It was not much of a hill: maybe, at best, a 10% grade. But that was too steep for us.
The 34 Masters of Forest Conservation candidates of the Faculty of Forestry, University of Toronto, departed from Toronto early on the morning of February 23, 2018, for the long drive north to Matawa, Ontario. One of my profs had put the touch on me to drive a van. So I found myself behind the wheel of a white Ford van, a kind of ungainly white vehicle with a ceiling high enough to stand up in, hurtling north up Highway 11 in the freezing rain.
The next morning broke rainy, with mixtures of ice pellets. At 7 a.m., in the conference room of the Canadian Ecology Centre (a group of wooden buildings and cabins nestled in the splendour of Samuel de Champlain provincial park) the woman from the Nipissing forest had explained to us how we would count trees, to see whether the red pine was growing back successfully after planting.
We loaded our snowshoes into the vans and set off along Highway 17, to drive to a block of forest managed for several generations now by the Clouthier family, a venerable forestry family in the Matawa area.
But we faced a challenge: it was Saturday.
When one spends one’s life in the city, one becomes accustomed to being able to go to where one wants. You get on a streetcar, or your bike, or in your car, and you proceed to your destination.
It’s different up north.
On weekdays, Clouthier’s teams, which own trucks and graders and sanding trucks, along with logging equipment, maintain the logging roads to and from the Crown forest that they manage. In fact, from the looks of the wide, smooth logging roads, with ample ditches, they maintain their roads to a high standard.
However, Clouthier gives his crews weekends off. Which means that, on a Saturday morning, they have no reason to sand their logging roads.
This became a problem for us.
The first two vehicles — the pickup from the Nipissing forest crew, and the Subaru of the Canadian Institute of Forestry, boasted snow tires and all-wheel drive, and climbed the hill without effort.
I was next, in the Ford van.
I couldn’t make it.
Halfway up, the eight students got out of the van and pushed our van up the hill, or at least, up the hill enough so I could get to a spot and gingerly turn around, and then, very carefully, crawl back down.
There was just no way.
And so we don’t know, and I guess we will never know, how well the red pine are coming back after that particular clear-cut in the forests of the Matawa area.
Mother nature has a way of keeping you humble.
