Honourary lumberjack

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From chainsaws to feller-bunchers, river drives to truck hauls, Marcel Barriault has seen it all

Posted By Mark Gentili

Posted 1 month ago

Seventy-nine-year-old Marcel Barriault now spends his summers relaxing in his trailer at Twin Lakes, but 50 years ago he would have spent his summer in the bush, a place he knows well, having spent his entire working life in the forests around Kapuskasing.

Today, he looks back fondly on those days before machinery automated much of the work that was formerly done by teams of men and horses.

"It was a tough job, hard work, and it was hard on a man," he told The Times last week. "There were 1,500 guys in the bush when I came up here, now there's maybe 150."

He came "up here" from Gaspé in 1950, following his older brother Charles Barriault (who opened Barriault's pit at the end of Ash Street). He spent his first winter hauling wood for a contractor named George Therrien, before being hired on by Spruce Falls at the end of 1951.

"It was Dec. 28 and we were making ice roads," Mr. Barriault recalled.

An aptitude for driving and machinery saw the man at the wheel of just about any kind of engine the forest industry had on the go at the time. Trucks, timberjacks, backhoes, skidders and graders...if it had an engine, Mr. Barriault could drive it.

"When I started, there were horses in the bush in '51, and a little bit of chainsaw, then I saw the change," he said.

"The change" of course is the advent of machine-driven logging instead of what had been the traditional method — sending teams of men and horses into the bush in the winter to cut timber. It was hard, sometimes dangerous work, but Mr. Barriault said he loved the job, recalling that he remembers many accidents, but only one death. He also recalled many moments of hilarity.

"One time at Camp 37 in the spring. There were lots of bears, and we didn't have fridges so the meat was all kept in the meathouse," he said. Naturally, bears were drawn to the odour of the meat and would find ways to get at it, which annoyed the men to no end. "A guy brought a gun one day and said if a bear goes in the meathouse, he was going to shoot it. He goes looking for the bear behind the shack, but the bear was following him around about five feet behind him. We laughed and told him. He turned around, dropped that gun and started to run."

He said the 38 years he spent with Spruce Falls went by fast, but he said he enjoys that the Lumberjack Heritage Festival des bûcherons honours the work of the men who opened the north. In particular, he enjoys the heavy horsepull, he said.

Mr. Barriault married his wife Estelle on Oct. 10, 1953. The couple has one daughter, Carole (Davitsky), and the family still calls Kapuskasing, the Model Town of the North, their home.

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