St. Lawrence Cruise Lines

St. Lawrence Cruise Lines came to us with a trade: a cruise up the river in exchange for the film we would make along the way. That is a fair shape for a job like this — the client gets a video, the crew gets the river — and it is how Anita and I ended up aboard the Canadian Empress in May 2016. She was my girlfriend then. She is my wife now. It was the first trip we took together.

We boarded at Kingston and headed east into Quebec, then turned around and came back through the Thousand Islands. The weather did everything we could have asked of it. We went up and down the St. Lawrence for days, past islands and small towns, and through the locks — which are the part I did not expect to enjoy as much as I did. Watching a boat the size of the Empress drop or rise inside a stone chamber, with the gates closing behind you, is a good way to spend an afternoon.

The river has been engineered for longer than most people realise. The route passes the old Galop Canal, opened in 1846, and then the modern Seaway locks that replaced the whole idea. Work on the Seaway started in 1954 and it opened to traffic in 1959, and it changed the river permanently. At eight in the morning on the first of July 1958 they took out a cofferdam and let the water in, and ten communities — nine villages and a populated island — went under. Around six and a half thousand people were moved, five hundred and thirty buildings were picked up and carried to higher ground, and the town of Iroquois was shifted a kilometre and a half north to keep it.

The buildings that could not simply be moved to another town were gathered up instead. Construction on Upper Canada Village began in 1958 as the Seaway was being built, and it opened to the public in 1961. It is forty-odd buildings reassembled into one village, and the village it depicts is 1866 — the year before Confederation. We stopped there, and it is the stop I would send anybody to.

People in period dress are living the part: baking, working the trades, running the houses, and visitors walk through it. You can stand in a kitchen with bread coming out of an oven that has been lit the same way for a century and ask the woman working it a question, and she answers in character. Knowing that the building you are standing in was lifted off its foundation somewhere downriver before the water came makes the afternoon land differently.

The company was the other thing I remember. There was one other couple anywhere near our age. Everybody else was older, and mostly travelling with people they had known for decades. On a boat that size you eat with them, you sit near them on deck, and by the second morning you know their names and something of their lives. We spent a lot of that trip listening to people in their seventies and eighties talk about where they had been and who they had been there with. That is not a thing you get on a big ship.

I was working for part of it, which is the honest description of what this was: filming as we went, catching what the day offered rather than directing it. A river cruise does not stop for a shot list. You take the light you are given and the towns you are docked in, and you make a film out of that.

What I took home was a film for the client and a trip with Anita. The food was excellent, the entertainment was better than it had any right to be, and the whole thing left us with something we still talk about. It was the beginning, for both of us, of a lot of travelling together.

DIRECTOR / PRODUCER / CAMERA · BRYAN BAKKER