The Big Seige 1952 – Stokes Bay, Ontario, Canada

An Excerpt From “The Bruce Beckons” by Dr. W. Sherwood Fox

“The setting of the stirring action I am now about to describe is Tamarac Island in Stokes Bay, site of the Tamarac Club. The island is a narrow ridge of limestone rising thirty feet above the surrounding water and has a length of half a mile. An excellent example of the carving power of ice, it lies with itslong axis pointing straight into the southwest along the path of the glaciers themselves. On its western side and parallel to its extends a shallow glacial trough which at its south end broadens out into a spacious beaver meadow. Trough and meadow together hold enough water to form a large lagoon which, were it not for the regular churning of the “tide,” would be hopelessly stagnant. Not far from the north end of the island the channel that divides it from the mainland contracts to the neck of water about fifty feet wide. Here, back in the eighties, lumbermen threw across the little strait two long, stout pine trunks as stringers to carry the planked floor of a bridge strong enough to bear the weight of the most heavily laden wagons. In the process of providing each end of the structure with an abuntment of rough stone the builders narrowed the passage to twenty feet. This had the unforeseen effect of amplifying several times the force of the seiche as it rushed back and forth between the lagoon and the bay. Since the channel at this neck is a least ten feet deep the volume of water passing through it is very great and is as sensitive to the slightest variations of pressure as is a thermostat to fine changes in temperture. Its quickness to register them is clear to any one who looks into the water from the bridge. Nowhere else in the Great Lakes have I ever found a spot where one can view so convincingly the reality, the constancy, and the irresistible power of the secondary seiche of a freshwater sea.

Now our scutiny of this eternal flux and reflux is more than an academic pastime. It is of practical import to angler and navigator. Long has the little strait by Tamarac Island been famous in this region as a gathering place of the black bass. The constant agitation o fthe current charges the water with oxygen and the fish throng there for a breathing spree. The stories of fabulous catches made in the narrows by loggers and swyers of the threescore years ago are not just reports of actual fact magnified by the memories of what might have been. For that, I have the word of one who, in later life a bishop, was in those early days a member of the timber gangs who cast their angles from the bridge when the day’s work was over. In his late teens he was in the employ of his father, a master lumberman, on Tamarac Island. Many a leisure evening did the young man pleasantly spend in whipping the reversing waters. At times so richly were his efforts rewarded that the good bishop still fears to cite the true figures lest he be regarded as just an ordinary fisherman – just one of the common guild who suffer from chronic inflation of the faculty of calculation. Not a word more would he say than this – with a convincing smile: “The rosiest of the tales of fishing here in the old days are all true.” He smiled again when I told him that even in these lean days of angling the bass still congregate by the bridge.

The day of the Great Tide! And many there are who remember it. Two aspects of it stand out in their memory above all others: their amazement that a scene of such violence as one usually associates with a tempestuous ocean could take place on an inland lake; their fears at the thought of the stupendous damage that this strange phenomenon, suddenly bursting from the blue, might produce. The exact year I cannot recall: it seems to have been about fifteen years ago. This at least is clear: it happened in one of those few summers when the reef in mid-channel between Tamarac and Garden Islands projected above the surface like a sharp-peaked cairn. So distinct was it that it was its own danger sign to warn strange navigators to give it a wide berth.

Dawn that day in mid-July brught with it an unwonted lnguor that became perceptibly heavier as the hours shuffled on. Its weight pressed down upon man and beast alike. The clumen’s inveterate passion for going a-fishing yielded to a leaden listlessness: no hampers were packed that morning for shore-dinners at Pleasant Harbour or Little Pine. Even the lonely club cow and a neighbour’s horses grazing by the lagoon and the beaver meadow showed no zest for the lush marsh grasses. Perhaps the peculiar atmosphere drugged our fancy into working overtime, but at the time it really did see that there was less snap in the hop of the grasshoppers and in the leap of the frogs in the grassy fringes of the lagoon. The barn swallows as they swooped and darted and dodged over the water did not seem so sure of themselves as they usually were, and the gulls, which generally spent their mornings cruising over the bay, seemed chained in a long line to the peaked roof-ridge of the old mill.

