7

ROOTS CONNECT IN VIEUX MONTRÉAL

Family trees, like trees in the forest, find ways of connecting at their roots. Botanists know how this happens in groves of our leafy kin: through underground networks of threadlike filaments called mycelium. These ethereal fibers are part of fungi that live symbiotically with their aboveground companions. These fungi supply nutrients and moisture to trees and receive nourishment in exchange.

Mycelium also transmit information that flows throughout the forest. When pests such as caterpillars first begin to attack, the forestwide web of mycelium fibers conveys chemical signals from tree to tree warning of a coming threat. The messages even specify the type of threat and the best organic substances for neighboring trees to use as natural repellents.¹

Trees also share nutrient resources through their underground root connections. That is why sometimes, when a mature tree is cut in the forest, its stump, although unable to engage in photosynthesis, survives for many years, as if nourished by those life-sustaining intravenous drip bags that we see in a hospital. Trees don’t use plastics, though; they rely on their interconnected roots and mycelium networks. This inspiring phenomenon becomes visible above ground when we see a ring of new green stems around the outside of an old stump. It is called crowning because the new green growth looks as if someone has placed a leafy crown upon the cut stump.

In the same cooperative manner, seedlings from mother trees await their turn to reach skyward, not competing with their elders until it is time for the ancient ones to walk on. Foresters have noticed that seedlings dwarf themselves, biding time for many years with halted growth, then shooting skyward when it is time to take their place among the families of trees in a mountainside ecosystem. As they mature, these younger trees continue the communal efforts. They too become connected, share nourishment, produce information, and share it with others, not only with their own species, but even with distant cousins. Some of these forest communities of interconnected trees and fungi are thousands of years old, functioning continuously as one living organism. Some massive living organisms in the Pacific Northwest of the United States are so old that their existence may predate the appearance of humans in the Western Hemisphere. Who can even begin to guess what stories they could tell, if only we knew how to listen and connect like the fungi?

I experienced the human equivalent of connected ancient tree roots in Montréal, Canada, and in particular in the network I found in Old Montréal, named, appropriately for my story, in French as “Vieux Montréal.” For Native Americans, names are important; we are expected to find guidance or inspiration in our names. So it is not surprising that Vieux Montréal lived up to its name for my family.

What is surprising is that the ancient roots of my family tree in Montréal survived for centuries. And then, in their version of a crowning touch, they regenerated and became visible like the ancient cottonwood I discovered along Lac-Saint-Louis, on the Lachine Route Verte bike path.

For me, Montréal’s bike path network acts like mycelium in the forest. It creates delicate connections, regenerating a spiritual life that has long lain dormant and is now crowning. Through this network Carolyn and I have discovered nourishment: offbeat cafés, restaurants, healthy neighborhood food markets. We reciprocate, as when we donate to the Maison Ronde, a café in a park that we discovered along the downtown section of the bike path. Le Café de la Maison Ronde serves and supports homeless First Nations urban nomads. And it has provided information to us: through posters about exhibitions in Montréal by and about First Nations peoples, with books on First Nations people in its free lending library, and through chance encounters with caring individuals who are helping displaced indigenous people to cope with urban life. Just like the slow communications of tree roots and mycelium, which take hours or days to deliver information, getting connected on the bike route requires getting into the slow lane and taking time to listen in tree time.

Fig. 7.1. Crowned stump

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The Montréal part of my journey homeward begins when Jacques Vieux (1757–1852), a French Canadian fur trapper, or voyageur, and my great-great-great-great-grandfather, appeared in my life. Like many of my accounts, the unfolding of this sequence of events involves time that is circular or spiral, rather than linear and unidirectional, flowing from past to present and future. Sometimes my understanding unfolds by looping back to previous events and memories in our family history, snatching them up, and then bearing them vibrantly into the present as if they were occurring now. Events in family history can open our minds and spirits to possibilities lying before us now and in the future. Reimagined futures then open doors to reconnecting with and interrogating the past, and thus the cycle continues. Having cycled through such a process repeatedly, I can affirm that it is still possible to maintain a rational sense of linear, calendar time, while simultaneously having a wonderful sense of a conflation of past, present, and future.

This chapter in my story begins with an innocuous tourist adventure.

When Carolyn and I moved to Vermont at the turn of the millennium, we began to bicycle on back roads for exercise and relaxation. As a result we tuned in to discussions about good, better, and safer biking trails. Then a folk singer at a Vermont coffeehouse we frequented dropped a casual comment about where he was headed after his gig—to a bike trail along the Chambly Canal in southern Québec Province. He made it sound intriguing, safe, and culturally rich.

Some weeks later, we drove north and tried this totally off-road bike route, a former towpath between the Chambly Canal on one side and the Richelieu River on the other. Within a few years we were exploring hundreds of miles of Route Verte, Québec’s world-class bicycle network. We remained “just tourists” for over a decade. Canada was our getaway, a disconnect from the demands of home and a home office. We learned that escaping from our daily routine opens gates to connecting with other levels of experience. Being in another culture was enriching and reminded us that there are social realities beyond those we sometimes struggle with.

