Day: March 1, 1998

He just couldn’t turn down such a brazen dare. All his life Louis Cyr had been called upon to prove the immense strength bestowed upon him by nature. He was not about to allow some upstart to arbitrarily strip him of the title of World’s Strongest Man, earned and bolstered at countless public demonstrations and weight-lifting show-downs throughout North America and England.

So, on Feb. 26, 1906–when he was 44–Cyr took on Hector Décarie, a young buck at the peak of his rigorous and scientific physical conditioning. The setting was a cavernous pavilion in Parc Sohmer, an exhibition ground that had sprung up in 1889 to lure customers to east-end Montreal aboard the city’s new tramway system. Parc Sohmer, built by a promoter who had tried to bilk Cyr early in his career, had been the scene of many Cyr triumphs over the years. One of these was his laughingly lopsided wrestling match in 1901 against Édouard Beaupré, an eight-foot-two-inch, 400-pound giant from Willow Bunch, Sask. During the match, Cyr tossed the Willow Bunch Giant to the mat four times in three minutes.

The weight-lifting match against Décarie wouldn’t be so easy. Word of the match spread quickly in Quebec as people sensed a historic occasion, either an astonishing comeback or the tragic end to an unprecedented career. Four thousand people packed the pavilion, hundreds more were turned away. When the spotlights were turned on they revealed to a shocked crowd the disparity between the two men. Cyr was slow moving and short of breath. His colossal girth had clearly fallen to seed. Décarie’s young body was hard and taut, like marble in motion.

For the first of eight lifts, the weight-lifters had to keep their legs straight and their feet together, a position that Décarie knew would be terribly awkward for a man of Cyr’s inverted-pyramid physique. Décarie lifted first, 135 pounds, little exertion apparent. Cyr’s turn. The crowd was hushed as the champion shuffled forward to take his turn with the barbell now weighing 151 pounds.

With the agony of strain contorting his face, Cyr managed to force the weight above his shoulders. Décarie added another 20 pounds to the bar and, with some struggle, raised it high. It was back to Cyr. He hesitated, looking to the crowd for a sign of hope, then, his eyes wet with tears of shame, he shook his head and conceded the lift to Décarie. Although the show-down with Décarie eventually finished a 4-4 draw, Cyr could not claim victory. After the match he called for silence and made this announcement: “I have decided to retire forever. I pass on my crown as world’s strongest man to Hector Décarie.”

The next day the papers began to feed on the carcass of the fallen champion from St-Jean-de-Matha, Que. In Montreal, a sports reporter for La Presse wrote: “There was a time when Louis Cyr was the hero of French-Canadians, the Samson of strongmen, the prototype of human strength. Alas, those times are over. Louis Cyr, beaten by age, is no more than a shadow of himself, a remnant of his past glory, a relic of his former power.”

One wonders whether the reporter would have been so harsh had he known the truth about Louis Cyr, that the man who showed up to win that night was in fact dying of a combination of debilitating ailments brought on by excessive eating that left him nearly crippled, subsisting exclusively on a diet of milk. That Louis Cyr was alive, let alone lifting enormous weights, was a miracle.

Cyr himself apparently didn’t make too much out of the rendezvous with Décarie. Indeed, he saw himself as the winner. In his memoirs–recorded two years after the event–Cyr merely notes that, unlike all his other competitions, the one with Décarie was based on points, not total weight lifted, in which case he had won hands down.

In his day, Cyr was probably the best known Canadian in the world, with the possible exception of Sir Wilfrid Laurier. His legend persists 100 years after he lifted himself into prominence simply because his feats of strength are so overwhelming and so well-documented they have resisted, like a mountain of granite, the erosion of time. It also helps to keep the name in play that there are weight-lifting championships bearing his handle, a dandy bronze statue in the St-Henri district of Montreal to keep kids asking “who is Louis Cyr?” and a play based on that fateful night in February 1906. The play, which was staged last summer near Shawinigan, is subtitled The Story Of A Life, The Story Of A Man, The Story Of A People. This was not just a weight-lifter because Cyr was the pride of a Quebec badly in need of inspiration.

