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
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