End of an era

As is often remarked at funerals, it’s a shame that we sometimes find the time to connect with people only in unhappy circumstances. This is how I feel when I finally get around to having a conversation with Mary Guptill, of Meteghan River, N.S. I’ve heard about her for years – partly in relation to her efforts as a conservationist, and partly because she was, near as anyone can tell, the first woman to practise forestry in Nova Scotia. But what spurs me to get in touch is the recent death of her friend Arcade Comeau, who was an important mentor early in her career.

Some media outlets mistakenly use the term “forester” to refer to anyone who works in the woods, but it is actually a professional designation that has specific educational and accreditation requirements. Guptill obtained her forestry degree from the University of New Brunswick in 1978, and soon afterwards she got a job with La Forêt Acadienne, a new woodlot co-op representing the region of Clare, the predominantly francophone area of southwestern Nova Scotia.

Comeau, a graduate of the Maritime Forest Ranger School, had earned respect in his community while working as a wildlife officer (with the Department of Lands and Forests, as it was then called). Then, in a leap of faith, he helped to found La Forêt Acadienne – taking on the role of manager, which he would hold until shortly before his death this September at the age of 79. He hired Guptill as staff forester for the fledgling group, to develop woodlot management plans. Her memories of those early years attest to Comeau’s personal character, his deep commitment to the people of Clare, and his vast knowledge of the region’s woodlands (all addressed in a tribute to him in the November issue of Atlantic Forestry Review) – and they also provide a snapshot of a unique place and time.

“Down here, because woodlots were so small and because there had been subsistence living later, we were almost a generation closer to the land than other places,” says Guptill. “The Acadians returned here in the late 1700s, so up until the early 1800s they were very busy clearing land and making houses, and they had to do it with no capital whatsoever. They came back dirt poor…. These people kept a subsistence way of life, one way or another – working in the woods, working in the fishery, or farming – they kept it later than elsewhere in the province. And they had large families that had to emigrate. The excess population, a lot of it went to the States – the factory towns. There are huge ties between here and the States. The point I’m trying to make is that when I got here, most of the people that were left had very close ties to the land.”

So although systematic forest management was a new concept, it aligned with certain traditional values. “As soon as we showed that we weren’t cutting everything – as soon as we showed that we were trying to build up the resource – we had huge support,” Guptill says. “People still wanted to treat the land well; they were only starting to treat it as a commodity. One way or another, lands had been passed down, generation to generation; they weren’t sold from one generation to the next. It was a source of resources, and you wanted it to perpetuate because your kids would need those resources too.”

Gaining acceptance in this culture, and in the male-dominated forest industry, could have been daunting, but Guptill recalls that period of her life with great fondness. “Arcade was a gentleman. There were never any troubles. He treated me like another person; I can’t say that for everybody. It’s taken for granted now that women can do these things, but it wasn’t then. He helped me along where I needed help – because I did – and we worked together in the woods for a while. He had to show me where things were and how things worked.”

Comeau also introduced his protégé to local truckers, sawmillers, and landowners.

“He allowed me to slip into the community,” says Guptill. “I was 23 then – that’s 40-plus years ago. I was meeting guys in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, and they had almost all had to leave this community and go work in English milieux somewhere, without any English, and they knew how hard that was – so all I had to do was try to speak in French and try to understand, and bungle along as I did, and they didn’t care. I had to throw away all my schoolbook French, which was useless down here, and pick up their French – and because I did pick it up, they were infinitely grateful, because then they were free to be themselves. They used to tease us. They said, ‘Arcade goes over the trees and Mary goes under them.’ He was a big guy, and I top out at five foot one inch and at that time I was about 105 pounds.”

One of the local figures Guptill encountered was a man named Rémi who ran a small sawmill, sawing four-foot hardwood. Before Comeau had a chance to introduce them, Rémi slung an arm around Guptill and said something to her in his Acadian French. “He’s hugging me, he’s got his arm around me, very companionable and friendly – and then he realizes that I don’t understand, so he looks at Arcade. And Arcade’s there with his tobacco, chewing away, and the grin on his face just gets bigger,” recalls Guptill. “What Rémi had said to me, I learned later, was ‘And whose little boy are you?’ Because in the community here, everybody knows everybody; there are no strangers. He looked at Arcade, and then Arcade said, ‘Look again, Rémi!’ And Rémi has his arm around my neck, and without blinking an eye, his hand lifts up. Rémi realizes I’m a girl, and his hand flips up. That was absolutely hilarious. Rémi was another one of these old gentlemen who never, ever would dream of transgressing in any sexual way at all – would never dream of mistreating a woman.”

Learning about the unique patterns of land ownership in Clare was a key part of Guptill’s on-the-job training. “The average size was maybe 150 to 200 feet wide, and then three miles long,” she says, explaining that this made it important to coordinate small harvest jobs on several adjacent woodlots – marketing the wood collectively, and ensuring that each landowner got paid according to their share. Doing this fairly depended upon Comeau’s special talent for finding property boundaries.

“He showed me the old lines and he showed me how they healed – how you could tell the old blazes on the trees,” says Guptill. “You have to know the bearings; you can’t just go by the old marks. And you have to base it on knowledge of the owners and their genealogy, because a guy would have a piece of land that he’d divided between his two sons – so you’ve got a strip that was four chains wide, and it becomes two chains wide. And that’s tied in with the history, because maybe the lines didn’t get divided well or maybe they did – and he’d retain all that information.”

La Forêt was one of the eight original “group ventures” established under a federal-provincial program aimed at fostering sustainable management of small private woodlots in Nova Scotia – and after the funding ended in the 1990s, it was one of just a handful that remained in operation, though with reduced capacity. Comeau carried on, and by all accounts he did far more work than he was paid for. Only in the past year did he move toward retirement, as La Forêt was folded in with the Western Woodlot Services Cooperative. Guptill’s career with the group had ended in 1990 due to ongoing difficulties in finding childcare, but she remained a keen observer of changes in the community’s economy and its woodlands.

“People are starting to realize now that you can’t create a forest. You can’t clearcut and expect one to come back just like it was. More and more, there’s research being done about the interconnectedness of everything, and what that federal money allowed us to do was put a small amount in continually, to protect what was here,” she says. “They’re getting to be fewer and fewer, but there are still mixed-wood stands that have tall remnant trees in them that are over 200 years old – and they retain the gene pool, they retain lichen populations, they maintain mycorrhizal connections. Protecting them didn’t cost that much – just a small amount of subsidy so that we could do partial cut after partial cut after partial cut, with small equipment. And I don’t really think we’ve got a method yet that can replace that…. We are not putting any value on the things that we need to protect; we’re only putting values on the resources we extract, and that gives us trouble.” DL