… I happened to be reading (or re-reading, I can't quite remember) Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising, reading it as the wood smoke from our fire at Rainbow Falls Provincial Park high on Lake Superior's north shore swirled about. I'd have posted this yesterday but Canada Day found me a few metres from the Trans-Canada Highway but kilometres away from a decent wireless signal that would have let me made a phone call let alone connect to the Internet (yes, Virginia, there are still places in Canada where there is no high-speed wireless Internet). So here's a little bit of an interior monologue from Neil MacRae, one of the heroes of Barometer Rising, as he walks through the streets of Halifax in December 1917, a day before the city would be levelled by the explosion of the Mont Blanc. Remember, MacLennan, (b. 1907, Glace Bay, N.S.) is writing this in 1941:
For almost the first time in his life, [MacRae] fully realized what being a Canadian meant. It was a heritage he had no intention of losing.
He stopped at a corner to wait for a tram, and his eyes reached above the roofs to the sky. Stars were visible, and a quarter moon. The sun had rolled on beyond Nova Scotia into the west. Now it was setting over Montreal and sending the shadow of the mountain deep into the valleys of Sherbrooke Street and Peel; it was turning the frozen St. Lawrence crimson and lining it with the blue shadow of the trees and buildings along its banks, while all the time the deep water poured seaward under the ice, draining off the Great Lakes into the Atlantic. Now the prairies were endless plains of glittering, bluish snow over which the wind passed in a firm and continuous flux, packing the drifts down hard over the wheat seeds frozen into the alluvial earth. Now in the Rockies the peaks were gleaming obelisks in the mid-afternoon. The railway line, that tenuous thread which bound Canada to both the great oceans and made her a nation, lay with one end in the darkness of Nova Scotia and the other in the flush of a British Columbia noon. (P. 79, New Canadian Library edition)
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