon – is found in a high cliff along the Mattawa River that, long before there was an Autoroute 20 or a 401, was the original Trans-Canada Highway.
I have come here to close out summer in this part of the country where summer only opened last week.
It is now September, but there are still ripe raspberries along the trail and, whenever you dare linger a moment, mosquitoes and even blackflies by the score.
“Didn’t anyone give these bugs a work schedule?” someone asks.
The Recollet fathers who came up this route four centuries ago to reach the Great Lakes swore the bugs along here in late spring required a different sort of “martyrdom” to get through – but usually the bloodsucking insects are long gone by August.
Ah well, if the 1960s couldn’t reach Canada until the 1970s, then I guess a summer turning up in fall isn’t that unusual.
As for the presumed election, after these first three seasons of 2008, Canadians may well welcome something to curse that isn’t the weather.
The Gates of Hell, it turned out, contained no such thing as a man-eating monster. It was a mine that contained hematite that natives – who were here 5,000 years before Samuel de Champlain or the Blackrobes paddled by – used to redden various things, including themselves.
We often forget how long this country that seems forever falling apart has been around. The fur traders go back centuries, the natives millennia, the impossible round rocks along the portages (think of walking on giant ball bearings well oiled by the summer’s rain) date from an ice age that retreated more than 10,000 years ago – and the river valley itself comes from a 600-million-year-old rift in the earth’s surface that still, from time to time, sends out small earthquakes.
I usually like to mark summers with a swing off the rope that hangs from a yellow birch down by the water’s edge, but since that rope is still dancing from the opening swing of the season – only a week or so ago – it seemed somehow inappropriate.
With a welcome turn in the weather – imagine! two days in a row of sunshine! – a hastily assembled summer-closing canoe trip seemed more in order, and so this heritage river seemed both close enough and short enough to suit the purpose.
It is 65 kilometres by water from near North Bay to the small town of Mattawa on the Upper Ottawa. When the water is higher, the canoes much lighter and the paddlers far more fit, it is often done in the space of a regular work day by those who dare the annual Mattawa River Race. When the water is lower, the canoes overfilled with everything from a propane stove to a dog – and the rock-strewn rapids more often walked than run – it can take several days to reach the pretty little town with the three giant white crosses staring down from the Quebec side of the Ottawa River.
The Mattawa is a river of spectacular beauty: high cliffs and high pines, the water dark and often black when not exploding white off the rounded boulders.
It is both easy and hard, the paddling easy but with a few portages that have been cursed – in both official languages and several native tongues – from the days of birch bark.
On some portages, an unbreakable canoe is as critical as it is in the rapids. One man trying to carry over the infamous Portage de Talon – a torturous climb that explorer Alexander Mackenzie declared “for its length, the worst” – went ass-over-teakettle backward as he tried to climb one impossible stretch of jagged rock.
He was, sadly, the only other canoeist encountered over several days along this famous route – the sense far too strong that, somewhere along the line, people in this part of the land had largely given up on summer.
It meant, however, an open choice of campsites, including one at Elm Point where the sun rose on one side of a sand spit and set on the other, and where the night sounds of sniffing animals were nicely drowned out by a small waterfall in the background.
It’s hard, really, to complain about anything on a morning when the sun is burning the mist off water still as marble, where loons are teaching their young the nearly impossible art of the loon takeoff, where a deer has come to drink by the startling red cardinal flowers that are unique to this river, and where not even an unexpected resurgence of sandflies can send you faster toward the little town where the trip, and summer, will end.
It’s still a pretty amazing country, even with the bugs and long-range forecasts.
One that will easily survive an unnecessary election where the Gates of Hell may well turn out to be your local polling booth.
Straight to the source: GlobeandMail.com