Pretty Catty part five conclusion by John Fisher 1949

 

TOP OF THE FENCE

 Chapter one is over for Mr. Log… he’s prisoner now in a raft… and he has 60 miles to go  down Lake Nipigon… towed by tugs which must be “catty” too to run the rafts through the islands and shoals … through storm and wind on this junior Great Lake.  The Abitibi tug captains pull the giant rafts as trickily as a cat runs along the top of a board fence.  Mr. Log is still a long distance from the Sleeping Giant, whose shoulders protect the harbour of Thunder Bay Mill.

At the end of Lake Nipigon is Virgin Falls … a dam and the big, tumbling Nipigon River with canyon … now Mr. Log is turned free from the raft … spilled … let run over the dam, down, down, down stream … over more dams … through rapids … sometimes he is tamed and controlled by booms  across the face of the river … and all the way the lumberjacks bully him  … keep him moving until he reaches another storage pond in Helen Lake.  Again he must be nipped into a raft and caught in the tear-drop “O” shape of booms.  And here nibble footed “catty” Bob Matchett dances on his back and helps ready him for the biggest ride of all… across sometimes surly Lake Superior … and up to the Thunder Bay Mill where Abitibi employees look out at the Sleeping Giant. And in the office files of the Port Arthur Woodlands Division  are listed the tens … hundred … of thousands spent on improving his journey … money spent on  dams, booms, piers, dredging, cleaning banks , dynamiting.

And in the handsome brick building of the Abitibi Thunder Bay Mill in Port Arthur where I tried to see the Sleeping Giant … here in his last resting place, Mr. Log see stenographers … pretty ones  too … who would throw their ink wells at you if you called them “catty”.  Yet, such is the  romance of paper that their very jobs depend upon men … rough, tough men hundreds of miles away who boss the rivers and float their golden boom islands past the feet of the Sleeping Giant … men who are flattered when you say to them "Pretty Catty"!

The end

GUTS AND GRACE part four of PRETTY CATTY by John Fisher 1049

 

GUTS AND GRACE

As far as Port Arthur goes  this story starts in Lake Nipigon...that lovely lake

beloved by moose hunters and fishermen.  On one of its many feeding rivers… say on a frosty November day a cutter swings his axe against a tall spruce… bites into it with bucksaw… shouts “timber”… the tree crashes and then the great odyssey begins.  Teamsters and caterpillar tractors haul the logs to the Ombabika River.  Now the log sits quiet and patient upon the ice for month after month… until May arrives…  the sun breaks the grip of ice… Mr. Log is on his way.  Oh, he doesn’t move fast… he’s jostled and jammed with thousands of others like him… sometimes dynamite is used to free him from the Chinese puzzle of fellow logs.  This nature-given conveyor belt of the river has its own moods and twists and currents.  The winds help him too, blow panic upon the logs… and old man sun joins the circus… sucks up the water in summer… slows the conveyor belt and even brings in the long dry summer arms of the banks to arrest the merry sail of Mr. Log.

The lumberjack swats and sweats and swears and gives Canada a vocabulary that would put Webster and Hollywood Press agents to shame.  As Mr. Log on his colourful jaunt to the jaws of the mill flirts, stops and stares at obstacles,  his back is pricked and prodded with sharp pike poles.  His bark is scarred from the  catty dance of steel boots.  Drama;  Colour; Pulp and Paper is not only our biggest business… it is our most Canadian of shows.  Here is the ballet of brawn.  Here tough rugged men do the arabesque on a floor of rolling spruce.  Here is drama with the backdrop of white water,  and props taken from Nature’s burly and beautiful storehouse.

The stage is mighty and magnificent.  Man against nature.  The orchestral accompaniment comes from the strange company of the outdoors… a medley of the musical silence of the bush… the drone of the mosquito … the timpani of  rolling water… the throaty vengeance of the frog… the swish of trees… the call of the wilds… and thrown upon this scene are the dimensions of smell… the nostalgic smell of slow rot and quick growth… and the dimensions of colour… floral and faunal.  Sunset and sunrise peeking through the screen   of green.

And Canada cries for expression in its personality! And the newsboy calls “paper” on corners rancid with friction-mad rubber burnt gasoline and choked with crowds. And newspapers are the carriers of democracy.  True!  Liberty must march with newsprint or die. The purveyor of Liberty is born not amid the thundering thousands,  but deep within the kingdom of trees.  Drama?  Colour?  Story?  Where art thou, Mr. Canadian dramatist?  Point thy pen to the pageant of paper and thou will write pungent prose.

Mr. Log has come down the river.  With thousands he takes rest in the storage reserves of Lake Nipigon.  The tugs wait for the winds to blow him over and into the v-shaped mouth  of the booms which trails behind them.  When the winds blow and the logs follow, Catty men like Bob Matchett close the mouth of the V… turn it into an “O” and the logs are caught inside.

to be concluded in part five  TOP OF THE FENCE

Pretty Catty part three by John Fisher 1949

 LIKE A BALLET DANCER

That serves to introduce a former Maritimer Bob Matchett .  They say he is a “Pretty Catty”. He only weighs 160 pounds, but, if you could see him jumping  like a ballet dancer up there at Lake Helen at the mouth of the Nipigon River you’d see why he is “Catty” and strong a little bull. Lake Helen is a long way from Thunder Bay mill where I tried to see the Sleeping Giant … but, it’d that distance that gives colour to our story of being “Pretty Catty”. The Abitibi men of Thunder Bay use the familiar boom to move their logs.  A boom is a great enclosure made by chaining giant boomlogs together. Just like freight cars are coupled together.   The wood floats within this great frame of linked big timber….  The book is towed by a boat…. A boom is really a huge catwalk which bobs behind the boat …just like a cat that’s afraid of  getting wet… just like a cat… as sure footed, as agile,  with the miraculous control of muscle,  Bob Matchett came to this tremendous Superior country looking for work  in 1937.  Today, he is foreman down at Lake Helen.  Quick on their feet these men, and they do their job  just as quietly and as unobtrusively as the  famous Black Cat in the black room.  They are partners in the People’s Paper.

