Off in a Cloud of Heifer Dust: Some Ottawa Valley Yarns

By Brent A Connelly

Off in a Cloud of Heifer Dust gets us up off our chairs for a tour up and down the Valley, from L’Orignal to Lachute, Pembroke to Perth, Almonte to Allumette Island, to meet friends old and new, and share a story or two.

Brent Connelly spent nearly forty years as a forester in Ontario’s Algonquin and

• Language: English
• Publisher: Burnstown Publishing House
• Release date: Nov 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781772571219

Book preview

Introduction

I beat a jack pine pole with a dry stick for a long, long time before finally getting an answer.

— Johnnie Young, storyteller, Kilmar, Quebec

… off in a cloud of heifer dust!

Land ’a Goshen! What in blazes is that all about?

The answer comes during a bus tour my wife, Heather, and I took in the fall of 2007 to Branson, Missouri, an emerging entertainment mecca for many fun and music-loving folks. We were having dinner with a couple of our busmates, Cathy and Ernie Dick, a likeable young couple who lived and worked on a farm outbacka the village of Douglas, Ontario, which is only a few miles up-’round-an’-in-behind the larger Ottawa Valley town of Renfrew.

The setting was a massive, typical American, seven-hundred-item, all-you-can-eat buffet, complete with passing lanes, flashing red lights, and a team of paramedics stationed at the dessert bar. After dinner, we were scheduled to board our bus for the ride to a nearby theatre to attend the Daniel O’Donnell show. And what would you expect when a busload of hearty Canadians was presented with the challenge of cleaning up your plate in an eatery such as this? Yes, we were running a little late while our tour hosts, Art and Dot Jamieson, of Beachburg, Ontario, were agonizing over how they could round up their family of gluttons and herd them back onto the bus.

Did we care? Not a bit. We were enjoying the scrumptious meal and the company of our new friends. Cathy, a teacher, homemaker, and sweet-pickle-and-jam prodigy, was the chatty one, who, with her flashing smile and charming giggle, treated us to some great back on the farm stories. As a professional forester having worked in the forests of Ontario’s Algonquin and Lake Superior Parks for four decades, I had much in common with Ernie. He was a part-time logging contractor, a part-time farmer, and a part-time builder of rock walls — all rolled up into a full-time working man with muscles to show for it.

We were having such a good time that we hardly noticed Art, with his arms waving frantically, jump up on a salad table and shout, The trough is shut down, boys and girls — board ’er up, it’s time to go and see Danny Boy.

As we struggled to push ourselves away from our table, Cathy announced with a big smile, while slinging her purse over a shoulder, "As my mother would often say, ‘Well, I guess we’re out of here in a cloud of heifer dust.’"

Well, that was it for me. As much as I enjoyed the Daniel O’Donnell show, it took me until intermission to clear my head from that cloud of heifer dust. Some day, an old storyteller was just going to have to pitch a little Ottawa Valley yarnin’ under that banner. I guess, for now, that’s me with another attempt to gather together some of the tales as told to me by the wonderful country folks I have known and worked with over the years, as well as some who have just recently come into my life.

This book is primarily about people from the Ottawa Valley, because, for the most part, that is where I have lived. To illustrate what the Valley consists of in my mind’s eye, I break the length of the Ottawa River into two parts. The Upper Ottawa Valley is west, north, and east from Ottawa to its headwaters in Quebec’s La Verendrye Park. The Lower Ottawa Valley extends southeasterly from Ottawa to the junction of the mighty St. Lawrence, upstream from Montreal. But whether you’re from the Upper Valley or the Lower Valley, proud residents can frequently be overheard boasting, Yes, siree, I’m here to tell you that I’m from the Ottawa Valley, by Jeez.

