Nine
The Invisible Founders
SO, THIS IS what it feels like to die.
I was not alone in thinking this. Later, days after I had used up several of the extra lives that are handed out to stray cats and stupid journalists, I would learn that the three others lost with me that week on James Bay felt exactly the same. We did not, any of us, think we’d make it.
It was late June 1986. I had come to Waskaganish on the Quebec shore of James Bay for the launch of Billy Diamond’s new boat. The Grand Chief of the James Bay Cree of northern Quebec had already built a successful regional airline and was now moving into a rather different form of transportation. He’d gone to Japan to meet with the giant manufacturer Yamaha, and by combining traditional Cree knowledge and Yamaha technology they had completely redesigned the famous Hudson’s Bay canoe—the accepted, albeit dangerous, method of transportation for the northern Cree for generations. Far too many lives had been lost to freak storms and overloaded boats and hidden rocks. Billy Diamond wanted a new boat.
He’d capitalized on the Japanese fascination with North American Aboriginals by striking an early meeting with Yamaha executives in Toronto. Then he’d gone to Tokyo for deeper discussions, and now, two years later, the first Cree–Yamaha boats—wide, handsome fibreglass craft—were rolling off a brand-new assembly line in the old fur-trading village of Fort Rupert, now reverted to its Native name, Waskaganish. The boat was about to be launched from the docks along the shore of the Rupert River where the freshwater flush from Quebec’s Ungava Peninsula empties out into the saltwater flats of James Bay.
Billy Diamond and I had known each other for several years—more on that later—and he’d invited me to witness the launch and perhaps even do a story for the Ottawa Citizen. I thought it would be a business story, not a survival tale.
With an Ottawa friend, Doug Sprott, I’d driven the better part of a day up through Maniwaki and La Vérendrye Park to Val d’Or and then caught the regular Air Creebec flight north. Nearly two hours later we bounced down onto the gravel runway and hitched a pickup ride into a village where the residents were so excited they could barely contain themselves. A feast was already in progress—beaver and moose nostrils, spring goose, bannock and smoked whitefish, huge pots of dark tea—and word was that the Japanese were coming by executive jet from Tokyo.
Peter Gzowski would also be calling in the morning. Chief Billy Diamond would go live on Morningside for the launch of the most unusual joint venture in Canadian corporate history.
A shipment of advertising posters had arrived on the same plane that brought us in. No boat appeared on the poster, but instead an effective message—“The waters of James Bay are not always friendly”—under a rising, threatening swell of churning water. Already that spring five Crees had drowned on the unpredictable waters of James Bay. This boat, the Crees believed, would put an end to such tragedies.
“You’re going out for the test drive,” Billy laughed when he met us.
“What?”
“It’s all set up,” he said. “Lawrence and Charlie are going to take you up the coast a bit for some fish.”
This trip was meant for work, not sport, and yet what could make a better storyline than to actually head out into the water? Lawrence Katapatuk was Billy’s lifelong pal, a nonpolitical Cree who kept to the bush as a trapper and hunter. Billy’s older brother, Charlie, was even more old world, a strong, silent man who spoke no English and who lived year round along his traplines and in the family’s coastal goose camps.
We set out Monday around noon, the Japanese not due until Tuesday morning when Peter Gzowski would be calling and the boat safely back. Billy thought I could go on the radio with him to back up his claims about the boat’s seaworthiness.
Doug and I threw our packs into the vast bow—a propitious move, it would turn out—and Lawrence, also fortuitously, tossed a tarpaulin over the packs and supplies. With Charlie standing Cree-style in front of the forty-horsepower Mercury—straight up, left hand holding the upturned throttle handle as if it were the hand of a child, wind straight into his face—we set out in calm waters under sunny skies into the mouth of the Rupert and then north into the gentle chop of James Bay proper.
“Look at that!” Doug shouted.
I turned from my seat on the backpacks and followed his finger. He’d sighted a most unusual rock formation, a small granite island that popped out of the water like some great prehistoric creature rising to challenge.
