Exhibit: Arbe/moi – The Hackmatack

Arbe/moi was a year-long project involving 40 artists and organized by Elizabeth Whalley with the financial assistance of the MRC des Pays-d’en-Haut and the Municipality of Morin Heights in Québec. Workshops took place in libraries in Sainte-Adèle, Saint-Sauveur, Morin-Heights and Wentworth-North, as well as in Galerie L’Apostrophe and L’Échelon des Pays-d’en-Haut.

The exhibition took place April 19-23 at the Chalet Bellevue in Morin Heights. QC. It will continue in Sainte-Adèle from May 4 to June 23 at the Musée Zénon Alary and Galerie l’Apostrophe, both located in the Mont-Rolland in the Laurentians, north of Montréal.

Art & text by John Pohl

Part I

I lived in rural Nova Scotia between the ages of 25 and 32, with my wife Helen. Two of our daughters were born there. There are many beautiful landscapes there: forests, fields, and of course, the beaches and coastlines pounded by the Atlantic Ocean.

But I was drawn to the wetlands the natives called savannah. They occupy large areas and are full of grasses, brown and yellow most of year, with a rust accent in the fall. I noticed that at the edges of the savannah, where the ground rises to become forest, scattered about the masses of spruce trees were taller spindly trees. The tops of these thin, straight trees are bent over, as if bowing in mock salute to the spruces. The tree is the tamarack, also known as a larch, but I learned in Nova Scotia to call them hackmatacks.

I felt a strong connection with the hackmatack, perhaps because I have looked down (physically) on most people all my life, especially in my youth. When I was in kindergarten, I was ambushed by three older kids as I walked home from school. The kids wanted to fight me, but soon realized that I was much younger than them. They were in third grade, and I was as tall or taller than them.

Last summer I joined an art project in Morin Heights called Arbe/moi, run by the artist Elizabeth Whalley. We were asked to choose a tree and describe our relationship to that particular tree in words and drawings, with the goal of developing an exhibition next spring.

I chose the hackmatack, in particular the one that I brought home from Nova Scotia as a sapling 33 years ago. It is now a one of a small forest of too-tall trees in my front and side yards in Longueuil.

My hackmatack is unique in my neighbourhood. It is a deciduous conifer, meaning it has soft needles that that turn a golden yellow in the fall, and drop to the ground. It is filled with little cones, and in spring, small pink and white flowers burst out.

My wife’s cousins in Nova Scotia had told me that the hackmatack was used for ship’s masts in the days of sail. This seemed plausible since the tree is supple and strong – it sways in the wind, but it never seems to be one of the trees knocked over in a hurricane.

But it turned out that the cousins were wrong: I visited two boatbuilder museums in September, one in the town of Shelburne, the other in an Acadian village in Pubnico, on the French shore of Nova Scotia. Guides in both museums denied my long-held belief that ships’ masts were constructed from hackmatack. Masts were built of spruce, they claimed to my dismay.

Both of the guides build boats in their museum workshops and sell them at the end of the season. The boat they build is the humble dory, a small sturdy, wide-bottomed oar-driven wooden boat that, in the old days, the big fishing schooners put overboard every morning with two or three men aboard. The “fishers” spent the day dropping long lines of baited hooks into the water,  hauling them back in later, hopefully with a fish on each hook.

The hackmatack did have a vital role in dory construction. As a tree that grows in wet areas, it is highly resistant to rot. Its wood holds the dory together, connecting the bottom of the dory to its sides. This key piece of the boat is called the knee.

The boatbuilder guide in the Acadian museum said the knee is made from a single piece of hackmatack: The bottom of the trunk and the top of the root that curves away from the trunk and grows almost perpendicular to it, close to the surface. Boatbuilders, he said, trained the hackmatack to grow a bigger, stronger root on one side of the tree by cutting limbs from the opposite side of the trunk.

But the boatbuilders of Shelburne made a much less elegant knee. Making a knee by “stapling” a piece of the hackmatack’s root to a board cut from the lower trunk was a much quicker way to build a dory, the guide said, and allowed the several Shelburne dory shops to become major suppliers of the boats. Perhaps not coincidentally, the fish-laden schooners usually set the dories adrift at the end of a season, or even after a trip or two. Shelburne’s factory boats were cheap enough to discard.

I could only shake my head, sadly, at this travesty of craftsmanship. I’m sure the Acadian dories are still afloat, somewhere.