The water in the channel at the bridge was out of tune with the prevailing mood. The “tide” was busy shuttling back and forth with more than ordinary vigour: the timing between ebb and flow was that common to most days in summer, but each successive pulsation bore with it a greater volume of water. Moreover, whether flowing in or flowing out the stream was ushing with greater speed and vehemence and was making itself heard in a crescendo of splashing and gurgling like a mountaing burn in spate. The normally docile minor seiche we saw in Pleasant Harbour had become here at Tamarac a turbulent reversing river. But in contrast to this agitation of waters we were sharply aware that the stifling air and the broad expanse of Stokes Bay were still as death. A feeling of apprehension almost made us shiver. Everything around us, animate and inanimate, seemed to share it with us. It was manifest that in the vast cauldron of the elements some extraordinary brew was being mixed.

We were not left long to ur guessing. Over the air came a voice giving out a loud, curt warning to mariners. I recall its substance though not its words. “Storm signals out for eastern Superior and northern Huron. All ships of deep draft in lower St. Mary’s River anchor at once. Pleasure craft make for shelter without delay. Expect northwest winds sixty miles followed by torrential rain. Clearing later. Tomorrow clear and cooler.”

Now we knew what brew of weather to look for. Nor was there much delay in the serving of it. The blanket of light grey which from noon onward had been almost stealthily drawn ove the sky had by this time become stained with vast patches of an intensely dark grey. For several minutes it retained this shade and this formation, and then, as by an unseen hand, the fabric was rent apart into long parallel strips between which shone rays of weird, coppery half-light dyed as with diluted blue-black ink. Far to the west we could faintly hear what might be the beating of surf on reefs or on shore, or even the sustained lashing of the tops of many trees. Even as we listened the air began to move slightly toward the southeast; its gentle fanning was welcome indeed.

During this interval of wondering and waiting we became aware that the little strait a the bridge was beginning to boil and foam in an unusual manner. Each incoming seiche was rising higher and with more commotion than the one before, and each ebb sank lower and more noisily than the ebb that had just preceded it. The span between high water and low water was now at least a foot and was increasing with each reversal of the current, which had now the volume of a stream after a thaw. Though we were standing on the summit of the island two hundred yards from the turmoil the roar of it tingled in our ears. The whole scene touched every nerve within us. Even the birds were behaving oddly. In the eerie twilight, like that of an eclipse of the sun I once saw at Rondeau on Lake Erie, the swallows ceased their skimming over the bay and retired to the rafters of the old mill as if for the night. In separate flocks the gulls and the crows set out, each flock in its own direction, with the singleness of purpose that marks a homeward flight. The only living thing within our ken that remained unmoved was a lone great blue heron. Ther he stood like a tall grey stick lodged in the muddy bottom of the lagoon. He had the air of waiting for something worth waiting for. He was right. Doubtless having lived all his summers in this region of inlets he had known such a scene before.

At last, as though bursting through the rents in sombre pall above, a temest tore upon us. The release of all the winds of heaven in one moment from Aeolus’ bag could not have struck with greater violence. The winds we had been hearing in the offing now seemed to take on visible substance. Yielding to their thrust the forest bowed as one tree and stayed thus fixed for many moments. Unable to stand longer before the blast we fled to the shelter of the old mill. Was this a tornado? Surely not in this corner of the globe! Our anxiety was not allyed by the casual remark of a villager born and reared in Stokes Bay: “Well, in July – 1892, I think it was – a twister blowed nearly all Wiarton down”!

No sooner had we dashed into the mill by the front door than we were summoned to the back door by the roaring of the water at the narrows. From the high landing outside we could see the whole lagoon and the bridge. The lagoon was as empty as a drained bath tub! The seiche driving in the same direction as the wind had drawn off all the water whose last dregs, churned into mud and strewn with a litter of dead herbage and brush, were pouring madly through the channel under the bridge. On the bare oozy bed of the lagoon stood out some unfamiliar objects – two wooden logging cribs weighted down with a filling of stones; in the lumbering days long past these had served as end-anchors to booms of logs. Round about them flopped helplessly a dozen or more huge carp and a host of small fry such as perch, sunfish, rock bass, and large shiners. And on these the heron, standing drunkenly a-totter in the gale, was lustily banqueting. As each fish descended to its gastric doom we could plainly follow its progress by watching the lump that passed down the long serpentine neck. It’s an ill wind indeed that blows nobody good!