Eventually one of our favorite destinations became a bike route along another historic Québec canal and river: the Lachine Canal bike route, which runs from the center of Montréal westward to Lac-Saint-Louis, formed by the St. Lawrence River at the arrondissement of Lachine. There we found Chez Charlotte, a cozy bed-and-breakfast that became a kind of bicycling home away from home. The unfamiliar was slowly becoming the familiar.

Lachine received its name from the fact that the St. Lawrence rapids nearby stopped the seventeenth-century explorer René-Robert La Salle as he attempted to find a northwest passage to Asia. In mockery of his failure to get beyond the treacherous rapids, the settlement created here became known as La Chine, the French word for “China.”

Efforts such as those of La Salle, and Columbus, were motivated by economic considerations and a desire to find an alternate route to the Orient. This is how the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere came to be known as Indians, a misnomer applied to the people Columbus encountered upon landing in Hispaniola, which he initially mistook for India.

The conflation of American Indians and Asian Indians is an important part of my journey of discovery in Montréal. It became central when we encountered the Asian Indian artist Manjit Singh Chatrik in an open square just off the bike path in Vieux Montréal, at the eastern end of our canal bike route. Manjit is one of many artists who have small kiosks to display their wares for tourists at the center of the Vieux Port tourist destination. Manjit initially attracted our attention because he paints, among other things, marvelous portraits of Native Americans in vibrant colors—true Asian Indian colors from an Indian palette. He was also warm and friendly, and spoke eloquently about his art and its meaning.

On the day of our first encounter with Manjit, we bicycled back toward our bed-and-breakfast in Lachine. It is about an hour ride. As we biked along, I was mulling over images of Native Americans we had seen in his display. I was also thinking about the condominium advertising sign I had seen earlier the previous morning while riding to the supermarket for breakfast supplies. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the sign in front of a modernistic building just two blocks from our bed-and-breakfast. It inspired me to imagine having a permanent residence in Montréal, a place we could come to and leave at will, without the hassle of making reservations in a busy tourist season, without working around weather. I persuaded Carolyn to look at the building and investigate just “to keep our minds open to new opportunities.” We had stopped by the condo sales office and picked up a brochure. The whole encounter was initially in the spirit of a travel fantasy, like imaginary trips people plan while reading a travel magazine.

With images of colorful paintings and imagined new living quarters spinning through my mind, we neared Lachine and Chez Charlotte. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a gathering of people on the steps of a beautiful nineteenth-century stone cathedral, Saints Anges. It is a bit off the bike path, and we would have missed the group of people had we not, for some reason, left the designated trail and taken the less safe sidewalk for the last few hundred meters of our return trip.

Carolyn and I had heard of classical music concerts being held there, but we had never attended one. A crowd on this particular Sunday suggested to me that this might be such a concert, and our opportunity to explore. I stopped rather abruptly, nearly causing a family biking accident, and looked at my watch. It was five to the hour. I asked Carolyn if she would be interested in going to a concert if this was indeed what the crowd signaled. She suggested we check it out.

After chaining our bikes to a sign, we had to run to the entrance and discovered that the concert was free. The music program was wonderfully varied, and included opera excerpts and Beethoven’s Fifth performed by a chamber orchestra. This was not just a serendipitous discovery; it was a musical miracle. I love the Fifth, and as often as it is played, I do not tire of it.

We quickly found our seats in a pew and were panting, out of breath from rushing, and for me, partly from the exhilaration. I had just feasted my eyes on beautiful artwork, bicycled along a safe path by a historic canal, which is my recreational delight, and was now about to enjoy great music.

Indeed the youthful chamber orchestra was inspiring, playing a familiar piece of classical music, risking changes in tempo that teased and played on listeners’ expectations. The very familiar became fresh and new.

During the intermission, I looked up at the nineteenth-century Baroque-style painted ceiling in the church and pointed out the celestial composition of angels. I commented to Carolyn, “I think they, and this music, are trying to tell us something about that condo.” The spontaneous, semifacetious utterance shocked me. I was not having a religious conversion experience, with angels actually talking to me. I was grasping for words adequate to express an overwhelming sense of beckoning that had been building the entire day. Perhaps Carolyn understood, as, surprisingly, I did not receive a rebuke from my very secular companion. She responded with a gentle, tolerant, bemused eye roll.

We were giddy kids, decades younger than our calendar years, when we finally rode the final half kilometer back to our B and B after the concert. The short distance was a delightful affirmation that we could experience world-class music just minutes from our now familiar lodging, and I began to allow myself to secretly fantasize living more than just occasionally in a more permanent home away from home.