If you ever have the occasion to fly over Lake Superior in the summer, you can look down and see these floating giant golden islands of logs or rafts towed by tubby chubby tugs.

Continued in part four  Guts and Grace 

Pretty Catty part two John Fisher 1949

 ROUGH, BURLY, MAGNIFICENT

Now, a Maritimer may eat a lot of herring bones and codfish and so on…but, they also feed on pride… and I  was ready to defend my “homeland” when the papermaker softened the blow and sparked my curiosity.  “ Some pretty smart fellows  come out  of the Maritimes,” he said…” we’ve got  some PRETTY CATTY  guys up here.”  By this time I was about ready to rouse the Sleeping Giant and go to war… imagine anyone calling  a Maritimer “Catty”.  Why that’s a female term… and women hate it… if you say to a woman that’s she’s “catty” … that’s an invitation to get out  the back door  and stay out… but fast.  There are few words  in the English Language  that  arouseth a woman’s scorn as the the label “catty”. Imagine calling a man “catty” !  I soon learned that in this rough, burly magnificent  land of the lakes where men are men… I learned that  to call a man “catty” was to pay him  the highest compliment  in the roughest toughest of all games.  It  is a lumberjack’s word of respect and I would only call a lumberjack a “sissy” if I were in the other end of a transcontinental telephone line.

You see, that newspaper you read every day is born out of two parts.  It was processed in a great roaring mill where  the machines rumbling at breathless speed take the wood … make it into a porridgy mush … turn it into running liquid and then into dry shiny paper.  They call that the Mill side of operations.  At Thunder Bay Paper Mill in Port Arthur city limits they have one of the most modern streamlined operations in the world.  In fact their grinder room is the very newest thing in paper making.

They are proud of it in Port Arthur.  But, there would be no mill if it were not for wood.  So the other great partner in paper making is the Woodlands Division…the fellows who  are responsible  for bringing  rooted trees in the bush to the mills, in other words the fraternity of lumberjacks.   Canada itself owes so much  to the lumberjack group.

Continued in part three  Like a Ballet Dancer

Pretty Catty by John Fisher 1949 part one of five

 “PRETTY CATTY”

The People’s Paper

Canada

March 16, 1949

John Fisher Scans:

“Pretty Catty”

These men are rough and tough,  They Boss the rivers.  They run the rapids and shout defiance  at the world’s biggest fresh water lake.  They know the Sleeping Giant, too.  He-men these , and yet the finest compliment you can pay them is to say “Pretty Catty”.

ANNOUNCER’S INTRODUCTION: Extra!  The People’s Paper, a radio edition for  your entertainment .  The People’s Paper headlining John Fisher, your favourite story teller, with true tales about you and your friends.

Tonight John Fisher takes giant strides from Lake Nipigon to Port Arthur and has a story which will give the Sleeping Giant pleasant dreams…he talks about  men who are proud to be called “Catty”.

And these men are part of Canada’s largest family , the pulp and newsprint family …325,000 wage- earners in mill and bush. This great industry has an investment  of over a billion dollars in mills and power plants  that cannot be moved…they cannot operate without pulpwood…Therefore conservation of the forests is of vital interest to the industry.  Every Canadian pulp and paper mill is pledges to a 10 point plan of forest conservation to bring about perpetual harvests from our greatest natural asset…our forests.  Canada’s pulp and newsprint leaders jointly sponsor this program.  Abitibi Power and Paper,,, Great Lakes  Paper… Ontario Paper…Ontario-Minnesota Pulp and Paper and Spruce Falls Power and Paper.

Well in our bushlands John Fisher has found some mighty unusual men… Extra!! PRETTY CATTY!

JOH FISHER: We were peering out the window.  We looked straight into the silver fingertip of Lake Superior.  Through the haze of winter we sought the Sleeping Giant.  I had seen him from the air when the steel green waters slapped at his feet  in summer.  Now I wanted  to see him in winter dress.  But Jack Frost  beat me to it.  He had thrown  a protective haze around this sleeping giant… this great rock promontory … resembling a slumbering giant whose bulky frame guards the gateway to the boundless plains of the West.

In Port Arthur, Ontario, they scarcely ever sell a postcard without  this dormant guardian in the background.  He is a symbol of the majesty of Lake Superior. The silhouette  of this rock is the signal to water born commerce that the world’s greatest inland waterway is about to stop.  Here is a part of Canada where Nature went on a rampage  and scattered and tossed her rocky children …here the Sleeping Giant stands as the dean of mighty Superior.

It was from a window in Thunder Bay that I tried to see the Sleeping Giant… instead there in the spotless, modern mill of the Abitibi Power and Paper I heard these ancient tales and superstitions.  We  could not see him… for an hour though, I listened to these Thunder Bay  Papermakers rave about the beauties and legends of our Lakehead country.

I had been filled with the charm and bigness of Northwest Ontario.  I kept nodding approval … “yes, this is magnificent country , alright, “I commented on  the sunshine again which beats down  summer and winter on the twin cities of Fort William and Port Arthur, which both stand more than 600 feet above sea level.  All of a sudden as I was talking, one of the men from the Thunder Bay Paper Mill pulled me up short.  He said “ You’re a Maritimer, aren’t you…well you’ve got nothing like this down there"...

to be continued as Rough Burly Magnificent