But the enterprising bird was not left long to his feasting. In a few minutes the water sank to its lowest point, stood still a while, and then began to flow back, at first gently, but soon at a speed that lifted the level of the lagoon eighteen inches above the average height for that summer. And thus the protentous ebb and flow went on for another quarter hour, a rhythmic seesaw of waters on an immense scale. What was the stupendous force that endowed on of Nature’s most placid aspects with a capacity for violence?

For an answer hark back to the warning from the air. This force was as it were a fortuitous conspiracy of barometer, wind, and seiche to work in unison – a pooling of their powers. The light pressure in the east allowed the waters to rise appreciably along the deeply indented shore of The Bruce. The high pressure on the Michigan side weighed down the level there and by the same actin propelled the water eastward. This doubled push, reinfoced by the drive of a near-hurricane, threw up a veritable flood upon the Bruce coast. But this is not yet the sum total of the elemental forces at work here: one has still to reckon with a “tide,” the secondary seiche, a normally unimpressive little movement but nevertheless a dynamic one which is in action night and day, in sunshine and under cloud, in summer and in winter, forever swinging to and fro in accord with the beating of some cosmic metronome. No skill of man can wholly calm it or nullify its hidden power. When Nature happens to be in the mood to add this force to that of the other conjoint elements, she holds in her hand an engine whose possibilities of destruction defy computation.

From all this tumult on the mainland side of Tamarac Island man was entirely absent except as a helpless onlooker. But on the Stokes Bay side it was different. Heeding the warning from the air, lesser water craft of every pattern, from punts with humming outboard motors to sixty-foot luxurious gas-cruisers, were speeding from the open lake in a long broken column to find shelter or mooring at the government dock near the village of Stokes Bay. Most of the vessels wre manifestly unfamiliar with these waters. On they hastened toward the dangerous shoal in mid-channel, innocents abroad in strange waters, unaware of the risk they were courting. The heap of jagged rocks was completely buried beneath a flood tide. By sheer luck most of the skippers safely passed by to one side or the other. But to the dismay of our watching group the finest and largest cruiser of the column was headed straight for the hidden peril. We were helpless to aid: the rush of the wind drowned our voices even shouting in concert, and the untimely twilight and the shifting curtain of spray concealed all signals. Now we knew why “it boots not to resist both wind and tide.” Before our anxious gaze the graceful craft rode straight on to the lurking shoal. Her bow rose abruptly and her stern dropped. In that position she came to a sharp stop and stood as though impaled on an unseen spike.

But we were not the sole witnesses of this scene. From the government dock a rowboat struck out for the stranded cruiser. Even as the oarsmen sped toward her a strong ebb of the seiche set in and the water began to subside. By the time the rowboat reached its goal the peak of the shoal was standing a foot above the water. Upon it was perched the handsome vessel like a streamlined Noah’s Ark come to rest on the summit of a miniature Ararat.

But while the two crews conferred the dark blanket of cloud overhead was ripped again and again by jagged strokes of lightening. In a moment large solitary blobs of rain began driving through the air at a rakish slant. After that came the deluge. How long the cataract decended I cannot recall; it seemed to promise no end. In its falling it quickly beat down to a dead level the foaming crests of the breaking swells and ironed out the wrinkles of the wavelets. By the time the clouds had vented themselves of their burden the rain seemed to have subdued even the fury of the gale to the pace of a normal midsummer afternoon breeze.

Not till then could the true plight of the cruiser be observed. By the veriest food fortune, it turned out, she had slid on an even keel upon the only smooth flat slab of dolomite in the whole reef. Had she veered a hand’s breadth from her course her hull would have been slit open on the points of limestone that bristled all about. A few hours later the lovely craft was gently eased off the detaining rock into the water, unscathed though not unmarred.

While the cruiser was being set free, the sun, now nigh to setting, was beginnig to stain the sky over Lake Huron; the dry cool northwest breeze of evening was already calming nerves that had been taut and touchy all day long; the swallows were dipping and curvetting as usual over the lagoon; the nighthawks were swooping and screeching overhead, and the minor seiche, having spent all her reserves of power in the violent orgy of the daylight hours, was once more in her wonted mood guilelessly and quietly swinging back and forth, back and forth, in the narrows by the old log bridge.”