Once We All Had Gills: Growing Up Evolutionist in an Evolving World

2. Layers of the Past

15 Layers of the Past Histories Mymother,ThereseDufresne,wasthedaughterofawell-likedlocalphysician , Albert Dufresne, who practiced from 1930 onward in Shawinigan and the surrounding countryside. His house calls could mean anything, including grueling trips into the backcountry by horse-drawn sled or canoe. By the time he retired, my grandfather had delivered or treated mostofthelivingcitizensofthetown.Heonceestimatedthathehaddelivered eight thousand Shawinigan babies. In 1966 he was made a Commandeur de l’Ordre de Saint-Gregoire-le-Grand, a papal award for his charitable acts to his many patients unable to pay in hard times. A street in Shawinigan now bears his name. Going to visit Shawinigan during summer vacations was the highlight of my early life. Shamefully, it was not because I liked spending an entire vacation in my grandparents’ rather formal house. I was too energetic for that. What I cherished most was any time I could spend out in the woods at a lake. My Uncle Gérard Dufresne’s family had a remote cottage on Lac des Îlles, where on one visit I was impressed to see the hole where an enterprising bear had clawed its way through a soil-filled double-log wall into the icehouse. What a frisson to realize that wooden doorswouldbeaspapertohungrybears(notthattheybotheredcottages with people around). Most of my cottage experience though was at Lac Souris (Mouse Lake–had they run out of better names?). Here the vast Quebec forest lapped the edge of civilization. On the far side of the lake, inaccessible from the end of the rutted lake road, my uncle Guy Ricard two 16 Becoming a Naturalist (thehusbandofmymother’ssisterMargot)andmygrandfatherhadbuilt a summer cottage. To get to the cottage from the road head, we would uncover my grandfather’s old motorboat, drag it over the wet sand into the shallows, load up supplies and gas, and push off with battered oars to get into water deep enough to lower the outboard. Then, with some boat rocking, repeated pulls of the starter cable finally got the balky engine going. We’d head off at two miles per hour in a cloud of fragrant blue smoke. If there were just the two of us, I’d be allowed to run the engine and steer with my grandfather’s nervous guidance. Once steady, I could throttle up enough to leave a discernable wake across the usually glassy surface. I have a photograph of one of those days–me a skinny ten year old wearing an oversized old raincoat of my grandfather’s belted around my waist, he with his inevitable cigar in his mouth. The center of Lac Souris had a darkness and chill born of what we children thought of as an immeasurable depth. With the green conifer wilderness, the lake beckoned with promised mysteries and adventure. The cottage sat just a short distance from a yellow sand beach with an ebb and flow of glittering golden mica flakes that played in the ripples. My daily companion in splashing around was my cousin Pierre Ricard. Every day was an unlimited and unsupervised opportunity for swimming in that frigid lake–an option we exercised fully. Of course, we didn’t know any better than to shed body heat into the cold water till we emerged shivering, numb, and clammy. We’d quickly change in the attic and warm up by the stove. There was no electricity. The only drinking water came from a rusty hand pump that had to be primed with water fromapaileachtime itwasused.Thewellwateritbroughtuphadapowerfulandnastymineraltastethatweweretoldwasgoodforus .Andthere was plenty of practical entomology–black flies in June, horseflies in August , and humming clouds of mozzies to fill in for the rest of summer. Pierre’s sister Michelle reminds me that Pierre and I made the youngersibsandcousinsplayextremehideandseekgamesinthewoods, andinonesuchgame we ambushedthemwithanavalancheofboulders. My brother tells me it was a giant log we cast down–something several feet long that crashed through the foliage. I remember the avalanche as a little heap of gravel and small cobbles pushed off a six-foot bank at the edge of a wide logging trail, all to the accompaniment of what we Layers of the Past 17 thought were convincing bear noises. That kind of play between ages seems a universal. Beth, also an oldest child, has told me that in her farm summers she and her older cousins kept the younger kids in her family from wanting to share in riding horseback by making their mounts Gypsy, Topper, and Molly ostentatiously buck by pulling in...