I nodded. Charlie shook his head at Lawrence, but neither said a thing. Only later would we be told that the Crees considered it bad luck to point to or even to glance at this dramatic rock at the confluence of the Rupert River and James Bay, that to acknowledge the thing was to invite the wrath of chuentenshu, the mighty north wind. Charlie and Lawrence were much too polite to say any of this.
The Cree–Yamaha freighter canoe rode beautifully, sliding over the light chop with grace and speed and an awesome sense of power and indestructibility. We could tell from how often the two Cree hunters changed positions—first one steering, then the other—that they, too, were marvelling at it.
The boat was twenty-seven feet long and deliberately wide for James Bay, where the north wind is almost always blowing and the shallow water can be so easily whipped into a frenzy. Since waves tend to be narrow and tight in such shallows, the boat was constructed so that it would crest three or four at once, virtually surfing, the ride as smooth as a limousine on a newly paved city street.
Doug and I lay back, turning our faces to the sun and preparing to let the gentle roll of the ride and hypnotic drone of the Mercury outboard put us to sleep.
Two hours out of Waskaganish our little world did a complete flip.
The wind hadn’t built slowly, as it does in the south, but instead suddenly crashed down from Hudson Bay farther to the north. The boat began to slam against the instant whitecaps.
And then, even though we’d set out with light jackets and our faces turned to the warmth of the late June sun, it began to snow.
Snow. At first large, rolling flakes like small birds riding above the waves, then icy pellets that stabbed like needles into our faces. We pulled our caps and collars tight and hunkered down.
We were quite far from shore. It had been some time since we could make out land and now, with snow blowing and low, dark clouds moving in, it was difficult to make out anything at all.
Charlie, the more experienced of the Cree hunters, was in control of the boat. He was half kneeling, the boat rocking and slamming too dangerously to do anything else but steer. He was fumbling with his shirt and thin plastic rain slick, trying uselessly to bundle up tighter.
The wind began to howl.
I’d seen this phrase written so many times—even sang along with it at the end of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”—but never before had I heard wind like this. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say the wind began to scream—a scream filled with terror. The Cree treat such things as wind and water as living creatures, animals, and now I perfectly understood why.
The scream grew so loud it drowned out the Mercury. The wind was so wild and ferocious it began to shear off the tops of the whitecaps, sending half-waves of salty water into our faces and down our collars. Lawrence, Doug, and I tied the tarp down and pulled it over us while Charlie drove on into the storm. The snow was so thick now that Doug and I couldn’t see any landmarks. We had no idea whether we were heading toward shore or out into the deeper bay.
Sailors know there are few dangers greater than wide expanses of shallow water and a high, unpredictable wind. The small chop we’d set out in had become huge, rolling waves. The freighter canoe could no longer bridge several crests, as it had been designed to do, and instead would ride up one, teeter—the Mercury screeching as water released its grip on shaft and propeller blade—and then collapse down into the funnel. It was as if every few seconds the boat was pushed out a second-storey window and crashed down on the sid
ewalk below. The jolts were crushing, our backs so hammered that eventually we had to roll onto our sides each time just before impact and then roll back up.
Charlie, still running the motor, stumbled once, his bare hand now so frozen it would not obey his command to get a fresh grip on the throttle. Lawrence jumped up to take over the steering even though it seemed the only directions out here were straight up and straight down.
We were soaked through. The wind was still clipping the tops of the waves and tossing stinging salt water in our faces. The crashing of the big boat into each coming wave was now hurling water over the bow and onto the tarp and floor. We were bailing, but futilely. The snow was building on the tarp and around the seats and transom.
Hours later, speaking in Cree with Lawrence translating, Charlie Diamond would say it was at this precise point—his hands frozen, the salt water washing over the bow—when, having spent his entire life on James Bay, he became quietly convinced that “We weren’t going to make it.”
Neither Doug nor I needed to be told any such thing at that moment. Both of us, privately, were preparing for the end. The boat was taking on water. The wind was picking up rather than calming down. The crashing was getting so we had to stifle our own screams each time the modern freighter canoe thudded into the next valley.