That is not to say that every town in Quebec has a street named for their celebrated compatriot. There is a Chemin Louis Cyr in St-Jean-de-Matha, but, as Stuart McLean recounts in his 1992 book Welcome Home: Travels In Smalltown Canada, townspeople refused to rally a few years ago when most of the Cyr memorabilia kept by his surviving grandson was put up for auction. Only a few items were salvaged by a couple of determined Mathalois when the town could have had an entire museum’s worth for $8,000.

The hopeful news is that since that tale was told, St-Jean-de-Matha has realized what a treasure it has in Louis Cyr, who is buried there. One of the above determined individuals, Pierre-Michel Gadoury, himself the grandson of senior strongman Donat Gadoury, has been the driving force behind the museum devoted to Louis Cyr which is housed for now in the town hall. The museum contains a growing collection of Cyr artifacts, photos and other memorabilia; a life story that is at once stirring and disturbing.

It is probably best to begin that story in 1755 when the two brothers Cyr, exiled from their Acadian homes by British troops, fled to Quebec. Pierre Cyr, Louis’ great-great-grandfather, settled in St-Cyprien-de-Napierville, south of Montreal. Somewhere along the genetic trail, the Cyr family picked up a tendency to be very strong and live very long. In his memoirs, Louis recounts that his great-grandpa Pierre was known to battle bears with a stick and lived to be 102. But it is his grandfather Pierre who, as the young Louis’ constant companion, drilled into the boy the importance of physical strength, not just as an asset to hard farmwork, but as a noble goal in itself. He also sowed the seeds of his grandson’s eventual destruction by convincing him that the more you eat, the stronger you’ll be, a credo that Louis followed with mortal gusto.

With a reputed birth weight of 18 pounds–”my first record”, he would joke–Louis Cyr began life in October 1863, as Noé-Cyprien, the eldest of 17 children born to his mother Philomène and his farmer father. His mother was a story in herself. She could fling 200-pound sacks of grain around like pillows and later, when she and her husband opened a tavern in Montreal, it was she who was the bouncer. It was also mom who, after having a vision in which she saw her budding Samson vanquish the English in a reprise of the Plains of Abraham, compelled Louis to let his hair grow long and curly, which, until baldness prevailed, was his strongman trademark.

From an early age Louis showed exceptional strength. As a toddler he would tip over a chair, pile it high with logs and drag it across the farmhouse floor. At eight years, told by papa to go round up a calf, he happily did so, returning with the 100-pound animal wrapped around his shoulders. At school, teased for his size, he quickly turned the taunts to respect through feats of strength; a little bullying was involved, but by all accounts Louis was a nice, God-fearing boy who obeyed his parents and didn’t unduly throw his precocious weight around.

The Cyrs were like thousands of Quebecers in the late 19th century. Times were tough on the farm and jobs were scarce. In 1879–when Louis was 15–the family packed its belongings and headed for the greener pastures of the United States. About 900,000 Quebecers made this same trek over a period of 80 years in what’s called the Great Hemorrhage, an exodus that historians say set francophone Quebec’s development back by decades.

It was in Lowell, Mass., where the on-again, off-again farm and factory worker shed the Noé-Cyprien name at the U.S. border and got his first taste of the business potential of his muscles. Cyr was prodded by his work buddies to try his strength against a Professor Donovan, part strongman, part con-man, who ran a local gym. Cyr easily out-lifted the Professor and suddenly realized his destiny might not be confined to menial work. Word spread of Cyr’s feats of strength and soon enough he found himself at his first public competition in Boston where he scored a triumph as the baby-faced, curly-haired “Frenchman” who lifted a massive Percheron workhorse off the ground.

Shortly afterwards the Cyrs decided to return to Quebec and Louis happily agreed, his heart then set on wooing a young woman from St-Jean-de-Matha he had met in Lowell. Petite Melina Comptois also happened to be the heart’s desire of the reigning Canadian strongman David Michaud. This love triangle eventually came crashing down when Louis married Melina and took on Michaud for the Canadian championship in an arena near Quebec City. Michaud lost both his title and his true love and Cyr was handed his ticket to fame.

Cyr, a devoted young husband of 18, was torn between a steady job and going on tour as the latest sensation in a world insatiable for new feats of physical power. He and his father had already taken a little caravan around rural Quebec showing off his incredible strength and Louis liked the life. After a hurly-burly stint as a cop in Montreal, Cyr surrendered to show biz and signed on with a series of promoters and circuses and later formed his own travelling circus.

