Gary Dover, ex military intelligence teacher, cabinetmaker, forester, historian, naturalist, friend.
It’s coming up on the anniversary of Gary Dover’s sudden death last September, a sad passing I just learned about from Gary’s wife Anita. There was no obit, no death notice, only a For Sale sign on their house that prompted me to call and Anita to text me the news from the UK.
Gary and I have been in and out of each other’s lives for years. He served in the Canadian Armed Forces with military liason and intelligence in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, taught at the Canadian War College and so happened to have been the intel duty officer the night of the ’95 referendum. We’d talk for hours over beers or in the woods, where we’d bushwack on snowshoes or chop a route through the brush with Gary’s Gurkha kukri and my bush axe.
I never saw him get lost. Before we’d head out, he would study the relevant topographical map and carry a photographic image in his mind as we roamed the expanses of woodlands and wetlands that still cover most of northern Vaudreuil-Soulanges. Back at home, he would draw our route onto the topo map if he thought it warranted marking.
Back in the early 2000s, a bunch of us, alarmed at the rate of uncontrolled development and the loss of our region’s eco-corridors, banded together to create Sentiers Vaudreuil-Soulanges. The aim was to lobby the Vaudreuil-Soulanges regional municipality and our respective communities to integrate green corridors in their master plans. With Gary masterminding, volunteers rough-mapped a chain of local walking trails through Hudson, Vaudreuil, St. Lazare, Ste. Marthe, Trés-Saint-Redempteur to connect with Rigaud’s l’Escapade network.
At first, it all seemed to be coming together. The Hudson SVS contingent convinced the Corker administration to give our registered non-profit a mandate to add new trails and maintain Hudson’s trail network at no cost to taxpayers with funding from a national trail-network coalition and a mix of paid and volunteer labour — much as it is done throughout Canada and the U.S.
We hired landscape architect Jamie Nicholls (yes, Hudson’s last mayor) to come up with a trail plan for the 30-acre Viviry Valley Conservation Area. We hired a logger with a team of horses to clean up the existing trail network. We blazed every trail with approved markers, a few of which one can still see.
On Thanksgiving weekend in 2008, some 30 of us set out on the inaugural two-day Grand Trek, starting with a blessing from Father Roland Demers next to Hudson’s Mount Pleasant Elementary School and finishing at Rigaud’s Parc de Lotbinière and the Festival des Couleurs. Although some of it passed on public roads and unauthorized rights of way, it proved the concept of a contiguous trail network connecting our communities.
But the intensity didn’t last. In Hudson as in Quebec and Ottawa, every election brings changes in orientation. Throughout the county, municipal councils bowed to landowners who didn’t want strangers anywhere near their properties, let alone on their land. A few of our trails remain, like Hudson’s Parkinson walking and snowshoe trail behind Whitlock West, but the legacy of that first Grand Trek died from a combination of municipal indifference and landowners’ legal threats.
Gary’s response was to go underground. We shut down the SVS website and other administrivia. The outing-club component broke away. Thus died the concept of a contiguous trail network.
Freed from the burden of a doomed mission, Gary threw himself into his many passions — gardening, woodworking, history and exploring nature. A skilled and innovative craftsman and cabinetmaker, he taught a generation of amateurs the rudiments of carpentry at his Merlinwood School. He led nature outings at Mount Pleasant Elementary. He experimented with mushroom production. Eventually, he closed his carpentry school and brought everything home to the cozy shop behind his and Anita’s Vaudreuil home, where he quickly branched out into yet another passion — researching ancient musical instruments and their reproduction.
My first inkling of this latest twist was the day he invited me to see his first try. It was a lyre, a stringed instrument right out of Homer’s Iliad. To set the table for its presentation, Gary had a basket of home-baked oatcakes and mead standing by. It would prove to be the first of many, many accurate reproductions of historic instruments, including the Irish harp featured on the Guinness beer label. Fittingly, he allowed me to write its story in time for St. Patrick’s Day.
The Dover homestead was furnished with beautifully crafted antique reproductions that began life in Gary’s workshop as recycled wood, mainly exotic hardwoods from Asian shipping pallets, but also salvaged timber from deadfalls closer to home. His abilities brought him to Hudson’s Greenwood Centre for Living History and the accurate restoration of pieces in their collection.
Gary still found time for hikes, especially when I was sniffing out a story for the Hudson Gazette. In the fall of 2011, he and I hiked into what was to have been the site of the new Vaudreuil-Soulanges regional hospital. (The site, vetoed by the Montreal Metropolitan Community, would have provided space for new schools and health-centred CEGEP as well as for housing for 3,500 hospital employees.) We were left speechless by the beauty and size of the old-growth forests we came across, a major reason why the site remains in its natural state.
One might ask why it took so long to learn of a friend’s passing. Gary and Anita would spend long periods travelling to the Middle East, Anita’s Mauritian homeland and the UK among other destinations. During and after the COVID lockdown, he and Anita would head off to a beautiful woodlot they owned in the Glengarry highlands.
Our last conversation was in February 2022. We worked together on a story about the failing aquifer along the height of land above the Viviry Creek’s headwaters. Gary and Anita’s well wasn’t producing as it had; his survey of the neighbourhood revealed that everyone was having similar concerns. The result was Hudson’s priceless wetlands (Feb. 11/22, www.thousandlashes.ca).
Gary and I aren’t quite finished our hike together. Before his death, he provided me with hours of information about his work as a military intelligence officer and historian. God wiling, I’ll have the opportunity to share his insight.
thousandlashesdotca 