The boat was rising so high and falling so far now that water blew in at the top of the rise and poured in at the bottom. And yet the vessel itself was bearing up. A wooden freighter canoe would surely have split in half by now, or flipped in the heavy waves, or sunk altogether. We were bailing, but not frantically. The fibreglass Cree–Yamaha creation never even shuddered. It slammed. It crashed. If we were going down it wouldn’t be the boat’s fault.
Too bad Peter Gzowski was never going to hear this.
Doug and I yanked on the tarpaulin to free it of snow and some of the surface water. Wet snow and water flew off in all directions, most of it staying aboard.
The boat crashed so hard into the next cliff of water that it seemed, for the moment, as if it might finally fracture and splinter and hurl us all to our untimely deaths.
“Look!”
It was Lawrence. He was pointing off over the bow. Charlie stretched up to look. Doug and I tried to look too but the bow rose and fell so fast we had to hit the floor. Then, when it rose again for the next wave, we shifted to our knees so we could see.
The snow had turned to sleet and was blowing hard, the sheets of wet ice hitting like machine-gun fire on the stretched tarpaulin. Off through the grey-white fuzz of what should have been the horizon was the faintest hint of substance: darker, steady, solid.
It was the prettiest sight any of us had seen in the short lives we’d been about to give up on.
Lawrence turned the freighter slightly and a mighty wave, a rogue wave in the eyes of the Cree, lifted the vessel and spun it sideways, tossing it hard into the next wave that washed into and over us.
“He almost got us there!” Lawrence shouted.
He, the sea. Not that he, Lawrence, had erred by daring to change course, even slightly, but that he, the sea, had chosen this moment to attack, the water a full and equal personality in this gaunt world, every bit as alive and with as much right to win as the Cree hunters who were up against him.
We headed toward the island, which Lawrence and Charlie knew would be surrounded by dangerous shoals. Up ahead we could see the waves spitting high as they broke and exploded just below the surface. With no passageway to the leeward side we’d have to come in from the northwest.
Lawrence turned and the motor crunched into one rock, then another, the propeller screaming as we rose over the rocks then choking as it settled back. But the sheer pin held and the motor kicked back in.
“We’re going to have to head straight out into it!” Lawrence shouted. “Once we’re beyond the rocks, we’ll come back in with the wind!”
These few moments were even more harrowing than any of the last two hours as Lawrence deliberately turned the boat away from our only possible salvation.
The freighter bucked and dropped and rose and crashed as it cut new angles across the fury, but Lawrence held hard to the controls and angled the boat so that it rose up onto one wave and cut across at such an angle that he was able to surf the boat from one wave to the next.
Charlie moved on his knees and reached down under the gunwales to retrieve a long pole. He held it in both hands and stood, groin and stomach pressed hard to the bow, then raised the pole over his head as if he were about to drive it into a whale. He was checking for rocks. As Lawrence turned back he cut the engine to half and Charlie began prodding ahead, signalling as he detected bottom, steering Lawrence always clear of the rocks.
Finally they seemed to have the angle Lawrence wanted. With a wrench of the throttle he turned the freighter so quickly it almost dipped sideways into the next wave. The wave caught, the vessel lifted, the motor screamed like a siren as it cleared the water. Then the freighter settled, the motor settled, and we shot straight over the waves, the wind now at our backs, almost soaring into the sheltered approach to the back of the island.
The water was but a moderate chop here, the freighter canoe once again gliding so smoothly it seemed impossible to imagine that moments earlier we’d all been making our peace with death.
Lawrence headed toward a rough beach, shutting down the throttle and reaching back to hoist the outboard as the Cree–Yamaha freighter canoe sizzled into the sand. Amazingly, the world instantly ceased to roll and rise and drop and shudder. The calm was extraordinary. The feeling when our feet first hit the shallows, then the shore, was as sweet and satisfying as any sensation we had ever known.
I knelt and kissed the beach.