As for the breadth of the Valley, well, that all depends on what storyteller you are listening to at the time, or what your frame of mind is that day. If you are chatting with me you’ll discover that Algonquin Park is in the Ottawa Valley, as are the foothills of the Laurentian Mountains. From my experience there are no limits. If you happen to be ordering a big tub of mouthwatering poutine from a chip truck in St-Louis-du-Ha-Ha, Quebec, and are greeted by the server with a thundering Gidday, Gidday, then you’re still in the Ottawa Valley and will surely enjoy the rest of your day.

I have added some personal anecdotes about some of the fun Heather, my wife of over forty years, and I have enjoyed with our own family of seven kids while living in rural and small-town Ottawa Valley. (Seven kids, you say! Are you nuts? No, not at all, but more about that and our down on the farm adventures a little later on.)

And, yes, there may even be some silliness to go along with an observation once made to me by a former forestry colleague, Bill Fullerton, when he chortled, We may all have to grow old, but we don’t have to mature. Also included are some crazy grocery-shopping antics that I have enjoyed over the years, as well as a glimpse into the charming little Valley town of Almonte where we are now enjoying our retirement.

Some of what you are about to read may fall under the modern term of self-effacing humour. This comes from my father, George Connelly, of Brownsburg, Quebec, who would often state and practise the adage: Learn to laugh at yourself, and you’ll be slapping your knees with glee for the rest of your life.

So go to the fridge and pour yourself a tall glass of refreshing raspberry vinegar, grab a couple of warm oatmeal-and-raisin cookies from the jar on the sideboard, lean back in the old rocker on the front verandah facing the rose bushes, stretch out your toes until they creak, and rest them gently on the back of your old hound who is sleeping peacefully in a shady spot by your side, because we’re going to take a little trip back to the country.

As a footnote, once again, I have buried a ridiculous term in the ramble to follow, hoping that it will be found by some eagle-eyed readers who will contact me. Who knows, maybe even more wild Valley yarns will flow from that.

PART I

Some Valley Characters and Their Yarns

CHAPTER 1

The Field of Country Yarns

A good cold will last seven days if you go to a doctor and a week if you don’t.

— Alex Bowes, retired farmer, Almonte, Ontario

The publication of two previous books, Holy Old Whistlin’ —Yarns about Algonquin Park Loggers and Finer than Hair on a Frog — More Yarns about Loggers and the Like, has taught me one thing: tell a tale about a logger, a farmer, or just about anyone else with a country soul, and you’ll receive another two or three in return. It’s like compound interest and as prolific as the tiny mustard seed, which, a farmer will tell you, can germinate out of the top of a fence post. Any working man who has ever laced up a pair of work boots at the break of day and stuffed a packsack with a five-sandwich lunch and half of an apple pie has some yarns to spin. All that is really needed is someone to listen and enjoy them. That is not to say that the charming Valley ladies don’t have tales to tell, too. After all, they are the ones who have seen and heard it all and have been the gentle geniuses behind keeping their families solid.

Now comes my opportunity to share some examples of how the exchange of stories from this amazing field of country yarns has unfolded for me. In Holy Old Whistlin’, I talked about my friendship with an old logger, Duncan MacGregor, who was the subject of the book, A Life in the Bush: Lessons from My Father, written by his son, well-known journalist and author, Roy MacGregor. After reading about Duncan, several people came forward with some stories about his famous older brother, Judge Willie MacGregor, who, after returning from WWI, set up a law practice in Eganville and later went on to become known as the Ottawa Valley’s travelling judge. What an amazing character he must have been.

In A Life in the Bush, Roy describes a case in Killaloe where a slick, big-city lawyer was presenting his arguments to the judge. He droned on, citing some off-in-the-clouds case law, when Judge MacGregor, who wasn’t at all impressed, came crashing down on him, That may be the law where you come from, but it ain’t the law here in Killaloe. And ever since that day, the good judge was known across the country as Judge Willie Killaloe Law MacGregor.

