Wavell

Serenity in the Spruce
Whatever it was called, Wavell always was a gem in the wilderness
"Wavell wobbles, but it won't fall down"

What is it about the northern spirit that allows a community - or the remnants of a community - to survive long after there is a
rational reason for its pulse to keep throbbing? Why is there still a Shillington, where the logging industry has been nothing but a
memory for more than half a century, and why is there a Wavell, where once was a school and a train station, a post office and a
merchant?

Wavell once called Scottish Landing or Scotty Spring, because an itinerant Scottish prospector named Sandy McIntyre once squatted there in 1906, but why, after a disastrous windstorm - some say it was a tornado - the middle of the 20th century, did the handful of residents simply shrug their shoulders and rebuild, and remain, daring, as survivors often do, the elements and the forest fires and the reality of economics to crush them?

They do it, says Don Deering, born and bred in Wavell, a survivor of the tornado, an outdoorsman and gentleman and consummate blueberry picker, because like Shillington, like Monteith, like Val Gagné, Ramore and Holtyre, Wavell, to somebody, somewhere, is home.

There was once a man, a charming, delightful and educated representative of a major paper company, who traveled northeastern Ontario and northwestern Québec calling on clients between Temagami and Hearst and between Chapleau and Senneterre and La Sarre and Ville Marie, and twice a week between 1954 and his retirement in 1973, he would drive unseeingly past the little sign near North Butler Lake Road, near Mt. Kempis which at various times was home for television towers and microwave towers and forest fire reporting stations.

In 19 years, he never once turned onto the well-maintained concession road to see what there was in this mysterious little place called Wavell. This salesman, who so loved people, who so loved history and who so loved his northeastern Ontario, went to his eternal rest in 2000 without so much as an inkling in his mind that Wavell was as historical a little settlement as has ever existed in the once unforgiving boreal forest of northeastern Ontario.

He would have loved to spend an afternoon with Wilbert and Lois, he a wood craftsman, she a housewife who says, "If you want history, talk to my husband. I'm a newcomer, an immigrant from Belleville. I've only been here 50 years."

From the little woodworking shop, from out of the lingering aroma of sawn pine and lathed spruce, walks a man with a somewhat shy expression yet with the warm crinkling around the eyes that suggests that he's more than a little pleased that someone would take the time to come to his little wood craft shop a kilometre or so off Highway 11, a kilometre or so from the tarmac and the convoys of $100,000 transport trucks and tour buses and high-priced and fast-paced SUVs and luxurious pickups towing motor homes the size of small motels and boats the size of west coast fishing trawlers, only a kilometre in distance, but an immeasurable distance in terms of lifestyle, of contentment, of serenity.

Wavell is a place the 20th and 21st century has bypassed. Yet it remains the kind of world just about all humanity pays wistful homage to - the Bay Street stockbroker, the high-powered gold mine manager, the suburban investment counselor who spends four hours a day commuting to a high-paying job that takes up 80 hours a week just so enough money is earned to keep up the payments on the Muskoka cottage that's seldom even visited because the family is just too busy working to pay for it.

Wavell is the reality of the dream of relaxed country living. Wavell is the reality of unlocked doors, of tumbledown schoolhouses and train stations, of young executives being dragged from the metropolitan suburbs to this vast and mysterious northland by parents who want them to appreciate their roots. There are roots in Wavell, and no community could ask for a greater legacy.

Wilbert extends his hand, then pulls it back quickly realizing he hasn't yet wiped the sawdust off onto his white t-shirt, then extends it again and says quietly, "I was born in 1923. My father took my mother into Ramore, and that's where I was born, but I've been here on this land and on my father's land next door for more than 75 years. This is home, and I've never been hungry."
Wilbert said his father came to what was called Wavell in 1919, fueled by an adventurous spirit, a reduced fare on the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway, a 160-acre land allowance for a paltry 50 cents an acre and a $600 bonus for starting a new life in New Ontario.