IT HAD TAKEN SEVERAL HOURS to reach shelter at the little island the Cree called Obejiwan, but it had taken years to reach this point in what was to become a lifelong relationship with the James Bay Cree of northern Quebec. Five years earlier I’d been working in the Ottawa bureau of Maclean’s magazine when a young Cree chief with thick black hair and thick black horn-rimmed glasses showed up at the door and asked if he might have a few minutes of my time. He had, he said, a story to tell.
All Billy Diamond had with him that early spring day in 1981 was a mittful of press releases from the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development announcing certain initiatives in the James Bay area that were tied to the 1975 James Bay Agreement, the landmark land claims deal the Cree had signed with the Government of Canada and the provincial government of Quebec. Mostly they involved promises not upheld. Paperwork is hardly the stuff of good television.
I let him talk. It took him a long time to say what he needed to say, but eventually the bare bones were laid out and anyone who’d taken the time to listen would have seen that this story went so far beyond mere paper, and even mere words, that its outrage was almost incomprehensible.
It turned out to be the most compelling story I’d ever worked on: six forgotten Cree villages in one of the most isolated pockets of North America, a people then sixty-five-hundred strong who’d never been given the courtesy of even a heads-up before the Quebec government announced a hydroelectric project so huge that it would rival such engineering feats as the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, and the Panama Canal. It was also a flooding and river diversion project that would, assuredly, wipe out a way of life that, archeologists believed, had changed little over the last ten thousand years. The flooding of the James Bay waterways and the effect on the Cree population was a story so complicated, so huge and tiny at the same time, that it took the young chief an entire day just to talk it out in my little Maclean’s office.
He talked about his own life. He’d been born on a trapline in the spring of 1949, Malcolm and Hilda Diamond having tried to get back to Rupert House with their five older children before ice out but becoming trapped on the far side of the Nottaway River as the ice broke and backed up. Little Bileesh Diamin was born in a temporary shelter, Hilda giving birth with the h
elp of older sister Annie, Malcolm cutting the umbilical cord with the same hunting knife he’d used only hours before to skin beaver.
Billy Diamond had been a child others noticed. He was thick and solid and very loud. He had an insatiable curiosity. Older brother Charlie took to hunting immediately, and the older sisters all turned easily to the traditional duties of food preparation and preservation, along with the curing of hides and the various crafts that in those days made living off the land possible.
Not Billy. He was forever wanting to talk, endlessly racing out to watch the passing floatplanes, fascinated by the little village they returned to each late spring and left each early fall with a full canoe of supplies for the coming winter. He used to talk Charlie into carrying the family’s old battery radio—complete with a huge and heavy “Nine Lives” dry-cell battery to power it—into the bush so that when they lay in their camps at night Billy could listen to and wonder about the outside world. Billy was soon learning English from listening to Toronto Maple Leafs hockey games and Sunday morning evangelical Christian shows.
Malcolm Diamond became chief, but it frustrated him to the point where he couldn’t bear it. He had three voices of authority telling him what to do—the Indian agent who periodically dropped by, the local French Roman Catholic priest, and the manager of the Hudson’s Bay outlet—and Malcolm spoke neither French nor English. And with the rise of Quebec nationalism in the 1960s the Quebec government began coming around, insisting that the chief of Rupert House fly the provincial flag down by the wharfs as well as the Canadian flag. When he refused to raise the flag, they did it for him. When the provincial authorities left, he took it down.
Malcolm had a gut feeling that tough times were coming. The provincial government visited more and more often. The Cree trappers were reporting that they’d seen survey crews and helicopters deep in the bush, always around the various rivers that poured out into the bay. When Billy turned eight, Annie, under instructions from their father, dressed little Billy in the new navy slacks and white shirt the family had bought in the Hudson’s Bay store and walked him down to the docks, where a big black Norseman floatplane was tied up. She handed him a small brown paper bag of candy and a small toy helicopter and told him “You be a good boy, Billy, and grow up to be somebody.” Then the Norseman’s pilot grabbed the youngster and shoved him inside the plane, quickly slamming the door shut and starting up the engine. With the child crying and screaming inside and Annie outside on the docks wiping her tears away, the plane taxied out into the bay and took off. Billy Diamond was off to school.
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