The details of how a fantasy became a reality are of secondary importance. What matters is that while we were waiting for the building to be completed and our little apartment to be finished, we more intensively explored Lachine. And that is how we made the French connection. It occurred just a few hundred meters from the church where we had attended our fateful concert. We were bicycling along the familiar path when we noticed a small stone building on the shore of Lac-Saint-Louis, just a few meters off the trail. It was here that we began to discover a more personal version of Vieux Montréal.

The small and ancient building with its welcoming Ouvert (open) sign is the Lachine Fur Museum, a wonderful exhibition explaining the history of French colonization and how it initially depended financially on trading furs with indigenous people. It also presented a wealth of information about the lives and challenges facing the voyageurs, the French fur traders. Over the course of several visits we learned about the competing French and English fur companies. I began to resurrect vague memories of my ancestor, who was purportedly a fur trader.

Then I began to really dig into Vieux family history. Almost immediately, bits of family folklore became uncannily real and within my reach. The fur company that my ancestor worked with had operated out of the building that was now the Lachine Fur Museum. It was their warehouse for furs. My voyageur relative had almost certainly spent time working and walking on the grounds we biked over routinely, since in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Lachine was a collection of fur warehouses and trading markets. Then it dawned on me. We had moved into the neighborhood of my ancestor’s workplace. I could not help wondering if it was not just the celestial images and classical music that beckoned me home to Lachine, but also his spirit at work.

Details of Jacques Vieux’s life prove fascinating. Born near Montréal in 1757, he first became a coureur des bois^*5 among the indigenous people. Soon thereafter he became a voyageur, attaching himself to a variety of large fur companies. He quickly became a leading figure in this world of commerce, opening new routes and alliances far west of Montréal. In 1786, he married into a family of French Menominee descent. They had familial connections with the Potawatomi, who at the time were established in the Great Lakes region. That is how the European side of our family first established its link with Native Americans.

Vieux Montréal attracted my mother as well. In her final years she sometimes joined us on our trips north, where she delighted in staying in a historic eighteenth-century inn in Vieux Montréal. It was furnished in eighteenth-century French furniture, both authentic and reproductions, including giant four-poster beds. Candlelit breakfasts by a fireplace seemed like a dreamy step into a lost past. My mother even bought a fur coat in Vieux Montréal. She almost never had occasion to wear it; global warming denied her the need, and she also felt a bit awkward displaying this sign of affluence. What might seem like evidence of an older woman’s indulgent lifestyle might have been something else. I think it was her connection to our fur trapper ancestor, a gateway that was unconsciously opening for her at the time.

Montréal became my mother’s favorite city, eclipsing even her lifelong love affair with New York and the many European cities she had enjoyed as a tourist. I think that in her final years, she too sensed something welcoming and familiar, even familial, about Vieux Montréal.

On her last trip, my mother had a chance encounter with Manjit. It was autumn, well after the tourist season, and we took a short walk after breakfast to the square at the heart of the old port. It was where Manjit sold his art in warmer months. But the artists’ kiosks had been closed for many weeks, and I lamented that she would not meet him. As I pointed to the little buildings and explained that this was where the paintings in our house and on her walls came from, we saw an older man in a turban. Manjit had chosen that morning to drive into Montréal and pick up some items remaining in his stall. He was stunned to see me and was overjoyed to meet my mother. He explained that he was there for no more than twenty minutes and was convinced that this was yet another example of how our lives had become entangled by one chance encounter after another.

When my mother died, we were planning another trip to Montréal. Just as I was about to call and cancel our reservations at the inn she loved, I received an email notifying me that the magical hotel would be closing soon. It had been sold. A window in time had opened to welcome my mother, with a touch of her family history, just as Lachine was becoming a doorway for me.

In recent years, Vieux Montréal and its connection to Lachine have proved to be a continual and increasing source of knowledge about my ancestry and also a wellspring of inspiration. Our Lachine location has kept us within range of the Kahnawake Mohawk radio station and its reminders of the struggle to keep indigenous heritage alive. The same radio station allows us to listen to a spoken Indian language and to remember how fragile this linguistic thread is. We hear about events of interest on the station’s news, and enjoy interviews with various First Nations artists, musicians, writers, and performers. Because we now drive through the Kahnawake reserve on our way to Lachine, stopping there for a meal or yet another visit to the shrine of Mohawk Catholic saint Kateri Tekakwitha, it has become part of our frequent pilgrimage to Québec. Even when we are not at Kateri’s shrine, I can see its church steeple from our balcony and it reminds me of who I am.

The hours, weeks, and sleepless nights I have invested in trying to fully grasp the wonderful mystery of Kateri have opened an illuminating and dogma-challenging window into the fraught world of Christian-Indian relations. Now, as I read about the great medicine man Black Elk, and efforts to make him a Catholic saint, I approach such matters with layers of intellectual understanding and a personally rooted experience of the intersection of distinct cultures.

For me, Jacques Vieux and Vieux Montréal are a critical part of my wandering home. But for others, non-Native Americans, I hope it is an example of how we may all reconnect with our ancestors if only we are willing to open the gates.