Garry Robertson, who had formerly lived in Whitney, Ontario, and had also known Duncan, called me one day with a tale that he had heard about Judge Killaloe Law MacGregor:

One Monday morning in Cobden, a young lad, who had started out as a horse thief and then branched out into the cattle-rustling business, appeared before the judge. He was well known to Judge MacGregor, who, by then, was getting a little tired of seeing the mangy maverick in his court. It was time to teach him a good lesson.

That will be thirty days in the Pembroke jail, he growled at the accused as he pounded the desk with his gavel.

Thirty days, laughed the young smart-alec. Holy shit, Judge, I can do thirty days standing on my head.

Is that so? replied Judge MacGregor. Well, then, you can have another thirty days — it’ll help you get on your feet.

Art Jamieson told me a similar yarn:

There was an old lad from inbacka Dacre who had put the boots to his bootlegger, placing him in the Renfrew hospital. His defence before Judge MacGregor was this: The crooked, damned bugger tried to cheat me. He wanted to sell me whisky for more than what I would have to pay at the government liquor store. Imagine that ripper!

Judge MacGregor explained that he would be dealing with the bootlegger once he had recovered from his beating and went on to expound on the seriousness of the assault, advising the fellow that he would fine him one hundred dollars. At that point, the old mountain man interrupted to boast, as he patted a back pant pocket, That’s not a problem, Judge, I have a hundred dollars right here in my arse pocket.

Well then, Mr. Money-bags, retorted the judge. Do you also have fifteen days behind bars in your arse pocket?

Finer than Hair on a Frog tells a story that was told to me by Charlie Downing, a logging contractor from Harrington, Quebec (one of those Lower Valley lads). It was about one of the loggers he once worked with who had forgotten his hard hat liner on a frighteningly cold day working in the bush. His bare ears were burning with the cold, and he couldn’t stand it any longer, so he sat down on a stump, pulled out his jackknife, rolled down a pant leg, and cut about six inches from the bottom of his long underwear, then pulled the newly crafted headwear down over his ears.

After reading the story, Mike Quinn, a retired farmer from the Osgoode area, called me up to tell me some stories he had heard about the horrors of loggers going to work in the bush camps in the fall wearing a pair of long underwear and not changing them until they came back home in the spring.

I was told about a fellow who went to the camps in October and didn’t come home until a Friday night in early April. He went upstairs to change his underwear and brought them down to the summer kitchen. They sat there as stiff as a plank, upright in the corner propped up against a milk can until his wife fired up the copper kettle to do her washing early Monday morning.

Mike went on to tell about a neighbour of his parents who came home in the spring after a long winter in the bush. My dad told me this story so I know it’s true, Mike explained. He continued:

After taking off his underwear, the logger brought the coal black garment into the kitchen and threw it onto the floor. In a few minutes, the underwear came to life and started to crawl around on the kitchen floor. With a look of disgust, the old lady ran for the broom and picked up the creeping long-johns with the end of the handle and raced over to the wood stove and stuffed them into the fire. As sure as I’m sitting here, you’d swear that she had thrown a sack full of popcorn into the fire. Popity, popity, pop! Bing, bang! Blew the blasted lid right off the stove, and it, and the tea kettle, ended up across the room against the door going down into the root cellar. That damned old pair of underwear prit’ near burned the house down that day.

In the logging camps, one-piece, long-john underwear was sometimes referred to by loggers as their trappers. This reflected a small, but large enough, rear panel or trap door that could easily be unbuttoned for ready access. This made it unnecessary for the wearer to remove the whole garment when the call came — a very handy feature on a windy, forty-below-zero January day, out behind a stump on a north-facing slope, twenty miles from camp.

So there we have it: a chance, however brief, introduction to Judge Willie Killaloe Law MacGregor; two off-the-wall underwear tales for the price of one; some homespun medical advice from a good-natured farmer; and a whole bunch of fun and laughter added in for good measure. What more can a man say?

CHAPTER 2

Moving On Down the Road

When I was a tad of a lad my mother told me and my brothers one night when she was tucking us into bed that the next night we would be sleeping in the same beds, in the same house, but that our house would be moving on down the road a piece.