From 1885 to 1896 Cyr travelled widely in Canada and the U.S. racking up one amazing stunt after another. The feat that perhaps stands above all took place in Boston in May 1895, when he raised a platform holding 18 hefty men off the ground with his back, a hoist of 4,327 pounds, an achievement that has never been even remotely approached. In Montreal, in 1891, his arms strapped in a special harness, he held firm while four enormous workhorses did their best to pull him apart. Later in London, England, he did the same trick with two horses for the amusement of the Marquis of Queensberry, who made him a gift of one of his prize stallions. The marquis and Prince Edward–the future king of England, were among many aristocratic types who befriended the colonial colossus on his 11-month British tour.

Among Cyr’s other remarkable feats: 273 pounds lifted over the shoulder with one arm, the barbell never touching the body; 1,897 pounds lifted off the ground with two hands; 987 pounds off the ground with one hand; 553 pounds with one finger. By way of comparison, in the modern world of power-lifting, the record for a dead-lift is 406 kilograms or 893 pounds, less than half of what Cyr did.

Cyr used a barbell lifting style typical of the era whereby at no time during the lift from floor to full-arm extension over the shoulder does the weight actually rest on the body. As body-building guru Ben Weider notes in his 1976 biography of Cyr, the military press, the style Cyr employed, is immeasurably more difficult than the contemporary clean and jerk method. Weider wonders “what a modern trainer could have done with the muscular force” of Louis Cyr.

While Cyr was wracking up record after record, defeating all who dared meet his challenge, he was putting on similar tours de force at the dinner table. In one noted instance, he and fellow strongman Horace Barré were each presented with a suckling pig and with little apparent effort consumed the entire meal in one sitting. Barré would eventually die of his excesses, and so would Cyr. When he was 37, tipping the scales at 355 pounds, Cyr suffered a severe attack of Bright’s Disease, a kidney ailment that left his legs paralyzed. On top of that he suffered heart problems and asthma that forced him to sleep upright in a rocking chair. His doctors had all but written him off when along came a medical miracle in the form of Dr. Donald Hingston who prescribed Cyr a diet consisting only of milk.

Cyr rallied and decided to lead a less punishing life, running the farm he had bought in St-Jean-de-Matha, managing his circus, playing with his grandchildren, playing his fiddle and serving as the benevolent godfather of St-Jean-de-Matha. He felt well enough to return to the stage in 1901 to fell the Willow Bunch Giant, but the recovery was superficial. One doesn’t really know what possessed him to risk his life in such a way, for he was not a foolhardy or hot-headed man, but Hector Décarie’s challenge was apparently just too boastful for Cyr to ignore. And so Louis Cyr gave the last public demonstration of his titanic force that fateful February day in 1906.

Drained by the effort, Cyr’s health slid downward and he died six years later on Nov. 10, 1912. He was 49. The news of his passing shared the front pages with the escalating brutality of the Balkan War that soon would lead to WW I, and the preparations being made in Canada for the next sitting of Parliament, Robert Borden’s first after defeating Wilfrid Laurier a year earlier.

The Balkan struggle comes and goes, same too the revolving doors of Canadian politics, but one thing has not changed in over a 100 years. Canada’s Louis Cyr is still the strongest man who ever lived.

Jay Willar straightens stiffly, knuckles kneading his backbone, and surveys the hard-won efforts of a morning’s labor: a 10-foot-wide swath of ground-laid netting festooned with tangled ribbons of pink-brown dulse. The noonday sun is already working its magic, baking it to a deep reddish-purple. Jay’s easy smile invites small talk. He’s putting in a third summer on Grand Manan Island, off the south coast of New Brunswick, harvesting dulse. While he admits that ‘dulsing’ isn’t easy, I’m flabbergasted when he tells me that four months’ picking is worth a whopping $7,000. Hard work notwithstanding, he’s put himself through three years of university harvesting seaweed.

