‘Just a bunch of God-damned foolishness, far as I can see." Lionel Savard worked all day yesterday through a cold rain and, at times, red muck up to his ankle - his left ankle, the right one missing since last winter when it became infected after he stepped on a nail and doctors decided to amputate below the knee.

Two lost months in hospital. Makes for some tough driving, but when you're fast going on 70 and have no pension to speak of, you keep on working. Lionel Savard's never known any different.

Working with his truck, and on crutches when necessary, he'd been hauling firewood out to a back road when a reporter happened along and asked him how it was going. How's it going? Just listen: "I've cut wood all my life. Pulp wood. Box wood. Logs I get sawed. Everything.

"But I don't cut no pulp any more. You can't sell it. And if you can sell it somewhere, you have to ship it, so it's not worth anything to you. It's the same thing everywhere. The mills shut down and you can't sell your wood.
"I'm too old for it to matter much to me. But it still makes you mad. And I'm God damned mad."

This wasn't the way it was supposed to be. Lionel Savard came out of a family of 24 - "My father married twice, eight with the first, 16 with the second" - and went to work in the bush after "I got my Grade 5." He had his share of bad times - a daughter lost in a house fire, a marriage lost a dozen years ago - but he always managed to get by because of the wood and because of the jobs wood along the Miramichi provided.

"I got tough from working 15 hour days," he says. "I used to weigh 230 pounds - I probably lost 50 this year." He's lived here all his life and wouldn't leave.

"It's good here," he says. "You can kill a moose. You can poach salmon. I used to poach the odd moose, too, but I can't do it any more." Only a couple of years ago he was dreaming about turning his big woodlot into a subdivision - a joke now, he says. None of his six sons have anything to do with the wood business. And all he can sell these days is firewood. He tried his hand at making Christmas wreathes a while back, but it wasn't for him.

Even with only one leg, he wanted to be in the bush, working.

And yes he had heard that the Olympic Torch Relay was going to be passing by, but hadn't the slightest interest in "a bunch of God-damned foolishness.

"It's just about money," he said.

Back down the side roads and highway to Miramichi, there was no shortage of talk about tough times as the torch caravan twisted its way along the various communities that were brought together in the 1990s to form this scattered "city" of 18,000. Organizers were careful to visit both the north and the south sides of the river, perhaps aware that it takes a lot more than amalgamation to bring an end to old rivalries.

In the past three years, five mills have closed along this widening of the Miramichi River.

It has been one of the hardest-hit communities in all of Canada, a pretty little place along a magnificent river that has been slammed by the double whammy of world recession and dying industry.

At the local food bank, co-ordinator June Somers says every month seems busier than the last.

"There's no work here," she says. "And even if there is, there's not enough to support a family.

"We're up around 400 families this month, that's up about 60-70 families from last year." Up at the celebration, thousands donned thick winter clothes and carried umbrellas that they bounced in tune to the travelling carnival's theme song, a tune from the Black Eyed Peas that sticks in the head like burrs in a spaniel's ears.

Tonight's the night Let's live it up I got my money Lets spend it up ... I gotta feeling that tonight's gonna be a good night That tonight's gonna be a good night That tonight's gonna be a good good night ... If the irony was noted, people in town were too polite to point it out.

Nancy Lordon, the deputy mayor of Miramichi, took to the stage, welcomed all to her town and was astonished by the sight before her.

"All those people," she says, "thousands of them, even with this weather - it was a great feeling." And good feelings, she says, are going to return to Miramichi. The worst of the storm has been weathered, she believes. A solar energy plant is going to take over the largest of the lost mills. The town hopes that, before Christmas, a buyer will be announced for the mothballed Weyerhaeuser mill on the north side.

And as for the torch - which kept going out on this windy and wet day in Miramichi - it could not possibly be more appropriate in that it symbolizes hope as well as peace.

"The timing is perfect," the deputy mayor says, "because of all that we have suffered lately." Back in the wood lot, Lionel Savard just shook his head, swore a new blue streak, and went back to work in the rain and the mud.