Keeping the Past

Heritage conservation is only sort of possible because much of our heritage is dependent upon our use of it. When I was young, I moved to the Eastern Townships, to a community that consisted of farms, one beside another. Over the years, most of the farms had been acquired by city folk, but they bought them to be in a farming milieu and spent money to keep the farm seeming like the one the farmer they bought from would have recognized. We fell in love with the farming heritage and participated as much as possible, working to keep my uncle’s farm feeling like a real farm.

West Bolton farmhouse

In the spring of 1978, we returned to the Laurentians, me in Arthur Hutchins’s truck with a large amount of hay and grain, fencing wire, a cow, a calf, a dog, a cat, and three hundred chickens. The cow was the prize, a pure-bred Jersey called Maple Cliff Dawn Horizon. Her first freshening, having a calf and milk, had taken so long that we had called her Maybe. I will never forget the expression on my brother’s face as I watched from the cab of Mr. Hutchins’s old truck, pulling up to my mother’s long-abandoned stable.

Maple Cliff Dawn Horizon

Mr. Hutchins’s truck had broken down trying to climb the unfamiliar, long hills of the Laurentian Autoroute – we were very late. If Mr. Hutchins wasn’t old by my standards today, his truck was. He was one of those farmer-Townshippers that I enjoyed living among. He supplied us with woodchips, a whole truckful every three or four months – ideal bedding for the beef cows on my uncle’s farm. We invited him in for supper if he arrived late in the day with his woodchips, and he seemed to enjoy himself. Arthur ate well, smiled a bit and never talked, except in short, one- or two-word answers to questions once he was sure they were addressed to him. I could not tell you if he was more comfortable in English or in French. He was most comfortable in neither.

When he went back to his rig, we inevitably found a two-dollar bill – remember those? – under his plate. The reddish-pink bill, featuring a younger queen on one side and Inuit hunters on the other, commemorated Canada’s presence in Resolute Bay and the far north, where they transferred Inuit to stake a territorial claim during the Cold War. A young Inuk described them as human flagpoles. The government could not transplant their community heritage in which their lives had been founded for millennia, and the experiment was a disaster for the flagpoles. Arthur’s two-dollar bill contained a message for us, too. We could take a cow and calf, chickens and fencing, but we could not take the farming heritage with us. Ignorant of its significance, we were relocating this menagerie into a non-agricultural environment. The calf would show us that. Mature cows can be docile, but growing calves test fences endlessly, and where the calf goes, the cow will follow.

Our menagerie summered at Mom’s stable while we moved into a little log cabin I had built in my teens. Our plan was to build a new house with our own four hands, slaughter and sell the chickens, keeping just 6 laying hens, and then move the hens, the cow and the calf into our log cabin before winter, just after we moved ourselves out of it. We worked on the new building through the summer, taking only two days off. It was returning from one of those days off that we discovered the calf problem.

Little log cabin

When we left the Townships, we acknowledged that we would not be able to milk the cow twice a day. We would have no electricity or refrigeration in the log cabin or in the stable, no sanitary way of keeping the milk. I went to the Stukely auction and bought a little bull calf, a Holstein, black and white patched, that would be the lucky beneficiary of good Jersey milk. I roughed-out an enclosure with an electrified barb wire fence and visited the stable’s new occupants once or twice a day. I didn’t make it over there before leaving for the second day off.

Coming home, as we drove down through the pine forest above Rolland Deslauriers’s house, to our surprise he was on the road, signaling us to stop. If Arthur Hutchins wasn’t really that old, Rolland Deslauriers was. Behind him was his log farmhouse and the red pine forest that he had planted in a field in 1949, he had once told me, the year I was born. Rolland and his wife Rollande were the last family to have farmed along our range road. All the farms, fields and most of the buildings were long gone, the fields grown into trees, but the lines on Rolland’s face still showed his farming heritage. They expressed his life, but not his speech. When he talked, there was no twinkle, no creases of laughter, just clear words that I was left to interpret. The calf and cow, he said, had broken through my fence, but he assured me they were back now. He slowly described how he had spotted them coming down the road, followed by half the neighbourhood, the current owners of the old farms, running, calling and yelling “Here!” “Heel!” “Home…!” His stone-carved face expressed nothing else until a tear formed in his eye and ran down over the lines, as his whole inner being convulsed in laughter, visible only through that lone tear. We had made his day.

Thanking him and following the road onward to our cabin, we sat in silence, both realizing that our dream of keeping a cow had just ended. We were like the Inuk on Hutchin’s two-dollar bill. Without the social heritage, we may as well have been trying to keep a cow in Resolute Bay. This was not a home for Maple Cliff Dawn Horizon.

We knew what to do with the calf.