Owner of the drying ground and ‘King of the Dulse to other Grand Mananers’, Leroy Flagg strolls over to look at Jay’s work. Now 75 years old and more or less retired, Leroy says he’s probably picked more dulse than anybody else on the island. “Started when I was 10,” he recollects. “Back then, dulse was worth about five cents a pound. Picked 325 pounds in one tide some years back–nobody else ever came near it!”

Leroy appraises Jay’s purple blanket of dulse. “Spread too thick in some spots,” he notes. “But it’ll probably dry out to about 600 pounds.” “Which is worth what?” I ask. “Oh,” drawls Leroy, “somewhere’s around $3.50 to $4 a pound.” I whistle appreciatively. “Gee, that’s not too shabby for a few hours’ work. Maybe I should give this a try myself.” Leroy looks me up and down a couple of times and guffaws. “You got any muscle in them skinny arms?” “No sweat,” I boast, flexing my biceps and flashing him my best drop-dead classic smile. He throws back his head and roars. “OK girlie, you fetch yerself back here at 8 o’clock tomorrow morning and I’ll send you out with them two fellers over there.”

“Them two fellers” turn out to be Bruce Linton and his brother, Fulton. We pile into a black half-ton truck and bounce down a dirt road towards Dark Harbour, on the west side of the island.

Die-hard dulse enthusiasts and dedicated pickers will tell you that the best dulse in the world comes from here. Massive, deeply shadowed cliffs buttress the western shore. Sunlight is rare, only a few hours a day and none before late morning. Great lumpy beach rocks, topped with curls of dulse exposed at early morning low tide, stay cool, shaded and moist–ideal conditions for this tender plant. Historical records indicate Grand Mananers have been harvesting dulse commercially since 1868. More than 150,000 pounds of it are marketed yearly across North America. Small quantities are occasionally shipped to Ireland, Africa, Hawaii and Australia. Referred to as “salad of the sea,” dulse is a variety of red algae common to cooler coastal waters from New Jersey to Greenland. Powdered dulse flavors stews, soups and salads. Dried fronds are eaten as a snack–an acquired taste. Dulse is rich in potassium, sodium, chlorine and vitamins.

We top the rise overlooking the harbor. The view below is spectacular–a 120-metre-wide seawall cradling a near-perfect circle of placid blue water. Salmon cages and a painter’s palette of fishing boats dot the harbor.

Fulton brakes the truck to a jolting halt on the beach, and we hop out and start unloading our gear. Dulsing requires rubber aprons, plastic garbage buckets, waterproof pants and burlap sacks–all of which we pile into a mustard-colored dory. Bruce pushes off, Fulton yanks the motor into a roar accompanied by a few puffs of oily blue smoke, and we zip across the bay. The tide is out and the bottle-necked gut isn’t navigable. We’ll have to haul the boat over the seawall.

“Everybody out!” Fulton hollers, as the dory grinds to a sloshing halt. Bruce hooks the boat to 15 metres of steel cable attached to a rusty winch perched atop the seawall, and waves an okay to his brother. I leap smartly out of range as the winch coughs, sputters and wheezes into action and hauls the dory at breakneck speed to the top. “Isn’t all of this kind of hard on the bottom of your boat?” I pant, as we drag the dory down the other side. “Nah,” says Fulton, “it’s coated with (non-stick material).” “What did they use in the old days?” Fulton grins. “French fry grease from the local restaurants.”

We shove off again. It’s a flawless morning. The dory trails a sparkling wake through the calm water of the Bay of Fundy. A mauve smudge along the horizon is all we can see of the State of Maine.

We travel about two kilometres south before Fulton slows the boat and begins scanning the shoreline. “Today we’re looking for a rock with a hole in it,” he explains. “We got some good picking near it yesterday.” Although most of the rocks look pretty much the same to me, Fulton spots his marker and guides us into shore. The dory shoulders aside huge, chestnut-brown fronds of kelp floating up from the murky gloom below. Getting out of the boat is tricky. The large, tide-rounded rocks are slick with green algae. I can’t do anything except hang onto the side of the dory. “Here,” encourages Bruce, handing me a lime-green garbage pail. “Use this to prop yourself up with while you pick.” Easier said than done. I inch along cautiously–it’s like walking uphill on a greasy cheese grater.

