[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

The Lock

To get home from the city, I have three ways to cross the Cataraqui 
River. The southernmost is the causeway and lift bridge connecting 
Kingston to its military eastern end. The middlemost is the four-lane 
bridge carrying Highway 401 across the Cataraqui marshes. The 
northernmost, and my favourite, is a pair of linked bridges, a swing 
bridge crossing the lock system and an old single-lane wooden bridge 
crossing the rest of the river, at Kingston Mills.

The locks are the last in the Rideau Canal system, a 125-mile-long 
linkage of lakes, rivers, dams, canals, and locks extending from 
Ottawa to Kingston. It was built, painfully and expensively and with 
many casualties (malaria, mostly), in 1827-1832 and is an 
extraordinary piece of engineering and fine masonry.

The Kingston Mills locks are particularly appealing; there's the 
silvery stretch of the lake to the north and, to the south and east, 
the pretty gorge that the lock were built to bypass. In summer, if 
you take this route, you accept the risk that when you get to the 
locks, the bridge will be swung across the topmost lock and the lock 
keepers will be letting water rise or descend, taking pleasure boats 
up toward the lake or down toward the last stretch of the Cataraqui 
River as it heads toward Lake Ontario.

The bridge was swung when I reached it late this afternoon. It's 
about a 10-minute wait, so, as usual, I got out of my car and ambled 
toward the lock to see how far along the locking had gone. From the 
looks of things, it would be a while. So I ambled back and leaned up 
against my car and got into chat with the guy in line right behind 
me, who was likewise leaning up against his pickup truck.

The rich green-and-silver landscape in front of us was exceptionally 
tranquil under a pearly sky. Four or five boats were peaceably tied 
up alongside the wall leading from the lake into the first lock, 
waiting their turn, as the previous lot of southbound vessels slowly 
descended to the next lock. You don't hurry on the Rideau Canal, not 
in summer. There's no point.

"So where'd it happen?" the guy with the truck asked.

I pointed at tied-up boat #2. "About there, I think, as near as 
anyone can figure."

"Incredible."

"And it's just such a pretty place," I mused.

Sometime on the night of June 29-30, a black Nissan Sentra with four 
women in it -- a 50-year-old and three teenaged sisters, all from an 
Afghan family now living in Montreal, on their way back from Niagara 
Falls and spending the night in Kingston -- had somehow managed to 
make its way past a locked gate or over a substantial concrete curb 
and had backed between two tie-up posts, over the wall, and into the 
canal, right by the first set of lock gates. The lock keepers found 
out about this on the morning of June 30, when they couldn't open the 
gates. The car was in the way.

The girls' parents, tragically afflicted, talked about the eldest 
daughter's habit of joyriding; she had taken the car's keys. Why she 
had also taken her aunt (or maybe cousin? it wasn't clear) and two 
younger sisters for a joyride in the middle of the night, and how 
she'd fetched up at the locks, much less three metres underwater, was 
a mystery. None of it made sense.

Until the arrests last week, of the girls' father, mother, and 
brother, each charged with four counts of first-degree murder and 
conspiracy to commit murder.

The 50-year-old woman, it turns out, was the father's undivorced 
first (and childless) wife, who'd acted as nanny to the couple's 
seven children. The eldest daughter had been beaten for dating a 
Pakistani man. The first wife had told her siblings that she was 
afraid for her life, but she loved the kids, and besides, her 
successor was holding her passport. But now in Canada, she could file 
for divorce. The daughters could breathe free of the air of Kabul and Dubai.

And so four women -- the girls were 19, 17, and 13 -- fetched up 
drowned in this tranquil place. Father, mother, and 18-year-old 
brother will be tried for their murder. Three younger children are in care.

The guy with the truck and I knew all this. Not in Canada, we're all 
thinking. Not three young girls who'd never get to experience their 
lives. Not a loving woman who'd never had a chance properly to 
experience her own life. Not in our canal. Not this extraordinary 
evil. Not. Not. Not.

The guy and I thought about this as we waited for the lock gates to 
close and the bridge to swing back in place.

I thought, but did not say (he wasn't that kind of guy) that nothing 
has happened to diminish by one iota the beauty of this place, the 
serenity of the water. The water is totally innocent; it had nothing 
to say in the matter. The people who should have loved these four 
made our clear, cool water their guiltless executioner. The canal 
walls are innocent; they were given no choice either. Creation may be 
in grief for evil, but it does not partake of it.

I remember driving through Gettysburg, right across the field where 
Pickett's tragic charge occurred, and feeling Creation's grief for 
the suffering that we inflict on each other and ourselves. Sorrow 
felt built into that soil. But not corruption.

But it feels to me as though the fresh water of the Canadian Shield 
-- because that's what flows through the Rideau Canal in two 
directions, north to the Ottawa River and south to Lake Ontario -- 
had somehow blessed and redeemed the evil that consumed these four 
innocent lives. Evil can ultimately have no victory over the Creation 
that Creator blessed and found supremely good. It can't, in the long 
run, even have victory over us, because Jesus took care of that already.

We all pray to learn that the four were not conscious when they drowned.

The city waits, simmering, to hear what's next.



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A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in 
no other way. -- Mark Twain