—The other Gary Cooper, agriculture technician, fiddler, and savvy hunter of wild ungulates and wild turkeys, Metcalfe, Ontario

Norman and Clara Cooper had a decision to make. In 1952, they were living with their three young boys in a small, two-storey, rented farmhouse on the 8th Line, a few miles outside of Metcalfe, Ontario. One day, the owner of the farm appeared at the front door to advise the family that he needed some money and was going to have to sell the place.

The Coopers were told that they were welcome to buy the farm, which included the house, barn, outbuildings, and 160 acres of land, for $1,600 cash money, as they say in the Ottawa Valley. Norman, who was a skilled carpenter specializing in building barns, worked regularly, but this was a lot of money for a young family to pull together in one shot. Plus, these were independent, hard-working, frugal people not given to charging off into a lifetime of mortgage misery at the first sign of trouble. There had to be another way to remain living in that little home they all liked so much … And there was.

Norman was well accustomed to jacking up and repairing old barns so figured that if he could buy the framed house and find a chunk of land nearby to sit it on, he could move the house. The first step was to find out if the owner would sell the house separately from the land, and after some negotiation, an agreement was made for the purchase of the house for $800.

Then began the search for a plot of land. It wasn’t a long search, however, because family members lean on each other in the Ottawa Valley. Norman’s parents, Robert and Louisa Cooper, carved off a small piece of land from their own farm to give to their son and his family. No money changed hands, nor was there any written agreement drawn up to cover the transfer of ownership; everyone in the country knew that Norman repaid his father and mother in kind many times over in the subsequent years.

Next came the engineering phase. There were no resources to hire a truck and float, so the operation had to depend on labour and equipment provided by neighbouring farmers. The house had a shallow basement, so Norman and his friends dug out space around the side walls with shovels, jacked up the house, and blocked it up to facilitate the positioning of stringers under the structure. A ramp was built to allow four hay wagons to back into the basement. The wagons were to line up in tandem with two wagons hooked back to front on the two sides of the house with a tractor pulling each set of wagons. Two Oliver 77 tractors, owned by neighbouring farmers Vernie Reaney and Stanley Cooper, were to be used to ensure an even and consistent pull.

At the same time, the new site had to be prepared. A basement was excavated with hand tools (there were no motorized excavators in those days), and a foundation constructed. Stringers were placed so that the house could be unloaded in the same way that it had been loaded onto the wagons. While all of this work was being done, the family continued to live in their home, and did so right up to their last breakfast before the little house shuffled and creaked on down the road.

The community was buzzing on June 13, 1952, the day of the move, and at the break of dawn everything was in place. The tractors were shined up, gassed up, and ready to go, while the anxious men were tying up loose ends and still smacking their lips from an early-morning feed of bacon and eggs. The mother of the house, Clara, was scurrying around preparing the excited kids for the big day.

The house was at the end of a narrow laneway about a thousand feet from the main road. The road was only lightly gravelled and sometimes rutted up in wet weather. A son, Dennis, remembers his dad occasionally getting stuck in the driveway with his car. So it’s not a stretch to understand why an uncle, Harry Cooper, was fearful that the house would tip over on its side on the way out the driveway. Not so. With the two tractors snorting away at full torque, the determined little house hung on and made its way safely out to the main road, where it turned south for its mile-and-a-half trip to its final resting place alongside the same road.

The one-room school overlooking the road on which the house would travel was also bristling with excitement and anticipation. This would be an event like none other. Gary was ten years old and the eldest of the three Cooper boys, who were all in school that day. He recalls the teacher announcing immediately after the first bell that the kids would be allowed to leave their studies and watch the move from the schoolyard. She knew that no textbook could ever offer her students an education such as this. The Cooper lads were beside themselves with pride — after all, what other dad in the country could load their house up on four hay wagons and drive it to another yard to play in and