There is dulse everywhere. Clutching the bucket with one hand I bend, comb my fingers through a purple-red mass, and pull. Surprisingly, the dulse isn’t slimy. Cool, velvety, moist and slightly rubbery, it pulls away from the rock with a crisp popping sound–like ripped lettuce. A good picker can take 200-300 pounds of wet dulse on one low tide. There are two low tides daily. It takes me the better part of an hour to fill my bucket–by which time Bruce and Fulton are two pails ahead of me. I realize, somewhat belatedly, that I have moved a fair distance down the beach and that getting a full load of dulse back to the boat is going to involve a great deal of heaving and straining, and possibly some serious bodily injury. But being a guest has its advantages: I am rescued.

We motor back to Dark Harbour and renegotiate the sea wall. The boys agree to drop me off at one of the large cages used for the rearing of salmon. I’m in luck; some of the salmon are about to be sorted for size. The man in charge is Earl Carpenter, who explains that farm salmon are ready for market when they reach an average of nine pounds. Getting them up to size requires a diet of fish meal, feather and bone meal, wheat, canola, and corn meal. Earl says fish at this particular farm swallow a ton or more of food per day, and that salmon at larger sites will consume two to three tons daily.

A huge fabric scoop affixed to a crane is lowered into one of the cages and lifted out, thudding and pulsating with fish. Amid much manoeuvring and splashing, the scoop is positioned over a Y-shaped wooden trough. Each arm of the ‘Y’ is fitted to a length of plastic pipe, the ends of which hover over the water inside two nearby cages. The drawstring at the bottom of the scoop is loosened to release a torrent of molten silver. Two men, dressed head to toe in fluorescent slickers, sort wriggling salmon as they flip-flop down the trough and through the pipes into their new pens.

A launch from the salmon farm takes me back to shore, and I set off in search of Roland Flagg and his ‘winkling’ operation. ‘Winkling’ is island talk for harvesting the tiny edible snails called “periwinkles.” I’m not surprised to discover that Roland and Leroy Flagg are brothers, and that Roland also buys and markets dulse. But he’s more than happy to talk about winkling. “I used to pick ‘winkles m’self,” he says, “but I’ve been buying ‘em from people for 26 years now. I can have more than 65 people come on one day!” Winkling, it seems, is as lucrative as dulsing. At 80 cents per pound, a largebucket of periwinkles can fetch $120. Two buckets a day is considered a good haul–about two hours’ work for an experienced winkler. Roland opens up a small, refrigerated building next to the dulsing shed. It’s packed, floor to ceiling, with wet sacks of periwinkles–pungent with the tangy odors of salt and seaweed. “They’re real good cooked and dipped in vinegar or butter,” he explains. “People love ‘em. Some of these’ll be in New York by Sunday. I usually ship out 6,000 to 7,000 pounds a week, mostly to Montreal, Toronto and New York.”

All this talk about food, not to mention my early-morning adventure, has my stomach growling. The North Head Bakery looks promising. I push open a newly painted screen door that nudges a tinkling bell. Nothing beats the smell of freshly baked bread! Shop owner Richard Rice, who greets me wearing spotless, starched white linens, says he makes 200 different kinds of bread. It’s almost impossible to choose. There’s a miche campagnarde–a round bread also known as the countryman’s cob, and couronne–a traditional and festive French bread shaped like a crown. This is a bakery with panache. Richard apprenticed at Au Bon Croissant in Montreal before opening this shop in 1990. He takes justifiable pride in his handiwork, and in the historic origins of some of his more esoteric creations. Confidently tearing open a crusty loaf, he offers me a sample. The aroma, texture and flavor are perfect.

A wedge of Danish blue cheese and two pears from the local grocery store are popped into my hamper, along with a still-warm baguette. This feast is wolfed down atop Swallowtail cliffs, a stone’s throw from North Head lighthouse. Below me, a thread of squealing gulls stitches through the salt breeze in the wake of the Grand Manan ferry as she rounds the point bearing mail, tourists, tradesmen and transport trucks. Trim and sleekly white, she’s a far cry from her steam-driven predecessors.

Records indicate that a packet service once operated weekly between St. Andrews, N.B., and Grand Manan. It was authorized in 1839. Today there are two crossings daily between North Head and Blacks Harbour. The 35-kilometre trip, one of surpassing beauty along rocky shores and wooded islands, takes 1 1/2 hours.