Most of the people who came up were Polish and Russian, Wilbert says. His surname is Van Clieaf, neither Russian nor Polish, but Dutch, and he notes with some amusement the Polish and Russian communities have dwindled to almost nothing, but the Van Clieaf name is still proudly affixed to the rural mailbox across the gravel road, sharing space with the mailbox of the Druer farm family, who are nowhere to be seen.

There is a crumbling heap of a shack on the Druer property, and Wilbert says it was once used to house some small livestock - maybe a few pigs - but it's in such a state of disrepair that it hardly looks safe even for the field mice that might be nestling in the old hay strewn about the floor.

There is a distant quality to Wilbert's expression, just for a moment, as he looks across the road, past the Druer's camper van, to the little building with the rotting roof boards and with a little remnant or two of tarpaper flapping in the wind. He's remembering, not something terrible, not something romantic, just remembering.

"That used to be our train station," he says. "It used to sit right down the road, across the bridge, right by the tracks. As he speaks, as he begins to talk of the reality his father faced in 1919 when he left the sugar bush hardwood forests of Bracebridge, Ontario, to come north to this 'God-forsaken country of blackflies" that he loved until the end, of getting off the train and not seeing a farm, but only the endless, heaving spruce and jack pine and aspen forest that would have to be tamed tree by tree in order to clear some arable land, and of how the train proved to be a salvation to settlers because it would haul the four-foot lengths of harvested spruce to the paper mill in Iroquois Falls, the peace and quiet is disturbed momentarily.

The sound is unmistakable, the deep-throated and guttural rumble of a pair of General Electric GP-30 diesels hauling another load of Kidd Creek metallurgical site products from the Timmins operation, hauling paper products from mills in Iroquois Falls, Smooth Rock Falls and Kapuskasing. Wilbert pauses, listens to the rumble, then stares toward the unseen rail line just a few hundred metres beyond the trees and beyond the meandering Black River, waiting for the raucous sound of the train's horn.

And when it comes, one short blast followed by two long, it is a reassuring sound, but not as reassuring as it once was, when a Wavell passenger could stand outside the station by the tracks and flag down the 4-6-2 Pacific Class streamlined Temiskaming and Northern Ontario steam engine to get a ride into Ramore to the north or Bourques to the south, maybe just to visit friends, maybe to get a few groceries, maybe just for the ride.

The train, neither the freights nor the Northlander passenger train the speeds by in the morning heading south and in the evening heading north, doesn't stop at Wavell anymore. Not much, actually, stops in Wavell. Traveling salesmen don't come in because there's no store, itinerant preachers don't come in because there's no church and the few families remaining have cars or trucks, and not many people traveling the Highway 11 corridor would have even heard of Van's Wood Craft unless they were regular visitors to the Matheson Flea Market on summer Saturdays.

"My father, like the other settlers, came here to open up the north," said Wilbert. "To this day I don't understand why he would leave the beautiful hardwoods around Bracebridge to come up to a wilderness that was still dense bush and flies and mosquitoes. But it gets in your blood - I've been here for 75 years and I can't think of living anywhere else."

His father cleared enough land to put up the requisite 16'x20' log dwelling, and cleared enough of the land to get established with a cow or two for milk, and a few chickens for meat and eggs, and maybe a pig, but the rest of the money came from cutting the wood.

What wasn't cut into four-foot lengths for the Abitibi mill in Iroquois Falls and loaded onto flatcars that the T&NO had left on the Wavell siding was cut into 16-foot lengths, skidded to the Black River in the winter, left on the ice until it melted in the spring, then driven down to the St-Aubin or another sawmill in Ramore.

Wilbert's father didn't have a team of horses for the first couple of years, but he eventually got a team that he trained to walk the banks of the river and haul a raft out in mid-stream, but that noble experiment ended when one of the skittish animals was out of synch with his cohort on the other bank one day and the raft flipped.

