My Earliest Personal Landscape

Autumn on the St. Lawrence River

I hope you’re enjoying my latest podcast conversations and book reviews.

I’ve been away doing a little book research in my hometown, fortified by pumpkin pie and the occasional Caesar.

Prescott was such a vibrant town when I was child, with the usual main street of shops, grocery stores, three banks, and two pharmacies. We had regular sidewalk sales throughout the summer, and a festival called Loyalist Days that featured a military reenactment from the War of 1812. And then the factories started to close. The industries left, more and more downtown shops became vacant, and the population dropped to 4,500. I think it’s closer to 4,000 now.

Like the town itself, my sense of geography was oriented around the St. Lawrence River. The river didn’t just exist in the background, it defined the concept. Surely all rivers are two and a half kilometres wide? I found it inconceivable that something I could throw a stone across might be a river; until I studied geography, I thought the others were just streams.

The St. Lawrence also determined direction. We didn’t have north or south in Prescott. ‘Away from the river’ or ‘towards the river’ were just as real as ‘towards Kingston or Montreal’.

The river influenced the temperature, too. Even when those humid Ontario nights of heavy air and violent thunderstorms were at their most oppressive, the St. Lawrence could always be counted on for a breeze. I remember how odd it felt going to villages twenty minutes ‘inland’ to visit friends. The countryside felt much hotter in summer without that freshwater air, and so strange and flat and disorienting without the river running through it.

I loved sticking my head underwater while swimming to listen to the thrum of an approaching laker. When it passed, all of us kids who had never seen the ocean had the thrill of riding those brief ship waves.

One summer, I got obsessed with snorkelling. I must have been in 4th or 5th grade. I spent most of July and August not far from the boat ramp, looking for fishing lures and anything else that might have fallen in. Sometimes I stood on the rocks by the pilings of a long-vanished wooden pier at Centennial Park — the rock with the rusted piece of rebar sticking out of it — and held a big stone in my arms. I jumped in and plunged straight to the bottom, just to see what it looked like down there.

One of my old snorkelling spots

My birthday coincided with the opening of bass season. Dad was never around for my early birthday parties, and when I got old enough, neither was I. We spent the weekend drifting through the fast water channel between two islands, flipping lures under trees and around rocks, or walking on the ice booms tied up to Drummond Island trying to catch a pike.

Where’s dad? My birthday coincided with the opening of bass season…

When dad was chasing fish in the shallows, I was scanning the shore from the boat, trying to understand the geography of those small uninhabited islands and what they might look like behind the tangled line of sumac that hid their interiors from view.

I got to know each of them in high school when my friend Rob Wilson and I explored them by canoe. We took a hatchet, rain poncho, mess kit and a single tin of beans each, and camped under rickety lean-to’s on every island downriver from Prescott. I could still find the stones from our campfires thirty years later.

All of those islands were uninhabited. When I asked around, no one knew who owned them. “They belong to the Indians,” people would say, which was just another way of saying they must belong to someone, but it wasn’t any of us.

The international bridge at Johnstown

The river also forms the border with the United States. There’s an international bridge at nearby Johnstown, and the town of Ogdensburg, N.Y. was a familiar part of my childhood geography. It was common to drive over for dinner — one particular steakhouse, Sholette’s, had a table in the back room filled with the same Canadian couples every Friday night.

Prescottonians crossed over for cheaper Christmas turkeys, and during the 1985 Ontario summer beer strike they went in desperation to buy cheap watery American beer. You’d have to be desperate to drink Schlitz.

When my dad gave up his pipe for cigars, I’d be told to “wear big socks” anytime he was thinking about a run to the States. He’d buy a couple boxes of Swisher Sweets at a strip mall in Ogdensburg and we’d drive to the corner of the parking lot, throw the packaging in a garbage bin and shove cigars all the way around our socks. We always went over with an empty tank; gas was so much cheaper there because of the difference in taxes.

I was aware from an early age how different life was on the other side of the river. The clapboard houses had peeling paint, there were cars on blocks in the driveways, and gun shops and fireworks for sale and booze on the shelves of the grocery stores. The sale of alcohol was government-controlled in Ontario: the Brewer’s Retail for beer, and the LCBO for everything else. I was also very aware of American flags on every porch. The only Canadian flags I saw in a non-government setting were fluttering from the lawn poles on houses along the river.

North Channel

I can’t remember a time when the St. Lawrence wasn’t in my backdrop: frozen cold in winter and dotted with ice fishing huts, white capped with storms, or glittering all summer, providing a compass point to orient the internal map of my world. There were long hot summers of water and green smells, and dark cold winters of frosted-up glass.

And there were so many days and nights spent in my tiny bedroom listening to music and staring out the window, dreaming of the things I might do one day if I could only get out into a wider world.

So much of my early life was connected to that swiftly moving body of water. I have always felt the pulse of the river, the relentless silent St. Lawrence surge, and it has always served as my internal compass point, and my symbol of home.