Perched like a footnote below New Brunswick in the Bay of Fundy, Grand Manan lies 12.5 kilometres due east of Quoddy Head, the easternmost point of the United States. Twenty-four kilometres long and 10 wide, it is the largest of an archipelago of 20 islands. The Passamaquoddy Indians called the island “Mun-A-Nook,” meaning “Island Place.” Inscribed as “Menan” on circa-1600 charts, Grand Manan has known both French and English ownership. A small group of Loyalists who stepped ashore May 6, 1784, were the island’s first settlers. The moderating effects of the waters of the Bay of Fundy blessed them with warm summers and short, bearable winters.

Descendants of those hardy folk established an economy that is still nourished today by the bay’s abundant waters. Nearly everybody, it seems, is a jack of all trades–and the trades change with seasonal and tidal offerings. Dulse pickers dot the shorelines from spring through mid-autumn. Lobster traps are set out after the second Tuesday in November, and must be out of the water by June 30. Heart-shaped herring weirs–traps–with fanciful names like Gale, Gamble, Struggler and Dream are tended from summer to early winter. Haddock, cod and pollock are fished between May and October. Gill-nets and trawl strings snare halibut in summer and early fall. Sea urchins are processed for their roe, November through April. Clams are harvested from September to April.

Fish dragging during summer months nets cod, redfish, haddock, hake and pollock. Scallop dragging takes place year-round. But new federal quota and monitoring regulations are putting intense pressure on small boat owners–people like Ivan Green, who started fishing with his father in 1949. “You were a free man back then,” he says wistfully. “Now it’s like being a slave on the end of a string. Fishing was the best possible life that a man could have until the government got into it.” With more than a little resentment creeping into his voice, Ivan explains that “two years ago a scallop license cost $30. Last year the price went up to $6,800. The big company boats can afford it, but the little guys can’t. I stopped ground-fishing too. My quota went down to 14,000 pounds–what I got for that wouldn’t buy grease for the motor. I cut my net up today. I agree that we have to have quotas; with today’s technology there’s no way fish can escape you. But the way it’s being done now is ousting the little guy. I figure this interference will last till they break us.”

Despite ever-increasing troubles in their fishing industry, Grand Mananers don’t count themselves as hard done by. They are a gritty lot, hard-working, steadfast and dedicated to lifestyles governed by Fundy’s tides. One of the island’s truisms runs something along these lines: “When all else fails, you can always go clamming.” This surely is rooted in their partnership with the sea, and their unshakeable belief in the benevolence of the Almighty. Their faith is reflected in 14 churches of various denominations, serving some 2,500 souls. Between 1977 and 1984, the teetotalling Ministerial Association staged a seven-year protest against the island’s first drinking establishment, the Marathon Inn. The local Legion–Grand Manan Branch, established by charter on Dec. 7, 1945–has never served up anything other than tea, coffee and soda pop.

Island legend says the Almighty Himself lent islanders a righteous hand against the evils of drink. In 1864 a young man from a local settlement of the time called Sinclairville, one John Green, went to a liquor store in Grand Harbour and then drank himself silly. So silly, in fact, that his friends expressed grave concerns: “John, you’ll die before you get home.” He blithely replied, “I defy God Almighty to kill me!”

God, it seems, took young John up on his dare. His body was found the next day, a Sunday, by the road. Not surprisingly, this unnerving event precipitated the immediate baptism of some 27 souls and the establishment of a branch of the North Head church. As if determined to keep imprudent souls from straying, Green’s ghost is said to make occasional appearances at the Cedar Street Bridge.

I have my own appointments to keep–notably, the next ferry to the mainland. I watch from the upper deck as Grand Manan fades into the morning mist. The ferry is late getting in. I have fewer than 50 minutes to make the one-hour trip to Saint John to catch another ferry to Digby, N.S. Other passengers hope to make the same connection, so our captain calls ahead. Four cars race from Blacks Harbour to the Saint John ferry terminal. Although we arrive 15 minutes late, the ferry is still at dockside, engines thrumming. We are greeted with a warm smile. “From Grand Manan?” “Yes!” “Drive right on.”

“Only in the Maritimes,” I laugh. “Only in the Maritimes.”