There are flower baskets hanging from the overhang of the little deck outside the back porch, the lawn is neatly trimmed, even the fields, lush in their mid-summer verdant splendour, look carefully manicured in that typically efficient Dutch drive for maximizing the natural beauty of their surroundings wherever they are.

Wilbert, delighted to show a visitor his wood creations - he has exquisite pine hope chests carefully stored in one shop, along with a custom-made canvas covered cedar canoe and a similar rowboat, and he grumbles good-naturedly about some of the furniture repairs he's been asked to do, especially refinishing jobs where the owner or collector of an old dresser or hutch has acquired a piece that has been defiled by a paint brush.

"I will never understand why people cover up the beautiful natural grain of wood with paint," he muttered.

Back in the yard, in front of his work shop, he looks across the gravel road to the Duer's farm, and recalls how his sister once used to live there - she was Wavell's postmistress for s number of years although the original post office was opened by the Desrosiers family in 1921 - and how she used to go down to the little train station, winter and summer, and wait for the train to pass, leaving as it rumbled by a sack of His Majesty's Mail on the hooked arm of a mechanical mail catcher. She'd retrieve the mail, sort it, and return the bag to the hook for the next train, and she'd repeat the process the next day.

Wilbert, along with as many as 76 other students, attended school in Wavell, as did most other children in the region known today as Black River-Matheson. Each concession had one or two schools on different roads - Beatty Township, Currie Centre, Carr Township, Anthony, Hooker's Creek, Vimy Ridge - they all had schools, and Wavell was no different.

Wilbert and his siblings and friends would not follow the concession road to the school two miles to the south, they walk over fields and forests to the little structure, it's one room sweltering in the summer even though it was in a grove of spruce and pine, and warm and cozy in the winter with the little stove fed regularly with fuel cut by the farmers and stoked by the teacher.

There is not much to indicate the school was a major part of anyone's life today. It's weathered gray, the wood aged, in many places covered by ugly painted pieces of tin, a new roof made from what looks like a hodge-podge of scrap metal of different shades and sizes, the work done a summer or two ago by some hunters that use it as a hunt camp on occasion. And while it looks as if a pine cone from a towering white pine in the school yard would reduced the old structure to rubble if it fell on the roof in just the right place, the door to the hall of learning is amazingly locked tight with a shiny, new Yale padlock.

"In some ways, Wavell was incredibly lucky when my father arrived," said Wilbert. "He came up here just three years after the great Matheson fire of 1916, but the fire burned itself out or changed direction before it got here. The community was small, but it was able to survive."

Wavell still survives. As long as there is that green sign that points to the east with the notation "Wavell Rd" spelled out in that prototypical Ontario highway sign color scheme, as long as there are those two Bailey Bridges and the one wooden bridge over the wandering Black River, which seems monumentally directionally challenged at times, as long as there is a Polish flag hanging in the shed window of a family farm belonging to the Lindsay's, as long as those endless steel rails stretch out to the north and to the south and the whistles of the twin GP-30's hang in the stillness of the air long after the train has gone and as long as there is the hardy pioneer spirit of gentle souls like Wilbert and Lois Van Clieaf, there will always be what there always has been - peace, quiet and serenity, in one of the backbone communities of Back River-Matheson, the little gem known as Wavell.

Story written and copyrighted by Richard Buell.

To reach Wavell turn east off of Highway 11 onto Wavell Road. The gravel road will split into two forks. The left fork crosses the Black River and leads to a clearing with occupied homes. The right fork leads to the old town site.

* In the middle of the 1900's Wavell also had a Department of Lands and Forests fire tower lookout on the nearby hill. Many of Ontario's ghost towns listed on here had fire towers located in or near them, such as: Pakesley, Key Junction, Dufferin Bridge, Pickerel Landing, Lost Channel, Byng Inlet, Cheddar, Germania, Ormsby, Uphill, Biscostasing, Milnet, Armstrong, Metagama and Pineal Lake . For more info. on Ontario's Fire Tower Lookouts go to this link: Ontario's Fire Tower Lookouts.